Keywords
Citation
(2008), "Engineering education is failing societys need for "sustainability literate" professionals", Structural Survey, Vol. 26 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2008.11026eab.005
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Engineering education is failing societys need for "sustainability literate" professionals
Article Type: Newsbriefs From: Structural Survey, Volume 26, Issue 5
Keywords: Engineering curriculum, Sustainability literacy
“Engineering education is still dangerously slow to understand the vital role of sustainability savvy engineers need in resolving top challenges like climate change”, said Sara Parkin, Founding Director of Forum for the Future. She was responding to recent research that demonstrates newly qualified engineers enter higher education with high ideals about sustainability, but felt let down by their courses and therefore ill prepared for the roles they will be asked to play in areas like energy efficiency and security and protection of the environment – wherever they are working. Forum for the Future’s Engineers of the 21st Century programme polled 500 engineers who qualified between 1996 and 2006:
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72 per cent felt that they would have liked to learn more about sustainability in their degree;
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23 per cent received no tuition in sustainability during the degree course; and
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40 per cent felt that their lecturers’ knowledge was inadequate.
Two further pieces of authoritative research confirm that people entering university education place a high value on sustainability. The recent Forum for the Future/UCAS Future Leaders Survey, polled 25,000 university and college applicants. The results show that after architects, applicants to engineering courses believe more strongly than any other group that learning sustainable development will help them get the job they want when they leave university/college.
Imperial College’s engineering faculty conducted their own online poll of 2,330 students. They found that one of the strongest drivers to take engineering as a degree was the “desire to make a difference to the world” and 75 per cent of students believed that engineering as a career would provide the opportunity to do this.