Engineering Education Today: Capturing the Afterlife of Sisyphus in Five Snapshots

Engineering education encompasses students, faculty, the workforce, and the profession of engineering. This paper provides five snapshots that seek to explore the current state of engineering education from different perspectives of scale: the student, the program, policy, society, and technology. The multifaceted view provided by these snapshots indicates that engineering education is a complex, adaptive system that operates on different spatial and temporal scales. These snapshots are intended both to inform and to raise questions for engineering education researchers, practitioners, administrators, and policy makers. Four interlinking themes are found to thread through each of the five perspectives-the philosophical basis for engineering, the role of experience, resources, and change. The paper concludes with exploration of these themes in the context of engineering education today.