I think there are things that the Academy of Engineering needs to say about engineering education. Generally speaking, engineering education is the responsibility of the professional societies. For example, the specific curricula for electrical engineering or civil engineering are not issues that NAE should deal with. But there are more generic issues I think we must tackle. For example, the question of the baccalaureate being the first professional degree.
Engineering is the only profession for which the baccalaureate is a professional degree.
Given the amount of information that one needs to successfully practice engineering, I think that's a question that we have to reopen. Another issue is career-long education for engineers. We don't have culture in engineering that demands that we continually renew ourselves like, for example, physicians do. I believe that the nature of engineering practice is changing fairly dramatically right now. Functionality and cost were the primary constraints in the past, but now we have to be concerned with environmental qualities, safety and reliability, maintainability, ergonomic concerns-a whole long list of such things.