How shall we satisfy the long-term educational needs of engineers?

After 50 years, it is time to seriously reassess some of the basic premises of engineering education. The long-term needs of engineers and society demand it. To keep up with the changes in both technology and engineering practice we have tried to add content to a more or less fixed-size program. There are three possibilities for a resolution: to lengthen the program, to do more in the same time, or to make it continuous. In fact, we must do all three, and those are the first three challenges. The issues are not all just quantitative, however. The qualitative, practical experience of "design under constraint" needs to become an integral part of engineering education, and we need to find a way to engage more faculty with personal experience in the practice of engineering. Likewise, we need to bring more diverse backgrounds to bear on engineering problems, to increase the creativity, and hence to engineer better. Hence the fourth and fifth challenges. Last, we engineering educators must accept the responsibility for ensuring a technologically literate citizenry.