Special session - preparing the engineers of 2020: A dialogue

This Special Session addresses a fundamental question: What changes must we make to ensure that engineering students will become what the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has referred to as "the engineer of 2020"? These graduates will compete in Friedman\´s "flat world," a world in which workers from China, India, and the former Soviet Block countries now possess the education and connectivity required to compete in a global economy with America\´s engineers at much lower salaries. The session seeks to generate discussion of the meaning of attributes central to conceptions of the Engineer of 2020 and to provide guidance from the engineering education community for an NSF-funded national survey of engineering education\´s readiness and capacity to produce the engineers of 2020. The session involves small-group discussions focusing on three attributes of the Engineer of 2020 (design and problem-solving skills, interdisciplinary competence, and contextual competence), and closes with brief group reports and extended discussion of these attributes.