9
Training and Fostering the Next Generation of Chemical Engineers
The chemical engineering curriculum today provides a robust foundation of tools and practices founded in an understanding of systems and molecular-level phenomena, including fundamental concepts of mass and energy balances, transport phenomena, thermodynamics, reaction engineering, control, and separations. Although the core subjects of the curriculum were first built around manufacturing processes, primarily petrochemical, they can be applied in most fields and professions. Indeed, previous chapters have highlighted how these concepts can be and have been applied across a wide variety of applications in energy, environmental sustainability, health and medicine; manufacturing; and materials development. As a result, chemical engineers are in high demand across most professions and job levels, and chemical engineering provides an excellent background for many career paths (NAE, 2018; see Figure 9-1).
In the past, chemical engineers tended to find industrial employment in manufacturing and process engineering. The connections between basic research and the workplace were usually made through industrial research and development (R&D) organizations that were aligned with internal business units with needs for both operational efficiency and new products or process developments. Chemical engineers would often begin a career in R&D or manufacturing and move, over time, into senior technical and business leadership positions. Faculty members would engage with industry as consultants and through university–industry collaborations. The net result of that model was a feedback loop from the market back to basic research at universities.
More recently, a strong shift in academic research topics in the field has occurred, driven primarily by changes in federal funding priorities, leading to a movement away from process research and toward basic and applied scientific research. This discovery-focused research includes areas, such as materials and life sciences, relatively new to chemical engineering. At the same time, many companies have globalized, shortened their time horizons, and reduced or eliminated longer-term research programs and laboratories.
The resultant growing gap between university research and market needs is often referred to as the “valley of death.”
During the past decade, the world has undergone a major technology-led transition enabled by global networks, computing power, sensors, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. This transition will continue and likely accelerate, creating an ongoing need for new skills and capabilities. As technology continues to transform how work is performed, a growing need for collaboration skills—in communication, interdisciplinary teamwork, and project management—can be anticipated, as can educational needs yet to be identified. And all of these trends will require lifelong learning.
This chapter examines the current state of chemical engineering education, including the broader context of the existing academic education model (Box 9-1) and the value of the current undergraduate core curriculum. The committee proposes strategies for growing and diversifying the profession—both of which are essential to the field’s survival and potential for impact—by making it more broadly accessible.1 Following a discussion of the aspects of undergraduate and graduate education that will need to change to prepare the next generation of chemical engineers, the chapter turns to emerging trends that are shaping new models of learning and innovation for the future.
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1 E.g., https://www.aiche.org/chenected/2021/02/ideal-path-equity-diversity-and-inclusion.
THE UNDERGRADUATE CORE CURRICULUM
Throughout its history, chemical engineering has been defined as a profession by its core undergraduate curriculum, a curriculum that has for more than a century prevented the “spalling of the profession” (p. 573, Scriven, 1991). At the same time, this core undergraduate curriculum has evolved with the incorporation of new topics reflecting emerging areas of impact and relevant practice, as well as ongoing dialogue about the very nature of the profession. The resilience of the discipline in the face of change reflects the nature of its core curriculum and how it brings together the underpinning sciences (chemistry, physics, mathematics, biochemistry, and biology) into an interdisciplinary problem-solving context. Together, the enduring nature of this canon and its history of adaptation and impact speak to the resiliency of the chemical engineering discipline.
This curriculum has been aimed at transmitting a body of knowledge that is foundational and translating it into solutions for technological and societal challenges. It has enabled chemical engineers to respond nimbly to the unpredictable nature of these challenges by redirecting fundamental concepts as codified in a historical sequence of core courses: mass and energy balances, transport of mass and energy, chemical kinetics, process design and control, and a capstone undergraduate laboratory. The examples used in transmitting this knowledge and applying it in practice have changed and will continue to do so as chemical engineering finds new applications, even as the foundations have acquired additional complexity through mathematical dexterity fueled by transformational changes in computing power, as well as greater breadth through the growth of the biochemical aspects of the discipline.
The core undergraduate curriculum provides a problem-solving approach to the mastery of concepts in the dynamics and thermodynamics of physical and chemical processes, with a historical evolution from the physical to the chemical; most recently to the biochemical and electrochemical, and at present, toward the photochemical realm. The problems addressed have changed because “engineers solve problems. If they are successful, those problems disappear. Then we find new problems to solve…, but the principles used to solve successive generations of problems change very slowly…” (p. 243, Schowalter, 2003).
The core curriculum as taught represents a method of inquiry and a toolbox for solving problems. It is entirely general in its most abstract mathematical form; perhaps for this reason, it has remained useful for a remarkable breadth of relevant practice. At the same time, however, it can appear to lack merit and utility when first learned, especially if the content is delivered absent context within current modern problems and practice. The consensus of a selected group of graduate students and postdocs is that “process science,” their nomenclature for the core curriculum, has proved complete enough and adaptable enough to persist for the next 25 years and longer (Westmoreland and McCabe, 2018). Yet the profession and its undergraduate curriculum do not always succeed in creating the messaging landscape required to attract and retain individuals with the diverse backgrounds and interests that future challenges will demand. As it evolves, then, the curriculum will need to convey with greater purpose and success how “no profession unleashes the spirit of innovation like engineering” and how few other disciplines “have such a direct and positive effect on people’s everyday lives” (p. 46, NAE, 2008).
To those embedded within the field at a given time, the evolution of the curriculum has often seemed too slow and the survival of the discipline fraught with perils. This is not a new perception. Decades ago, Denn (p. 565, 1991) observed, “We have been hearing a great deal in recent years about the changing nature of chemical engineering. The emphasis on new fields of research has created the appearance of a fragmented profession….” Nonetheless, as suggested above, the curriculum “has endured, not because it is frozen, but because it has adapted dynamically to new ideas, emphases challenges, and opportunities” (p. 7, Luo et al., 2015). As described later in this chapter, some topics within the curriculum will need to evolve more rapidly, and in some cases, components removed from the canon during earlier cycles of evolution will need to be restored.
Today, as throughout its history, the field of chemical engineering needs to consider what minimal requirements and what set of principles should define the content of its core undergraduate curriculum. This is a question perhaps best posed as: What should an evolving undergraduate curriculum deliver as its product? Nearly 20 years ago, the answer to that question was, an undergraduate chemical engineer trained through “a program of study sufficient for entry-level positions in engineering practice and engineering-related fields,” but also exposure to shoulder areas and to professional and personal ethical guidelines and the foundational knowledge required for graduate studies (p. 243, Schowalter, 2003). These requirements have not changed, but chemical engineers function and practice in a much different environment today. They are asked to address more diverse challenges with a body of knowledge and a toolbox that extend beyond what a 4-year core undergraduate curriculum can competently deliver in full. As discussed later in this chapter, master’s degrees and continuing education are likely to become increasingly important for working professionals who seek to specialize in one of these shoulder areas.
The toolbox delivered by the undergraduate curriculum provides a mathematical framework for designing and describing (electro-/photo-/bio-) chemical and physical processes across length and time scales spanning many orders of magnitude. It teaches that (1) some quantities are conserved (energy, momentum, atoms, mass); (2) their balances need to be carried out over “control volumes” small enough to be homogeneous but large enough to be described by continuum equations; (3) thermodynamic relations define the point of equilibrium, but also the dynamics by which systems approach such equilibria, whether through chemical or physical changes; and (4) all of this extends, remarkably unperturbed, to molecules and atoms in every state of matter (gas, liquid, solid, supercritical).
A survey of young professionals a few years after they had entered the profession of chemical engineering identified features of the undergraduate curriculum that they considered important to their careers (Figure 9-2); the components of the enduring core curriculum are well represented throughout these features. The four highlighted items represent those in need of revision and strengthening in the face of changes in both the nature of chemical engineering practice and the employment landscape. Two items in particular—process and product safety; and data science and application: design of experiments, statistics, analytics—reside within the core knowledge base and need to become more prominent. Process and product safety will need to become a stronger component within each core undergraduate course. Data science and statistics may be delivered most effectively in a separate course embedded within the core curriculum and taught with specific emphasis on matters of chemistry and engineering. This latter course would also bring a greater emphasis on statistics in the modern context of larger datasets, more powerful computing, and models and methods that are more robust and of greater fidelity.
The other features highlighted in Figure 9-2—business skills, leadership training, management, and economics; and innovation and entrepreneurial skills—represent “softer” skillsets that provide entry-level engineers with significant competitive advantages in today’s workplace. Along with other, related skills, such as written and oral
communication and a baseline understanding of policy and regulatory issues, however, they reside outside the technical core of chemical engineering. In the committee’s view, the core undergraduate curriculum is not the most effective vehicle for delivering the necessary foundational knowledge and skills in these areas. Elective courses, postgraduate training in specialized industrial settings, and lifelong learning through professional societies and relevant literature provide more effective routes for acquiring and sharpening these skills, and the application and sharpening of these ancillary skills can be made part of each core course, with emphasis on how they enable and enhance the technical contributions of chemical engineers.
The remainder of this section describes some of the challenges that represent important considerations in the near-term evolution of the undergraduate curriculum, as identified by members of this committee and shared by invited external speakers in discussions and presentations. Three challenges are discussed: the need for experiential learning and greater connectivity among the concepts/tools of the discipline and their application in practice through (1) more effective connections among the individual core courses (“the silos”); (2) experiential learning through virtual or physical laboratory experiences earlier in the undergraduate course of studies; and (3) a more effective and seamless embedding of statistics and of mathematical and computational thinking into the core. The committee emphasizes that these challenges are inextricably connected, and notes that actions suggested in the course of the discussion are meant to be illustrative, and not to prescribe modes of implementation, which will best be identified by experts in discipline-based education research (e.g., NRC, 2012; Paul and Brennan, 2019).
Connecting the Silos
In the core curriculum, concepts of balances (mass, energy, momentum), fluid flow, thermodynamics, kinetics, and process/design control are taught in separate courses that may make them seem disconnected to students. Students are then asked to connect these seemingly disparate concepts with each other, as well as with the bond-making and bond-breaking rules from the chemistry curriculum, the biochemical tenets of the biology curriculum, and the mathematical mechanics taught within the mathematics curriculum. Not surprisingly, students face significant hurdles in bringing these historical repositories of knowledge together to form the problem-solving and reasoning strategies that constitute the practice of chemical engineering. Some of these connections emerge, with varying levels of effectiveness and rigor, in a laboratory or unit operations course near the end of the curriculum. But these connections are better made by anticipating in earlier courses how these concepts will ultimately coalesce at later stages and what kinds of engineering challenges require their combined application—how the balances, the thermodynamics and dynamics, the fluid flow, and the chemistry and biology ultimately merge into the design and control of reaction, separation, biological, and materials synthesis processes. These earlier connections can be made, in the committee’s view, by making the boundaries between the silos more porous, highlighting how the individual core concepts first presented within their respective silos ultimately merge into the practice of chemical engineering.
Experiential Learning and a “Laboratory within Each Core Course”
The dense nature of the core undergraduate curriculum leaves few openings for incorporating an additional hands-on laboratory course earlier in the curriculum. In some instances, this has been successfully accomplished, albeit as a broad engineering design course (e.g., the Coffee Lab at the University of California, Davis; see Box 9-2). In other cases, a freshman-level introductory course has attempted to place the curriculum in context at an early stage, but without the rigor of analysis and treatment that will follow later on and with some duplication of the content of subsequent core courses. Such efforts need to continue and expand, but they are likely to miss those students that enter at a later stage of the curriculum through transfer from community college or other majors. An alternative strategy would be to use advances in real-time simulation and demonstration in virtual/digital form to illustrate an “experiment” representing the behavior of a (bio-/photo/electro-) chemical or physical system as described by a mathematical representation immediately following this “experience.” In its interactive mode, this kind of visualization would allow students to design and control the behavior and performance of such systems, to explore how they respond to perturbations in parameters or conditions, and to address and resolve safety and ethical matters in the practice of engineering without risking any direct physical or professional consequences of their actions. Such approaches, currently implemented as more ad hoc strategies, would expose students to issues of design, control,
safety, and even economic impact that typically appear in their more formal and foundational contexts later in the curriculum. They could also be used to incorporate sensitivity and statistical analyses, design of experiments, “what if” assessments of realistic scenarios, and a view of mathematical treatments underpinned by their role in analysis and decision making in the practice of the chemical and physical processes that such treatments intend to describe. The application of these approaches will continue to benefit from advances in real-time description and visualization of process (and product) performance, and will sharpen the process synthesis and analysis skills needed for chemical engineering practice. And students will be more effective and feel less intimidated when examining the validity of assumptions made in describing real-world systems that would otherwise require descriptions too complex for analytical solutions or even numerical analysis of more complete equations.
Bringing Mathematics and Statistics into the Core
In most cases, students acquire the mathematical machinery of calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra in courses taught by college math departments or through advanced high school coursework. In such courses, they acquire limited (if any) skills in numerical methods or in the construction of the equations that describe the physical and
chemical content they are later asked to implement in chemical engineering courses. Statistical analysis, specifically in the context of acquiring knowledge and analyzing dense datasets, is essentially absent from the curriculum until the capstone laboratory course, where students first encounter the imperfections of the data gathered through their own actions. Previously, such statistical and mathematical methods were more closely integrated into and introduced earlier in the curriculum. The reversal of that pattern seen today in the case of statistics is due to the emergence of data science as a modern catchall for the learning and practice of such methods. The committee believes that training in mathematics and statistics needs to be brought into the core curriculum in a more structured manner, either complementing or replacing some of the education that currently occurs outside the core curriculum. This might take the form of a course in mathematical methods taught within chemical engineering departments focused on illustrating how analytical, numerical, and statistical methods are used in the context of the equations that emerge later within specific core courses. The return of this content to the core needs to occur reasonably early in the course of studies for greatest impact, creating several challenges given the dense nature of the curriculum and the needs of students entering at different stages and with different backgrounds and skillsets in mathematics and statistics.
In summary, the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum has served the discipline well and will continue to evolve in response to scientific discoveries, technological advances, and societal needs. In this evolution, it will benefit from rapid changes in the ways knowledge is disseminated and transferred within and among disciplines. As part of this evolution, it is also necessary to consider the imperative to attract and retain practitioners of chemical engineering with increasingly diverse backgrounds, as discussed in the next section. Later sections of this chapter address the need to enhance and improve training in business, economics, innovation, and entrepreneurship, as well as lifelong learning. The committee considers these skills to be essential, well suited to being illustrated within the core undergraduate curriculum but entailing foundational knowledge that lies beyond the core.
BECOMING A CHEMICAL ENGINEER: THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY
As a discipline, chemical engineering is unique in its pervasive contributions to society—in areas ranging from energy; to food, water, and air; to health and medicine; to manufacturing; to materials, as described in earlier chapters of this report. Consequentially, the field is in a strong position to attract a broad range of individuals interested in the many areas associated with chemical engineering who also are seeking a career with the potential for societal impact. Research has shown that members of historically excluded groups are often motivated by the altruistic career goals of making the world better and giving back to their communities (Thoman et al., 2015). Emphasizing the role of chemical engineering in addressing societal issues might therefore help attract more high school students from diverse backgrounds to the undergraduate major.
Women and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are underrepresented in chemical engineering relative to the general population, even by comparison
with chemical and biological sciences and related fields. While a career in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field is an attractive path toward altruistic work, persisting barriers impede the entry of women and BIPOC into the field. Some of these barriers affect all historically excluded groups, while others affect students based on their gender or racial identity, and these barriers can be compounded for students who are members of more than one historically excluded group. The National Academies and others have reported extensively on such structural and cultural barriers as unwelcoming and unsupportive cultures and environments; “gatekeeping”; biases; lack of mentors and role models; and inequitable policies and practices that impact recruitment, retention, and career success (see, e.g., McGee, 2020, on barriers for underrepresented and racially minoritized students; NASEM, 2020b, on barriers for Black students; NASEM, 2016, on barriers for women and BIPOC broadly; and NASEM, 2018 and 2020a, on barriers for women).
As a result of such systemic barriers, chemical engineering benefits from the talents of only a fraction of the population. Educational attainment in chemical engineering for women (Figure 9-3) and BIPOC (Figure 9-4) has remained essentially unchanged for more than a decade. The demographics in chemical engineering today reflect the past. Historically, science and engineering have not been welcoming to BIPOC and women and have been particularly harsh to Black Americans. In his essay “The Negro Scientist,” published in The American Scholar in 1939, W. E. B. Du Bois challenged assumptions held by Whites regarding the propensity of African Americans for science. These types of biases persist, and after starts and stumbles with interventions designed to counter systemic barriers (NASEM, 2016), work still remains to provide clear and inclusive pathways in STEM fields, including chemical engineering, for historically excluded groups.
To fully support members of historically excluded groups in chemical engineering training and education, specialized programs and cultural shifts will be necessary. Interventions and support mechanisms will vary based on which groups are targeted (NASEM, 2021c); the focus may be on supporting women,2 or on Black3 or Latinx/Hispanic and Indigenous4 students. The design of specific support mechanisms will vary as well according to the unique needs and goals of each institution. In this section, and in the later section on graduate education, the committee presents strategies applicable for most chemical engineering departments that are likely to improve the recruitment and retention of and outcomes for multiple underrepresented groups.
Research has illuminated how children’s early pathways can be determined, along with some of the critical factors that dictate their future educational options and career trajectories (Akee et al., 2017; Chetty et al., 2016, 2019). These studies have revealed that children with high scores on third-grade math tests who come from high-income families, children who grow up in geographic areas with high rates of invention, and girls who are exposed to women inventors are more likely to become inventors. These findings speak
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2 E.g., Society of Women Engineers (https://swe.org/).
3 E.g., National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (https://www.nobcche.org/).
4 E.g, Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (https://www.sacnas.org/).
to the social factors that require attention in any technical field seeking to spark creativity and build pathways to include the full pool of talent. The importance of role models and access to opportunities is clear, as is the need for adequate academic preparation for any STEM field, including chemical engineering. In primary and secondary education, studies specific to chemical engineering are lacking; studies that include qualitative data and experiences specific to chemical engineering are lacking even more.
Chemical engineering as a field is not immune from systemic and other barriers to inclusivity, and the field can draw insights and apply the lessons from STEM-wide studies. In short, if chemical engineering is to reach its full potential as a discipline and a major enabler of solutions for societal needs, it will need to address opportunity gaps and ensure that its educational, research, and professional environments support the success of everyone, regardless of their identity.
Cech (2013) speaks to the (mis)framing of engineering as meritocratic and depoliticized (asocial). This mischaracterization results from the false assumptions that an inherently technical field will inevitably be a meritocracy as though technical fields can operate outside of social influences (Cech, 2013; Cech and Blair-Loy, 2010). This framing has been debunked with research revealing the myriad structural and cultural factors that turn students away from the field regardless of their skills and competencies (Seymour and Hewitt, 1997), such as structural racism (McGee, 2020), gatekeeping, and weeding out through historical exclusion in the education system (Malcom, 1996; Malcom and Malcom-Piquex, 2020), and stereotyping regarding who has innate talent (Leslie et al., 2015). Science and math courses have long been gatekeepers for entry into engineering. Retention data disaggregated by discipline are not readily available, but based on the observations of members of this committee, such courses as the sophomore-level course in mass and energy balances in chemical engineering serve as additional gatekeepers.
Those chemical engineers who are retained in the field play many roles in practice and face significant challenges in retaining relevance and excellence as the field evolves; they do so through diverse educational trajectories and with endpoints in industry, academia, and elsewhere. When considering what draws people to chemical engineering, it is important to acknowledge these different educational and career trajectories and the pressures involved in achieving and maintaining them. Stability, work–life balance, professional support structures and mentorship, and opportunities for growth are important to people in any sector but are not distributed equally across sectors or demographics within them. In academia, professors act as educators, administrators, mentors, researchers, communicators, and fundraisers, but all individuals are not equally suited to all of these tasks, and some can become overburdened by the need to fulfill them all.
At the same time, members of historically excluded groups bear a disproportionate responsibility for promoting diversity, providing representation on committees, and supporting the academic and career progression of other members of underrepresented groups. Institutionalizing the work of diversity requires shared responsibility, not just the efforts of those with a personal stake in improving access to equitable opportunities. Both industry and academia still fail to pay and support women and BIPOC and promote them to executive positions at a proportional rate (Funk and Parker, 2018; Gumpertz et al., 2017; Renzulli, 2019). Promoting and retaining meaningfully diverse talent will have a multiplier effect, engendering greater diversity moving forward as more diverse groups decide who joins the workforce. These issues are pervasive throughout STEM fields and certainly not unique to chemical engineering. In looking to the future, however, chemical engineers have an opportunity to be leaders among STEM fields in increasing diversity and inclusion within their profession.
Greater visibility and connectivity within the broader community can also support diversity, equity, and recruitment, and chemical engineers can make contributions in other areas of public interest beyond diversifying the field. Like all scientists and engineers, they have the opportunity to use effective scientific and popular communication to engage with the general public, as well as improve resources for K-12 educators. Social media and science entertainment have been vital for accessibility and visibility, but given the integral roles of science and engineering in society, scientists and engineers need to be
more integrated into policy making. Chemical engineers have a stake in society equal to that of people with law or business backgrounds who commonly take on societal concerns, and are trained in a thought process that would lend itself well to addressing those concerns with respect to both scientific and systemic issues. It is not clear to the average high school senior that chemical engineering will have a critical role in many of the domains that will be central to progress in the coming decades. As demonstrated in earlier chapters, many policy issues in such domains as energy, food security, clean air and water, and health care, and public health involve chemical engineering. Maintaining dialogue among chemical engineers in policy-making positions, communities to be served, and those in academia and industry would also benefit the field, identifying needs and potential priorities.
Science policy is another area in which students are driving growth at universities, founding student groups and advocating for formalized programs. Being responsive to those student interests and facilitating this career path can help chemical engineering programs attract those who want to pursue public-sector work and to develop both the tools and the influence needed to have direct impact in bettering their community.
This section has addressed recruitment of chemical engineers and barriers to entering the field, in particular for women and BIPOC. Recruiting is critical, but so is retention. Mentorship has been shown to have a positive effect on underrepresented students, yet underrepresented individuals enrolled in STEM programs typically receive less mentorship than their well-represented peers (NASEM, 2019e). Institutionalized developmental support needs to evolve from “Are you cut out for this?” to “How can we help you succeed?” Formal support systems for academic success are enhanced by the deliberate formation of peer and mentoring networks. Beyond mentoring, systemic approaches to ensuring success for all individuals along the entire career path will ensure that chemical engineering remains equipped to attract, develop, and retain a diverse cadre of future chemical engineers.
MAKING CHEMICAL ENGINEERING BROADLY ACCESSIBLE
A long-running national dialogue about college affordability and the impact of student loan debt on the overall economy has recently become more visible. The relative affordability of community colleges is a major attraction for a diverse body of students, ranging from talented budget-minded high school seniors to nontraditional students. In 2021, average annual tuition and fees at 2-year public schools was $3,372, versus $9,580 for in-state students at 4-year public schools (Hanson, 2021). In addition, at least 17 states have programs that make community college attendance tuition-free for at least a portion of the student population (Farrington, 2020). Students enrolled at 2-year schools are more racially diverse than those at 4-year schools (NASEM, 2016), and the majority of tribal colleges and universities in the United States are 2-year institutions. Further, many states have existing contractual agreements promising not only admission to public 4-year institutions for students who demonstrate success at a community college, but also the ability to graduate within 2 years after transferring. Indeed, it is possible that 2-year community colleges could become the default choice of the middle class in the relatively near future,
requiring a major adaptation of chemical engineering undergraduate programs to become viable options for those students.
This body of transfer students represents an untapped opportunity for chemical engineering to broaden participation in and access to the profession. Over the last decades, science communication and outreach at the K-12 level have resulted in significantly increased interest in STEM fields, but that increase (particularly among diverse groups) has been focused in areas in which high school courses are available—physics; biology; computer science; and, to a lesser degree, mechanical engineering/robotics. Many high school graduates have little exposure to the relevance or potential impact of chemical engineering as a career, and few community colleges offer chemical engineering courses, though many provide transfer pathways to 4-year schools. Building bridges to actively recruit both full-time community college students and nontraditional students and identifying and implementing pathways to support them after they transfer could greatly democratize the profession.
Chemical engineering transfer students face a remarkable challenge beyond the abrupt change from the community college to the larger university environment (sometimes referred to as “transfer shock”; Flaga, 2006). Chemical engineering curricula generally have required courses beginning early in the sophomore year, with many programs offering an introductory course in the first year. Further, education research has underscored the importance of providing early hands-on experiences in engineering to improve students’ motivation to complete their degrees (Cui et al., 2011). In fact, such experiences have been shown to be particularly successful in the retention of women and BIPOC (respectively, a 27 percent, 54 percent, and 36 percent retention gain for women, Latinx, and African American students; Hoit and Ohland, 1998; Knight et al., 2003; Napoli et al., 2017; Willson et al., 1995). These gains are attributed not only to increased design, teamwork, and communication skills, but also to the development of a peer support network (Richardson and Dantzler, 2002). Challenges for transfer students are compounded because, in contrast with prerequisites in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, most 2-year community colleges lack chemical engineering departments to offer these courses, much less hands-on experiences. Further, because students at community colleges do not fulfill any major requirements, they do not form a peer support network with other chemical engineering majors. As a result, transfer students are asked to compress most of 3–4 years of chemical engineering curriculum into a 2-year period, and to do so without the same peer support or foundational experience in engineering enjoyed by their nontransfer peers. This is not a recipe for success.
The challenge of accommodating a 2-year path to graduation for community college transfer students is already facing many undergraduate programs at public universities. This is an ideal opportunity for the widespread deployment of online course offerings within the sophomore chemical engineering curriculum (mass and energy balances, a first course in transport phenomena and/or thermodynamics, and likely a course in mathematics for chemical engineering applications). Further, from a student perspective, these courses need to be widely accepted so as to open up options for transfer to a variety of 4-year programs. Despite the obvious administrative hurdles, these courses would be most beneficial if crafted by and offered as a collaboration among leading large universities
(public and private), along with the accreditation agencies and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), thereby promoting universal acceptance of these courses as satisfying prerequisites for the junior-level curricula at individual 4-year institutions.
In addition to academic hurdles, community college transfer students may face financial or other challenges that, while unrelated to their academic abilities, affect their performance. For example, the lack of study groups or support systems noted above (Lenaburg et al., 2012) can translate into a sizable drop in their grade point average during the first term, which can have long-term impacts on the future potential for graduate study and career options. In addition, given the relatively short time spent at a 4-year university, such transfer students typically do not participate in campus undergraduate research experiences, thus missing out on important opportunities for professional skills development and resumé building. Universities need to develop systems to support and engage these students early on and establish peer networks that will support their acclimation and academic success (Eris et al., 2010; Litzler and Young, 2012). Importantly, doing so will build students’ confidence and teach important workplace skills.
The committee recognizes that adding more experiential learning earlier in a traditional 4-year curriculum (as discussed previously in this chapter) and making that same 4-year curriculum more welcoming to transfer students from 2-year institutions are seemingly at odds with one another. The experience of a transfer student in a 4-year program will never be the same as that of a student who entered as a freshman, but it is the committee’s hope that more practicum-like experiences will become standard across all introductory STEM courses, whether offered at a 2-year or 4-year institution. For this reason, the committee also chose to highlight an example of experiential learning (Box 9-2) that does not require expensive or specialized equipment, as well as the development of virtual experiential learning experiences and courses that satisfy the chemical engineering degree requirements typically offered during the sophomore year.
TEACHING UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS TODAY AND TOMORROW
Delivery Methods
In spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused almost all U.S. higher education institutions to move abruptly to an online format, greatly accelerating ongoing trends toward efficiency and scale within higher education. The result was the creation of significant online content of widely varying quality and a deeper understanding of what does and does not work in synchronous and asynchronous online modes both for chemical engineering and more generally.
To some degree, chemical engineering courses, regardless of the subject, traditionally start with fundamentals and end with practice (if time permits). This pattern reflects the desire of educators to teach tools that can be adapted throughout a student’s career rather than a vocational skill. In practice, however, this approach has resulted in the derivation of fundamental equations in lecture, with application and problem solving occurring in discussion sections and problem sets. The online experience of 2020–2021 amplified existing trends toward classroom delivery that encourages more problem- and
project-based and group learning, which appears to be welcomed by students. One mode of implementing this “flipped” approach that became prominent in the online format was including the derivation in an asynchronous recording and then solving the problems live. The obvious weaknesses of this approach are a potential lack of understanding of asynchronous content or noncompliance with requirements to watch it. There are also some indications that such flipped approaches or greater use of team-based learning may disproportionately affect women, BIPOC, and low-income students; however, the results of early research are conflicting in this regard (e.g., Cruz et al., 2021; Deri et al., 2018; Dixon and Wendt, 2021; Raišienė et al., 2021; Sarsons, 2017; Winter et al., 2021). More research is needed in this area, and any move toward more asynchronous learning and/or team- and project-based learning will need to ensure equitable outcomes for all students.
In this regard, it may be more realistic to consider online delivery as the new form of “self-teaching.” Historically, the U.S. higher education system (regardless of discipline) has strived to impart to students both concrete knowledge and skills and the ability to learn new skills throughout their career. In this sense, the purpose of courses is to teach content that is critical, but that is either too difficult or not obviously motivating to learn on its own. If viewed through this lens, the curation of online content that is either of a complexity level appropriate for self-teaching or related to subjects for which the student is motivated offers an exciting prospect for lifelong learning, allowing for the uniform distribution of better content at lower cost and democratizing the offering of specialized courses around the world. Augmentation of existing courses (with modules, examples, or alternative explanations), communication and other soft skills, business/entrepreneurship/management, policy and regulatory issues, and extensions of course content are areas in which online and classroom learning may dovetail within a single course or curriculum.
All online content carries the curse of the internet—namely, the varying quality and accuracy of information and content. Within a single course or curriculum, curation of content will become a major faculty responsibility. With respect to extension learning, curation of content may become a major endeavor of professional societies such as AIChE. In the past, these societies have served their membership in terms of information dissemination and continuing professional education via conferences, workshops and seminars, and the publication of journals. Going forward, this role will likely shift not just to one that is online in nature but to one that is more geared toward serving as a trusted curator of outside resources, perhaps via a subscription model rather than content generation and ownership.
Curricular Content Evolution
As discussed earlier in this chapter, the chemical engineering curriculum has in recent years sought to balance the goals of retaining core rigor (mathematical modeling, thermodynamics, kinetics, and design) and incorporating new important topics (most recently, biochemical engineering and data science). With a massive expansion of the number of STEM majors in many institutions (Figure 9-5), enrollment in the introductory sequences of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and biology has grown to the point that
chemical engineering students make up a small portion of STEM students. This shift has led to the question, posed differently at every university based on its politics and financial construct, of the degree to which these other departments should teach introductory material relevant to chemical engineering and to what degree a chemical engineering program is responsible for its own introductory material. For example, each chemical engineering major in the United States is required to take a calculus sequence from a mathematics department. Some chemical engineering departments have developed supplemental undergraduate mathematics content to incorporate coverage of relevant partial differential equations, linear algebra, numerical methods, and the data science and statistics tools needed by chemical engineering students. This trend is likely to be limited, however, by the relatively small size of chemical engineering departments and an inability to teach an entire undergraduate curriculum without the aid of sister departments on campus. Further, as discussed above, one major drive toward college affordability and diversity and inclusion is the broadening of a path for transfer students from lower-cost community colleges and students who change their majors. Neither is well served by a curriculum that is monolithically specialized starting in the freshman year.
TEACHING GRADUATE STUDENTS TODAY AND TOMORROW
Chemical engineering research has expanded considerably in breadth and scope over the past decades, and it is likely to continue doing so. This expansion requires that graduate students acquire deep knowledge in adjacent fields and subfields, including, for example, biology, materials science, and applied physics. At the same time, increasing demands on undergraduate education programs have necessitated reduced coverage of core chemical engineering topics, such as thermodynamics and transport phenomena. The question facing graduate education in the field is whether to compensate for the depth and content that are no longer provided by a chemical engineering undergraduate degree or to focus on giving students the flexibility and opportunities to largely tailor their own graduate program.
A core graduate program consisting of thermodynamics, statistical and quantum mechanics, transport phenomena, chemical kinetics, and applied mathematics will continue to be necessary for chemical engineering research, but that content will have to be delivered in a manner that allows students to apply it in a wider range of contexts. Courses in thermodynamics, for example, will have to rely on approaches and examples that illustrate the general applicability of the underlying concepts, from problems related to issues of protein stability; to general free-energy minimization techniques; to phase transitions in mixtures of solids, liquids, or gases. The core curriculum will need to be limited to foundational concepts, thereby giving students the flexibility to pursue coursework in areas of direct relevance to their research.
While graduate preparation in chemical engineering builds on undergraduate material, this exclusivity comes at the cost of diversity in terms of both the number of women and BIPOC and the breadth of scientific backgrounds in the chemical engineering graduate population. The imperative to recruit talent from a more diverse range of backgrounds will require, in addition to the measures discussed above, the opening up of chemical engineering by providing background content in a manner that creates opportunities for students from other disciplines (e.g., chemists, physicists, biologists) to join a graduate chemical engineering program. That material would include elements from the core subjects covered in the undergraduate curriculum but organized and delivered in a way that is easily accessible to postgraduate scientists or engineers. Interestingly, anecdotal evidence from the members of this committee indicates that while many chemical engineering graduate programs use undergraduate preparation in the field as a major gateway to admission, faculty of their own departments include many members whose training was in related disciplines.
Relative to undergraduate programs in chemical engineering, those in chemistry and biology graduate significantly more women (50 percent and 63 percent, respectively, compared to 35 percent in chemical engineering; NCSES, 2018). Similarly, undergraduate programs in chemistry and biology are more racially diverse (58 percent and 55 percent White, respectively, compared with 64 percent white in chemical engineering; NCSES, 2018). By considering admitting more graduate students with undergraduate degrees in these related disciplines, chemical engineering departments could provide opportunities for more diverse applicant pools. Significantly, a decision not to accept graduate
students from other, related fields would generally rule out the enrollment of graduates of many historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions that lack undergraduate chemical engineering programs. At the same time, a search for diverse graduate students cannot be limited solely to those institutions. Even when recruiting within undergraduate chemical engineering programs, there is an elitism in some graduate programs that excludes those who may have chosen a bachelor’s institution because of its affordability or location. For a graduate program, it is justifiable to want students to understand what it means to do research before committing them to, and supporting them for, a program lasting many years. But how is genuine interest cultivated for those who did not know earlier about or did not have access to undergraduate research opportunities, or for those members of historically excluded groups who did have the chance to participate in such programs as the Research Experience for Undergraduates but are then not actively recruited to the host institutions?
Another vehicle for graduate education that has until recently been largely missing from the graduate chemical engineering curriculum is internships in industry, government, or the nonprofit sector. Experiential learning in the form of graduate internships is currently rare, and providing sufficient opportunities for systematic placement of graduate students will require a conversation among industry, federal funding agencies, universities, and professional organizations such as AIChE to enable the development of suitable frameworks capable of administering effective training programs, perhaps even on a national scale. As with coursework, new opportunities are emerging through remote and virtual access. New models will likely be needed that address issues of equity and inclusion, suitable compensation, intellectual property considerations, and a commitment to the mentoring of graduate interns. Encouraging companies to create educational/internship opportunities by creating model programs would be beneficial.
Master’s degrees are likely to play an increasingly important role in graduate education. For the reasons outlined above—whether a need to acquire additional depth in core chemical engineering concepts or to gain breadth in ancillary disciplines such as bioengineering or computing or data science, among many others—master’s degrees could offer an attractive solution for chemical engineers needing to adapt and respond to a rapidly changing marketplace. One obstacle that remains to be addressed is the cost of such degrees. However, with the emergence of improved options for remote learning, and with compelling examples of high-quality degrees (e.g., the Online Master of Science in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, with more than 5,000 graduates in its 8 years of existence; McMurtrie, 2018; Nietzel, 2021) being offered for less than the cost of the typical undergraduate tuition at a state institution, students and employers alike will benefit from the flexibility offered by master’s and graduate certificate programs. The chemical engineering community will have to develop carefully conceived degrees that can not only provide in-depth, topical chemical engineering content for students and practitioners but also attract students from other disciplines. Such programs will also need to provide the flexibility required by working professionals who wish to continue their education and earn an advanced degree through evening and/or weekend programs.
NEW LEARNING AND INNOVATION PRACTICES TO ADDRESS CURRENT CHALLENGES
The preceding sections outline significant steps that could be taken to grow and diversify the field of chemical engineering and deepen its impact on society. These observations about curriculum, experiential learning, approaches to teaching, and ways of building a more diverse and inclusive profession, as well as the broader issue of controlling the costs of higher education, raise the question of whether education in the field can be better designed to deliver on future opportunities. Is it possible to double the quality of an education (including an outcome measure of student success) delivered in half the time and at half the cost? How can education be made globally accessible in real time? What are possible new options for addressing the identified challenges facing chemical engineering education? Answers to these questions could reflect and incorporate the ways in which technology is transforming how work is performed in many professions and how global networks have transformed knowledge management.
In the past, problems were solved based on what an individual or group of individuals knew, acquired from discrete sources (e.g., books, articles, other publications, and their own lived experiences). Today, in contrast, essentially all of the world’s public information has been indexed and is quickly available, often at no cost, via internet search engines. When confronted with a problem in almost any setting, those with internet access first search for possible solutions or known information. Their initial findings connect to nearly limitless information about related topics and solutions and opportunities for an individual to find and build upon what is known. An education is necessary to provide sufficient background in the subject matter so the problem can be formulated, to curate and validate information, and then to know how to apply the information to create the needed solutions.
The nature of the education needed to solve problems in this way is evolving. Several companies in the technology arena have eliminated previously held requirements for a 4-year degree for many jobs and are leading the development of more targeted certificate programs to create a pool of talent for the range of jobs that are open. For example, Google has launched “Grow with Google,” a program wherein completion of an online certificate program available on Coursera can lead to entry-level jobs with competitive starting salaries.5 There is no requirement for a 4-year degree or equivalent experience. The Google program engages more than 100 partner companies that also have positions available upon completion of the common certificate programs. The traditional higher education model is linear, with a student moving from K-12 to some amount of university education and then to work, and there are usually limited feedback loops and a lack of integration across the steps. That linear model could be transformed into a general learning model based on a shared platform integrating the educational silos found today.
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5 See http://grow.google.
The degree to which truly new models of skills-based education will penetrate chemical engineering is unclear. The advantages of the integrated approach discussed above are numerous and are likely to remain attractive for many students. On the other hand, there is ample evidence that U.S. research universities are not designed to deliver a low-cost undergraduate education. Their many missions result in high costs (to support faculty and research) and high overhead rates (to pay for people and facilities), and they are not responsive over the time scales of the connected world because of the nature of their research and scholarship. New connected models of learning and innovation that span traditional boundaries could provide solutions more responsive to some of today’s needs, although major barriers, including the incorporation of laboratory classes, would have to be overcome.
Learning and innovation could be designed to span the boundary between universities and workplaces. Instead of universities taking on more responsibilities, contributors could build content that would be shared and could be used at all stages of education. That content could be both scalable and used locally in the classroom or as a supplement to classroom learning. Given the accelerating pace of change, such changes would assist learners of all ages in thinking about future career options that can be aligned with their learning and skills development (see Box 9-3).
The move to skills-based hiring opens up other new possibilities. An existing degree is at some basic level a collection of skills. Different disciplines have both unique and common skills, the latter of which enable new mapping of those skills to other disciplines, as well as to different jobs. Skills-based modules offered as complements to existing degree programs could provide a lower-cost path to a first job, along with continued support for additional lifelong learning in response to the evolution of the job market. New learning networks could also help build a more diverse STEM workforce by enhancing access to much-needed career opportunities, background preparation, and support.
As discussed earlier in this chapter, much remains to be learned about the relative advantages of online and classroom teaching and learning. While online programs have gained popularity and were widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, their advantages clearly come at the cost of the interpersonal interactions and discussions that occur in a traditional classroom. Chemical engineers have an opportunity to lead innovation in STEM fields by building a model that emphasizes scalability as well as human connection. Scalability can come from online content that is curated jointly by companies and universities and made available for local use in the classroom, or from the use of standalone modules to address particular topics that are accessed entirely online. Human interaction can then come from internships or work on extended projects at a company. The possibilities are numerous, even as the existing business model and the set of priorities now in place in universities, companies, and government create barriers to change (e.g., Conn et al., 2021). As with all major disruptions, change will likely be generated first by companies as they struggle to find, hire, and develop future talent.
CONCLUSION
The core chemical engineering curriculum has contributed to the long-term success and impact of the discipline. The undergraduate curriculum provides a mathematical framework for designing and describing (electro-/photo-/bio-) chemical and physical processes across spatial and temporal scales of many orders of magnitude. Data science and statistics may be delivered most effectively within a separate course embedded within the core curriculum and taught with specific emphasis on matters of chemistry and engineering. At the same time, experiential learning is important, and the majority of industrial and academic chemical engineers interviewed by the committee stressed the importance of internships and other practical experiences. However, far fewer internships are available than the number of students who would benefit from them, and the density of the core undergraduate curriculum leaves few openings for incorporating an additional hands-on laboratory course earlier in the curriculum.
The current chemical engineering curriculum is well suited to preparing students for a wide variety of industrial roles. Graduate research increasingly encompasses a diverse range of topics that do not all require the level of traditionally curated knowledge currently delivered in graduate chemical engineering curricula, and so graduate curricula may need to be adjusted. Internships for graduate students are currently rare, and new models will need to address issues of equity and inclusion, suitable compensation, intellectual property considerations, and adequate mentoring of interns.
Women and members of historically excluded groups are underrepresented in chemical engineering relative to the general population, even by comparison with the chemical and biological sciences and related fields. Diversifying the profession is essential to the field’s survival and potential for impact. At all points along their academic path, chemical engineering students need role models and effective, inclusive mentors, including mentors that reflect the diversity of backgrounds needed by the field. Leveraging of professional societies and associated affinity groups could provide valuable support for people of diverse backgrounds entering the field. Strong university support for student chapters of professional organizations would improve access and success.
The general affordability of community colleges is a major attraction for a diverse body of students, ranging from budget-minded high school seniors to nontraditional students. Increased engagement of transfer students is an untapped opportunity for chemical engineering to broaden participation in and access to the profession. Students from 2-year colleges and those who change their major to chemical engineering would benefit from a redesign of the curriculum allowing them to complete the degree in less time. Better academic and social support structures are needed to enable successful pathways for these students. New methods for offering portions of the curriculum in a distributed manner and more general restructuring may require flexibility in curriculum design and changes in university policies, graduation, and accreditation requirements.
Recommendation 9-1: Chemical engineering departments should consider revisions to their undergraduate curricula that would
- help students understand how individual core concepts merge into the practice of chemical engineering,
- include earlier and more frequent experiential learning through physical laboratories and virtual simulations, and
- bring mathematics and statistics into the core curriculum in a more structured manner by either complementing or replacing some of the education that currently occurs outside the core curriculum.
Recommendation 9-2: To provide graduate students with experiential learning opportunities, universities, industry, funding agencies, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers should coordinate to revise graduate training programs and funding structures to provide opportunities for and remove barriers to systematic placement of graduate students in internships.
Recommendation 9-3: To increase recruitment and retention of women and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) individuals in undergraduate programs, chemical engineering departments should emphasize opportunities for chemical engineers to make positive societal impacts, and should build effective mentoring and support structures for students who are members of such historically excluded groups. To provide more opportunities for BIPOC students, departments should consider redesigning their undergraduate curricula to allow students from 2-year colleges and those who change their major to chemical engineering to complete their degree without extending their time to degree, and provide the support structures necessary to ensure the retention and success of transfer students.
Recommendation 9-4: To increase the recruitment of students from historically excluded communities into graduate programs, chemical engineering departments should consider revising their admissions criteria to remove barriers faced by, for example, students who attended less prestigious universities or did not participate in undergraduate research. To provide more opportunities for women and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) individuals, departments should welcome students with degrees in related disciplines and consider additions to their graduate curricula that present the core components of the undergraduate curriculum tailored for postgraduate scientists and engineers.
Recommendation 9-5: A consortium of universities, together with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, should create incentives and practices for building and sharing curated chemical engineering content for use across universities and industry. Such sharing could reduce costs and advance broad access to high-quality content intended both for students and for professional engineers intending to further their education or change industries later in their careers.
Recommendation 9-6: Universities, industry, federal funding agencies, and professional societies should jointly develop and convene a summit to bring together perspectives represented by existing practices across the ecosystem of stakeholders in chemical engineering professional development. Such a summit would explore the needs, barriers, and opportunities around creating a technology-enabled learning and innovation infrastructure for chemical engineering, extending from university education through to the workplace.
