Engineering Academy - The Prototype

For the past five years, every time I thought about this idea and worked on it with over 20 colleagues from across the country, we were thinking we needed to start a new college. After all, no college we knew of could ever have the ability to reinvent itself in this format. As we went down that road, we hit the same roadblock every time - it cost a half a billion dollars to start a new college. That is an unbelievable amount of money to try and raise to essentially run an experiment. Granted it is an experiment I feel confident will succeed. There just weren't any avenues we could find to get it started.

Here is the new revelation - try it once. Take 25 students and 2 teachers. Bring in 5-10 experts per year to help lead the students through different learning activities. Evaluate the heck out of the prototype. Have 4 or 5 control groups of students that start at the same time at other institutions from various models (comm college, univ, private, etc.). Give all groups the same assessments at the beginning and at crucial places along the way and ultimately be able to show how effective this mode of education is compared to the traditional. We wouldn't need to build buildings or buy land or take 5 years to get started. We would need to find a temporary home for this small group and acquire the right set of equipment. As I estimate the costs of this prototype, they are around $5 million. This is a very small price to pay for a potentially huge reward.

Here is a quote from the former president of the National Academy of Engineering:

“I think we ought to be seeing a watershed change in engineering education---it is not happening.”…“I’ve tried to indicate to you that I think the practice of engineering is going to change tremendously and that therefore the education of engineers needs to change tremendously. I love this quote: Wayne Gretzky, probably the best hockey player who ever lived, talked about the fact that he didn’t skate to where the puck was, he skated to where the puck would be. I’m afraid that engineering education is skating to where the puck was.”

From “The Urgency of Engineering Education Reform”, Dr. William Wulf, President of the National Academy for Engineering

Ok. So I still need to find $5 million. Well, I actually have a couple of leads. Stay tuned. And please feel free to add comments. Any views from any standpoint help us as we move forward.