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Workshop Summary

INTRODUCTION

On February 24–25, 2022, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Materials and Manufacturing Board (NMMB) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine sponsored a workshop, Infusing Advanced Manufacturing into Engineering Education. The workshop was held as part of the information-gathering process being carried out by an NAE committee working on the project Strengthening the Talent for National Defense: Infusing Advanced Manufacturing in Engineering Education Through Capstone Design Courses. The goal of both the workshop and the entire study was to “consider advanced manufacturing technologies of most interest to commercial and DIB manufacturers and plan and conduct a workshop to explore the needs of the DIB and to highlight exemplary practices of advanced manufacturing treatment in undergraduate engineering education” (see Appendix A). The following pages summarize the presentations and discussions held during the workshop.

By the time the workshop was held, the committee had already hosted a number of meetings at which they had heard from various experts from academia, industry, and government in the areas of advanced manufacturing and engineering education, and the information gathered at those meetings was combined with the presentations and discussions at the workshop to provide the foundation for the committee’s deliberations. The ultimate result

of those deliberations was the consensus report, of which this workshop summary is an appendix.

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

In her welcome and introduction to the workshop, study Committee Co-Chair Maxine Savitz offered some background on the study and workshop. The study was sponsored by the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program of the Department of Defense (DoD) and was being carried out under the auspices of the National Academies’ NMMB and the NAE. As part of the study, the committee had been asked to conduct a workshop to explore the needs of the defense industrial base and to examine ways in which undergraduate engineering education could facilitate the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies.

The 2-day virtual workshop had been divided into four sections, Savitz explained, two on each day. The first three sessions were structured as panels, in which each panelist would speak briefly and then jointly participate in a discussion, with questions posed by the moderator and members of the audience. The final session would have breakout sections in which the participants in each section would discuss a set of questions on various topics related to engineering education as it related to advanced manufacturing. Audience members were encouraged to submit questions via Slido to be addressed in the various sessions.

After Savitz’s welcome, John L. Anderson, president of the NAE, spoke to provide a context for the workshop and describe its goals. “This is an opportunity for industry, academia, and government to come together for the purpose of generating and integrating ideas about advanced manufacturing and formulating methods to effectively introduce these ideas into engineering curricula in both the undergraduate and the graduate level,” he said.

Innovation, which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has descried as the economic currency of the next century, arises from a confluence of engineers, scientists, business professionals, and government leaders, Anderson said, noting that all of those groups were represented at the workshop. However, innovation is only part of the story. Once a device has been conceived and designed, it must be manufactured, and the design and creation of effective manufacturing processes is a key part of the innovation ecosystem. Unfortunately, Anderson continued, “manufacturing is sometimes a forgotten word in the vocabulary of innovation because it often lacks the glitz that new ideas

and discoveries generate.” Universities, for example, often place too much emphasis on the idea phase of innovation and neglect the manufacturing phase.

As an illustration of the importance of manufacturing to innovation, Anderson spoke about the invention of the neodymium-iron-boron magnet, which is today found in nearly all cell phones, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and laptop speakers. This year, Masato Sagawa was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for his innovation of this magnet. “Dr. Sagawa won the prize,” Anderson elaborated, “for both the idea of the magnet’s composition and for the advanced sintering process to manufacture the magnet with reproducible quality and low cost, thus giving it the dominant market position among permanent magnets and electrical devices.” In short, Sagawa’s work went from invention to development and, finally, to manufacturing, which, Anderson said, is “the epitome of engineering.”

Because tomorrow’s manufacturing capabilities will be determined by today’s students, “it is critical for engineering students to appreciate the importance of manufacturing and the advances made with respect to speed, safety, quality, and cost,” Anderson said. To that end, colleges and universities must not only teach about the importance of manufacturing but must also shape their curricula in ways that take into account the needs of manufacturing. “Richer and more relevant educational experiences result in better prepared students to take their positions in our technical workforce,” he said.

Industry also plays a vital role in education, he continued, as it needs to inform faculty, students, and the agencies that fund research about the hurdles that must be overcome to reach the next generation of design for manufacturability. And, he added, “it is also important that government recognize the role of engineering, specifically manufacturing, in advancing technology. This is how the public will see a return on this investment in basic research.”

The workshop offered a unique opportunity to improve manufacturing education, he said. “We can learn from different sides and angles and integrate concepts for the teaching and advancement of manufacturing methods.” In particular, he said, he was looking for the workshop participants to carry out “thoughtful discussions” concerning the best ways to prepare future engineers with the knowledge and expertise they will need to take advantage of advanced manufacturing technologies to help create a stronger and more sustainable future for this country.

“I suggest that what we are doing over the next 2 days is building important bridges, bridges that promote strategic movement and remove obstacles

to achieve a desired goal,” he said. “As bridges create new paths, these discussions can open new opportunities for us as a community to reach critically important outcomes.”

Following Anderson’s introduction, the study sponsor, Adele Ratcliff, spoke briefly. Ratcliff, who is the director of the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program in the Office of the Department of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Policy, reiterated Anderson’s comment about the need for pivoting from the current heavy focus on innovation to paying more attention to what is needed to ground engineer students in manufacturing. “As technology has become more complex today, whether it is rare earth magnets or the next generation of advanced electronics, often the technology has become so complex and the manufacturing process needed to produce that becomes so complex, it is really hard to differentiate which is which,” she said. “Which is the enabler to innovation? Is it the manufacturing process, or is it the precursor of what people call the technology itself? I argue that today likely it is those manufacturing processes, but our engineering programs seem to have not kept pace with that.” That was a key question being asked of the workshop attendees, she said: Have engineering programs kept pace with the growing importance of manufacturing processes, and, if not, what should those programs look like?

The gap between an idea for a product and the successful production of that product—that is, the manufacturing step—is often referred to as the “valley of death,” Ratcliff noted, because good ideas often fail to be transformed into viable products. However, she continued, “I do not view that as the valley of death. I view that as a valley of opportunity. That is where we convert our ideas to reality—through that manufacturing process.” But what will it take to restore the manufacturing capabilities and leadership that the United States has lost in recent decades, and how can U.S. engineering programs contribute to that restoration? Those are the questions that the workshop should address, she said.

ADVANCED MANUFACTURING

Because the workshop was focused on infusing advanced manufacturing into engineering education, understanding the workshop’s discussions requires first having a clear sense of what advanced manufacturing is. In general terms, “advanced manufacturing” simply refers to manufacturing with new and more effective tools, techniques, processes, or materials, but that means

that the manufacturing processes that can be described as “advanced” are constantly changing. What would have been considered advanced manufacturing 20 years ago is probably not thought of as advanced today. And, unfortunately, there is no generally accepted consensus on what constituted advanced manufacturing today, nor was any effort made at the workshop to come up with a list of manufacturing processes that should be considered advanced.

However, as was apparent by the various examples that they provided, the workshop participants themselves had a sense of what advanced manufacturing entails in today’s world, particularly as it applies to defense technologies, and this section examines the various examples of advanced manufacturing that the workshop participants discussed as a way of providing a sense of what advanced manufacturing entails in today’s world.

José Zayas-Castro of the National Science Foundation (NSF) listed a number of specific areas being supported by the foundation’s Advanced Manufacturing program, which provides support for researchers doing work in the area of advanced manufacturing. The specific areas being supported, he said, include autonomous systems, biomanufacturing, breakthrough materials and materials design, digital design and manufacturing methods, nanomaterials and nanomanufacturing, novel semiconductor design and manufacturing, and smart manufacturing. Autonomous systems are those that operate with a high level of independence and are able to decide how to respond to various unforeseen situations; they often are able to learn and improve their performance without human intervention. Digital design and manufacturing refers to systems that are fully digitized, so that data are collected and analyzed digitally and the processes are controlled digitally, providing greater flexibility and making it possible to respond quickly to changes; a digital system could, for instance, monitor the output of a process and make changes to the process in response to any problems it detected. Smart manufacturing refers to an approach to manufacturing that uses digital information technology to allow the system to be much more connected, flexible, and responsive, leading to greater efficiencies and faster responses to changing demands.

Chris Saldaña of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) mentioned both selective laser sintering and CNC (computer numerical control) machining as examples of advanced manufacturing platforms, along with three-dimensional (3D) printing and advanced composites. Amy Fleischer of California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), in speaking of advanced manufacturing topics that are being integrated into the engineering

school’s course, spoke of multi-axis CNC machining and modeling, reverse engineering with 3D scanning, and data analytics and smart manufacturing with real-time control. And William Bigot of Ascent Aerospace emphasized the importance of digital technologies used to monitor and control manufacturing processes; the information and analysis provided by these technologies can help operators understand how well their processes are working and even predict when a machine will need maintenance or repair.

Perhaps the most commonly mentioned example of an advanced manufacturing process during the workshop was additive manufacturing. This is a broad term that refers to a process in which an object is created by building it up, as opposed to subtractive manufacturing, where one starts with a solid block of metal or other material and removes pieces of it through machining or other techniques to create the desired shape. The best known and most common example of additive manufacturing is 3D printing, where an object is created layer by layer.

Michael Sarpu of Lockheed Martin commented that the main value of additive manufacturing is to build something that could not otherwise be built. People first become familiar with 3D printing, for instance, by creating something simple, such as a ball of a cup, but those are not the sorts of items that additive manufacturing should be used to build because it is not, at least so far, a particularly fast process. So, it is important to think about additive manufacturing—and, more generally, about advanced manufacturing—in the correct way. “If we think about it just to replace things we do today, then you lose,” he said, “because I can always injection-mold or five-axis high-speed-machine something quicker than I additively produce it. But if I come up with a structure that I cannot build any other way, now, all of a sudden, advanced manufacturing becomes that cornerstone of a manufacturing process.”

On a related note, Sarpu said that advanced manufacturing also has implications for the engineering process. “For the first time probably ever, we in manufacturing can now build things that an engineer cannot conceive,” he said. “When you think of the power of additive manufacturing and other technologies, we can now create things that cannot be conceived by a human.” This reality, he predicted, is going to lead to the growing importance of generative design processes, which will automate much of the design work that engineers have historically been responsible for. This is turn raises the question of who will design these generative design tools for the engineers to use. That will require a completely different sort of design thinking, he said.

ORGANIZATION OF THE SUMMARY

This summary is intended to capture the presentations and discussions that took place during the 2 days of the workshop. It contains four chapters in addition to this introductory chapter. Chapter 2 examines the state of manufacturing engineering education mainly from the perspective of academics and educators involved in training engineers and others who will go into the manufacturing workforce. Chapter 3 provides an industry perspective on the workforce needs of advanced manufacturing, while Chapter 4 looks at government and nonprofit institute efforts to improve manufacturing and manufacturing education, with a particular focus on advanced manufacturing. With these three chapters having provided an overview of the current state of advanced manufacturing and manufacturing engineering education, Chapter 5 collects and summarizes the many comments made throughout the workshop concerning what should be done to improve the state of advanced manufacturing and, particularly, manufacturing engineering education in the future to make the U.S. advanced manufacturing sector as effective, productive, and competitive as possible.

As per the policy of the National Academies, this workshop summary is the product of the workshop rapporteur and does not represent any National Academies position on the issues in this area. All opinions and recommendations expressed here are the opinions and recommendations of the individual workshop participants who made them, and while there may have been general agreement among those participants on certain issues, there was no attempt to reach a consensus on any issue, and no statement in this workshop summary should be interpreted as indicating such a consensus.

THE STATE OF MANUFACTURING EDUCATION

A significant part of the workshop was devoted to understanding the current status of engineering education as it applies to advanced manufacturing; the goal of these presentations was to set the stage for later discussions about what more can be done to better prepare engineering students for jobs in advanced manufacturing. To this end, several of the workshop’s presentations, including the keynote, were focused on engineering education in colleges and universities. This chapter recaps the keynote address as well as the four presentations from Session 3, “Undergraduate Education

in Manufacturing,” as well as other contributions related to manufacturing engineering education made in other parts of the workshop.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

The keynote address was given by Kyle Squires, dean of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). The session moderator, Robert Sproull, summarizing details from the ASU website, described the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering as the largest and most comprehensive engineering school in the United States and noted that those schools offer a variety of opportunities beyond the classroom, including undergraduate and graduate research, peer mentoring, entrepreneurship, student organizations, internships, and community service. In particular, he said, “The newest of the Fulton Schools is the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks, which prepares graduates to tackle the next generation of engineering challenges essential to sustaining global economic growth, strengthening supply chains, and transforming manufacturing systems.”

Squires began by saying that he hoped to offer some context for the discussions in the rest of the workshop. He would do this in three parts. First, he would introduce and describe the Fulton Schools of Engineering and, more broadly, ASU. Then he would talk about the evolution of the engineering schools over time. And, finally, he would describe the thought process that led to the decision to create the new School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks, which is now in the process of recruiting faculty and building a new facility for the school, which will be open for occupancy in January 2025.

A key fact about ASU, Squires said, is that it is a very innovative place. “There are constantly new ideas churning, ways to advance student’s success, positioning the university for growth, and doing that in ways that really are different,” he said. And indeed, the university has been ranked number one in innovation by U.S. News & World Report since the magazine began its innovation rankings in 2016.

As described in its charter, the university is built on three pillars. The first is that it is a public university dedicated to providing access to students, “measured not by whom it excludes but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” The second is that it is devoted to advancing research and discovery of public value; that is, the university emphasizes research that matters and helps improve life in some way. And the third is “assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural, and overall health of the

communities it serves.” This is a key distinction between public and private universities, Squires said. Public universities are responsible to their community, the taxpayers, and various other stakeholders. “We really do think about that in terms of the ways that we advance all that we do within the Fulton Schools,” he said.

ASU has done well in translating its research into outcomes, Squires said, particularly as measured by patents. It is among the top 10 U.S. universities in terms of the number of patents issued and is 11th worldwide. It also rates well in terms of entrepreneurial outputs. When calculated per $10 million of research expenditures, the schools of engineering rank fifth nationally in terms of numbers of startups, sixth in intellectual property disclosures, and seventh in licenses and options.

Of ASU’s 134,000 students (about 50,000 of whom are online), 27,000 are in the seven Fulton schools of engineering. About one-third of the 7,000 students in ASU’s Barbara and Craig Barrett Honors College are engineering students. There are 25 undergraduate degree programs and more than 50 graduate programs in engineering. “We are creating programs to draw in a very wide range of students to come into engineering,” Squires said. “I think in the context of manufacturing, that is vital, that experience base.”

The engineering faculty, with about 370 tenured and tenure-track professors and another 100 or so lecturers and professors, also excels, he said. For example, faculty members have received 32 NSF career awards over the past 3 years. “When you are hitting about 10 career awards per year, that is significant,” Squires said.

The seven schools of engineering sit on two campuses, one in Tempe and one in Mesa, which are about 20 miles apart. The new school of manufacturing is on the Mesa campus. “We intend for that School of Manufacturing to represent—and I use this phrase deliberately—the center of gravity for manufacturing within the Fulton Schools,” he said. “Every discipline of engineering has some engagement with manufacturing. It is the intersection of those disciplines that we are trying to capitalize on here through our new school of manufacturing.”

Switching to the topic of how the schools of engineering evolved over time, Squires began by saying that in 2009, ASU’s engineering programs were organized into 14 departments. Then, inspired by the NAE’s Grand Challenges of Engineering, the university reorganized the college of engineering into five interdisciplinary schools with the goal of making the college more adaptable and more responsive, connecting disciplines, and creating new opportunities for faculty and students. The five schools were the School of

Biological and Health Systems Engineering; the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence; the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment; the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy; and the School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering. The Polytechnic School was added in 2014, and the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks was added in 2021. The new structure enables connections that “drive research forward in new and creative ways” and increases responsiveness to opportunities both internal and external to the university, Squires said.

Furthermore, the 2009 realignment was crucial in making the establishment of the manufacturing school possible. “We did not know it at the time,” he said, “but we were basically seeding the ground to enable establishment of this school…. [W]e had to establish the structures and thought process to be able to do that.”

The Fulton schools also have transdisciplinary connections with a number of other segments of the ASU community, he added, including the School of Earth and Space Exploration (which does significant work with NASA), the Biodesign Institute, the business school, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering.

The reorganization has offered a number of lessons, Squires said. First, by removing barriers between the departments, the move encouraged faculty members not only to interact with other faculty members whom they might not have spoken with before, but also to “think bigger.” Faculty members are more likely to think beyond their traditional areas and to ask “Why not?” It represents a major change in mindset, he said.

Furthermore, from an organizational and operational perspective, the move has allowed the engineering college to leverage its resources in new ways and to scale curricular and extracurricular programs. As an example, Squires spoke about the introduction to engineering course offered to students in their first semester. The course has more than 80 sections, he said. “We have a team of lecturers that we flood into those sections to engage those students. We use our current student body to help support it. But it is a scalable structure.”

Turning specifically to what the college has learned about building engineers, Squires said the lessons can be grouped into three broad lessons. First, the students should be treated as engineers from day 1. Students are engaged in the design/build process from the beginning and given a wide variety of opportunities to discover and follow their passions. Second, build community within the college by developing an engineering mindset and

reinforcing values. Student organizations, peer mentors, and student ambassadors are crucial in this process, he said, because “the students are always going to be the best ambassadors and role models and examples.” Third, meet learners where they are. For example, one of the largest residence halls on campus is for engineering students. “We teach classes there,” Squires said. “We have tutoring there. We meet our students there for career coaching. It is an example of basically making those entire sets of experiences embedded.”

In the final part of his talk, Squires spoke about the thinking behind the new School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks and the decisions that went into shaping it. One of the key considerations, he said, was what was happening in the surrounding community and how to respond to that. For example, Arizona has become a major center for U.S. semiconductor research and manufacturing, with a number of companies, including Intel and NXP, having existing semiconductor fabrication plants and Taiwan’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation building a new $12 billion chip factory and Intel spending $20 billion to build two new chip plants. Furthermore, the area has long had strengths in such areas as equipment manufacturing, chemical and material suppliers, and semiconductor packaging. “Those will continue to grow as we are … attracting new companies,” he said. “We need to be responsive to that need. The workforce needs here in engineering, in manufacturing, in technology are immense. That is a strong signal that drives our thinking.”

At the same time, ASU was successful in convincing the state of Arizona to provide seed funding for the New Economy Initiative. The idea behind that initiative, Squires said, was to be responsive to the growing technology landscape in the area by hiring more engineering faculty and providing more opportunities for expansion by meeting the demands in manufacturing engineering. Simultaneously, he said, the plan was to establish research centers in such areas as energy, communications, and manufacturing “as a way to connect our faculty and research students to the corporate base and speed the translation of innovation out into practice.”

The reorganization and growth of the Fulton Schools of Engineering took place against the backdrop—and in response to—this environment in Arizona. For example, the School of Computing, now renamed the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, is in the process of being reimagined. The choice of the term “augmented intelligence” was a deliberate one, he said, as people sometimes think of the more common term “artificial intelligence” as implying that computation is taking the place of human thought, while

“augmented intelligence” signals that their work in computing is designed to advance the human condition by assisting in innovation.

The creation of the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks was done specifically with the strong manufacturing base in Arizona in mind. The manufacturing of the future will span the design, realization, technical management, operations, and optimization of systems and networks devoted to creating things. In particular, Squires defined a manufacturing system as a “combination of elements that function together to produce the capability required to meet a need” and commented that such systems are “increasingly networked in new ways to promote efficiency and innovation.” Working in partnership with the Polytechnic School, which is very solution-focused and has many technology programs within it, the new manufacturing school will give the Mesa campus of ASU a distinctive identity and respond to the opportunities offered by the local strengths in semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, and medical devices, he said.

More generally, Squires continued, the new manufacturing school is intended to combine research, academic programs, faculty expertise, and industry partners to address the next-generation challenges that will define the future of manufacturing. There will be many such challenges, and Squires offered examples from three specific areas: process science and engineering; robotics and automation; and data analytics, cyber, and artificial intelligence.

In process science and engineering, the college is involved in, among other things, new resins for stereolithography, polymer chemistry in biofabrication, and cellular structures for energy absorption. “This is informing the way in which we give the school structure, the way we drive future hiring,” he said.

In robotics and automation, ASU engineering is working on precision automation, human–robot collaboration, and smart and connected factories. Human–robot collaboration will make it possible to do really innovative things in manufacturing, he predicted, while smart factories, while not a new idea, are a very versatile idea that offers many opportunities for the school of manufacturing.

In data analytics, cyber, and artificial intelligence, Squires again listed three areas in which ASU engineering is doing work: manufacturing quality control, heterogeneous data fusion and behavior modeling, and secure and resilient systems. In the area of manufacturing quality control, he spoke about how it is now possible to use the great amounts of data collected during manufacturing processes to make improvements midstream by analyzing the data and acting on them in real time. “We do not have to make … a thousand

of these parts and then go measure some and discover there was a flaw,” he said. “Mid-process improvements are possible.”

Wrapping up, Squires described the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks as having three “structural elements”: a knowledge base, new process technologies, and support for regional priorities. The knowledge base includes knowledge in such areas as robotics, automation, data analytics and machine learning, security, logistics and management, and design. Among the new process technologies being worked on there are additive manufacturing, microtechnology and nanotechnology, semiconductor manufacturing, and the manufacturing of emerging materials. In supporting regional priorities, the manufacturing school will focus on such areas as aerospace and defense, semiconductors, medical technology, and the automotive industry, particularly innovation in energy storage batteries. Finally, the school is committed to helping develop the manufacturing workforce for the area—not just engineers but also the other workers that the industry relies on. “Our manufacturing school will also be a connector for technology-focused workforce training opportunities [for] technicians that move into fab or move into a large factory,” he said. “They do not necessarily need engineering degrees, but we are vital to providing the modern set of skills and training to enable those graduates to thrive.”

UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION IN MANUFACTURING AT FOUR INSTITUTIONS

Session 3 was moderated by Sundar Krishnamurty, the Isenberg Distinguished Professor in Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; Chi Okwudire, an associate professor at the University of Michigan; and David Parekh, the chief executive officer of SRI International. The basic issues to be addressed were what advanced manufacturing technologies are taught in undergraduate education, how capstone courses address advanced manufacturing technologies, what advanced manufacturing technologies are most important to industry, and the best practices and exemplary engineering courses that incorporate advanced manufacturing technologies.

The four speakers were Amy Fleischer, dean of engineering at Cal Poly; Guillermo Aguilar, head of the mechanical engineering department at Texas A&M University; Susannah Howe, a capstone design instructor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; and Chris Saldaña, the manufacturing group chair at Georgia Tech.

California Polytechnic State University

Fleischer, whom Krishnamurty described as pioneering the college experiential learning-based engineering curriculum, began by describing the manufacturing engineering degree program at Cal Poly. It is one of the university’s smaller undergraduate programs, she said, with only about 25 students graduating from it each year, compared with the engineering program as a whole, which has about 6,000 undergraduate students in 14 different degree programs. Still, she said, the manufacturing engineering program exerts “a valuable influence on our overall curriculum.”

Students in the mechanical engineering program are offered a concentration in manufacturing, and about 50 of those students graduate each year with that manufacturing concentration. These students tend to be creative and to want an extra hands-on part of their education, Fleischer said. Furthermore, the manufacturing engineering program offers a number of service courses across the school’s engineering curriculum, and not only mechanical engineering students but also those majoring in aeronautical engineering, biomedical engineering, and materials engineering take many of the courses provided by the manufacturing program.

The engineering students at Cal Poly are somewhat different from those in other schools, Fleischer said, in that they come into the program looking for hands-on learning. “Our motto— and not just for engineering, but across the entire university—is learn by doing,” she said, so hands-on learning is integrated into many of the university’s classes. “Students here at Cal Poly are already kind of inclined to want to do manufacturing. As we talk to the students who are in the program, they say building things is really cool. They really like that. It’s drawing them in, they are very excited about that.”

Indeed, she said, there are increasing numbers of students entering who are interested in hands-on building experiences because students are getting exposed to such experiences in high school and even earlier with such programs as makerspaces and FIRST Robotics. The availability of 3D scanners and printers is also playing a role, she added. “We are drawing a lot of those students into Cal Poly who want to continue to work in those areas.”

First-year students in the manufacturing engineering program are exposed to basic types of manufacturing—electronics fabrication, materials removal, materials joining, casting, and so on—and then in later years, the students learn about more advanced types of manufacturing. The manufacturing classrooms combine lecture spaces with laboratory spaces, so students can learn something in the classroom and immediately go practice it in the

laboratory. The laboratory spaces have a combination of traditional hand-driven equipment and basic CNC machines, with the students moving to the more complicated machinery as they advance through the program. After the students have mastered different techniques, they combine them to create machines from scratch.

The manufacturing program is also integrating advanced manufacturing into its curriculum, Fleischer said, mentioning specifically additive manufacturing and multi-axis CNC machining and modeling. “We are moving into reverse engineering with 3D scanning,” she added, “and now a nice emphasis on data analytics and smart manufacturing with data in real-time control is being integrated into our coursework.”

Switching topics, Fleischer said that it is very important for a program like Cal Poly’s manufacturing degree to have strong industry partnerships. For example, the department has a partnership with Haas Automation. “They help us keep our labs up to date and make sure the students are working on the most cutting-edge pieces of equipment,” she said. Indeed, she added, the partnerships run the gamut of manufacturing practices, from the digital focus of Apple to Haas, which is a traditional machining company, with companies like Solar Turbines falling somewhere in the middle. The program also has an industrial advisory board, she said, “and we are always talking to them about what makes the most sense for our programs.”

Students have a variety of ways to get hands-on experience outside of the class-associated laboratories. For instance, the engineering school uses student techs extensively in all of its facilities to maintain the equipment and help train other students. There are also many clubs with a manufacturing-related focus, from a blacksmithing club and a cast-in-steel foundry club to a chapter of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. A variety of vehicle teams engage in competitions with vehicles they have designed and built, from a human-powered vehicle team to traditional racecar teams to a hyperloop team. And each year, the university designs and builds a float for the Rose Bowl parade, which generally includes automated moving parts.

The university has a tremendous amount of facilities to support all these activities. “We have basically what’s an airplane hangar,” Fleischer said. “That is a full shop with most of our club space.” Each year 2,000 students are given basic training that gives them the fundamentals they need to be able to work in that shop, and most of the faculty and most of the staff in the college have also completed this training. A second facility with much more advanced equipment is dedicated to work on senior design projects.

Every single engineering student in all 14 of the college’s degree programs does a senior capstone project, and most of them have a significant build phase. The mechanical engineering program in particular requires all of its students’ projects to go to prototype. The college also offers interdisciplinary senior design projects, and students in the manufacturing program do blended projects that combine industrial engineering and manufacturing engineering. “As they work through those projects,” Fleischer said, “they are building not only the prototypes but also looking at costing and how would they transition to scale manufacturing.”

With these sorts of experiences, she said, Cal Poly’s engineering graduates are highly sought-after by industrial companies. “A lot of them go into the defense industry and aerospace industry, which are both very strong here in California, but also into things like the sporting goods industry and national labs.” The college also places undergraduate students directly at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, she said. “It is unusual to place undergrads, but they come in with a really great skillset.”

Texas A&M University

Aguilar began his presentation by giving an overview of Texas A&M’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. It has roughly 1,500 undergraduate students and 500 graduate students, and it awards more than 500 degrees each year. There are about 90 tenure-track and academic-professional-track faculty, including 43 in endowed faculty positions and seven who are members of the NAE. Research expenditures for the most recent fiscal year were almost $30 million. “This is a large operation,” Aguilar said. “It is one of the biggest departments in the country, and obviously that shapes out the curriculum that we have.”

With that, Aguilar began addressing the questions that had been asked of each of the panelists, beginning with how the department incorporates advanced manufacturing technologies into its undergrad curriculum. The existing curriculum actually has very little room in which to introduce advanced manufacturing topics, he said, although manufacturing is covered to a certain degree in such courses as Principles of Materials and Manufacturing as well as Materials and Manufacturing, and students in the department’s capstone courses can choose to have an engineering laboratory. One possibility would be to introduce advanced manufacturing elements into

engineering science courses, Aguilar said, such as using 3D printing to produce a gear as part of the statics course or to print items in a fluids or heat transfer laboratory experiment. “Those kind of things would be useful,” he said, “and to some extent we are covering that.”

Turning to the next question—on the types of manufacturing experiences that are available to undergraduates—he said that the need for such experiences has been filled to some extent by internships, co-ops, capstone courses, research, and independent studies, but that such experiences are not available to all students.

On the question of what industry is asking of academia and what interaction the department has with industry, there is a mixed bag, he said. Some manufacturing companies argue that the department should continue to prepare its students very strongly in fundamentals and that industry can afford to train them later on, but others—mainly smaller companies—are looking for students who have more hands-on experience and are ready to contribute without on-the-job training. Either way, Aguilar added, the department takes into consideration the input it gets from industry and sees advisory boards as instrumental in helping the program keep track of industry trends, “and we do everything we can to try to adapt our curriculum to the current needs.”

In response to a question about what the department is hearing from its alumni who have gone into manufacturing, Aguilar said that most of them are still adapting to the new advanced manufacturing way, and they offer insights into the sorts of changes that will need to be made to the curriculum to better prepare students for work in advanced manufacturing. Over the short term, the needed training can be carried out with co-ops, directed studies, internships, and the like; the problem with this approach is that these are accessible to only some of the students. Over the long term it will be necessary to make changes in the curriculum, but doing so will require either taking time away from core courses—and thus short-changing the training in fundamentals—or else cutting into the time spent on general education courses, but “that is a steep hill to climb,” he said, “considering all the changes that need to be approved at the upper levels of the university.”

On how to move students from design and prototyping to manufacturing, Aguilar said that serious investments will be needed and, unfortunately, not every institution will be able to afford them. Modern manufacturing generally requires major capital investments, and the closest thing that Aguilar’s department has been able to achieve is small-scale desktop devices such as lasers, 3D printers, and CNC machines that can be used to provide some hands-on training to students.

Addressing the question on capstone courses—specifically, how they are evolving and what goals and pressures are driving the change—Aguilar said that most are drifting toward smaller-scale, less traditional heavy manufacturing and more design and prototyping, but that is “not quite closing the loop” with advanced manufacturing. It is still not feasible to create structurally sound designs with 3D printing or other advanced manufacturing using the cheap desktop machines available to students. “We really think we need to close the loop” by providing students with access to advanced manufacturing tools, he said.

On the topic of how to attract students to manufacturing, Aguilar suggested taking advantage of “the cyber world that many of our students are now hooked on.” By hooking them on visuals and games, they can then be guided into building their own devices. However, he warned, it will be crucial to get them to move beyond just enjoying the cyber world as users—they need to become creators. It will also be important to get K–12 education involved in the task of attracting students to manufacturing, he added. “This is not something that higher education can solve independently.”

Manufacturing could be made more attractive to students by making sure that the visuals are of the sorts of things—robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, electronic devices—that already appeal to the younger generation. Students also need to see that what they make has societal value, Aguilar said. “Nowadays students grow up with a very deep social conscience, making them aware of things like how to provide drinking water for remote areas or better health care or leveraged freedom from a wheelchair, or walking and running blades for amputees,” he said. “Those kind of things students can quickly engage with and be attracted to.” And he suggested making reverse engineering a larger component of the curriculum.

Finally, he spoke about what steps are needed to better integrate advanced manufacturing into undergraduate engineering education. It will take, he predicted, a “big infusion of resources to make advanced manufacturing training devices accessible to the many students we train now nationwide.” However, he added, this is not something that many institutions will be able to afford, at least not at the necessary scale, and so the best approach may be to partner with industry and with government to provide the sort of equipment necessary to expose students to advanced manufacturing as part of their education.

Smith College

The next speaker was Howe, whom Krishnamurty described as a national leader in capstone design courses and in “advocating for capstone design and promoting design innovations in engineering curriculum.” Howe spoke mostly about such capstone design courses, and her talk covered three main topics: a set of decennial surveys about capstone design, a research initiative funded by the NSF studying new employees in their transition from capstone design to the workplace, and the capstone course that she teaches at Smith College which, she said, is very different from the ones at Cal Poly, Texas A&M, and Georgia Tech.

The Capstone Design Survey has been carried out three times so far—in 1994, 2005, and 2015—with the next one scheduled for 2025. Howe, who directed the surveys in 2005 and 2015, said that the goal of the survey is to understand the current practices in capstone design, how these courses are evolving, and how can they be improved. The surveys take about 45 minutes to complete, so they are somewhat detailed. There were 360 respondents in 1994, 444 in 2005, and 522 in 2015, and the greatest number of responses came from those in the mechanical and aerospace engineering fields, followed by electrical and computer engineering, civil and environmental engineering, chemical engineering, and biomedical engineering. Only a few of the respondents were in the manufacturing field, Howe said, so the survey results are not specific to manufacturing but apply to the engineering field broadly speaking.

Discussing what they surveys revealed about the details of capstone courses, Howe showed a series of graphs detailing the results.¹ Most capstone courses lasted either one or two semesters, with more than half of the respondents in 2015 reporting two-semester capstone courses. Furthermore, there was a clear trend over time to have longer capstone courses, with some capstone courses today lasting as long as 2 years. The most common structure for capstone courses was to have the class and project done in parallel, although a significant minority of the courses were class followed by project or project only. There were no class-only capstone courses, Howe reported, so the project is clearly a major part of such courses.

The survey results indicate that the number of students taking capstone courses at various institutions has been growing over time, she said, and most

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¹ S. Howe, L. Rosenbauer, and S. Poulos, 2017, “The 2015 Capstone Design Survey Results: Current Practices and Changes Over Time,” International Journal of Engineering Education 33(5):1393–1421.

projects are done by teams of students, most typically with three, four, or five team members. The total student time spent per project varied widely and was a function of team size as well as of the length of the capstone course, with a majority of respondents reporting a total time per project of somewhere between 200 and 1,000 hours, but some reporting fewer than 200 hours and others reporting well over 1,000 hours and even over 2,000 hours. “So it’s worth noting that this is a nontrivial undertaking,” Howe said. “This is not the same as a small final project that you might have at the end of a different kind of course. This is a big undertaking and often done by multiple students at a time.”

The sources for the capstone projects included industry, government, faculty research, external competitions, and the students themselves. In 2015, 80 percent of the respondents reported that industry or government were the source for at least some of their students’ capstone projects. Much of the funding for the projects came from the colleges and universities themselves, but a significant percentage of it came from the projects’ sponsors, with students providing some of the funding as well. The amounts supplied by the external sponsors varied widely, with some sponsors providing nothing and others as much as $30,000 per project; in 2015, 60 percent of the respondents reported that sponsors provided an average of more than $1,000 per project and 20 percent reporting an average sponsor funding of more than $5,000. The most common project expenses were for supplies, hardware, software, faculty time, and travel.

Next Howe described some results from a project that looked at the transition from capstone project to workplace for a number of engineering students from four different institutions. One part of the project involved doing weekly surveys during the former students’ first 12 weeks of work, asking them what transferred from capstone to their first work experience. A large majority of the respondents said that self-directed learning was a key skill that had transferred, Howe reported, while teamwork and communication were also critical. “Within the first 12 weeks, these are skills that our new graduates were using on the job,” she said. “And, sure, they were using technical work skills as well,” but the importance of the technical skills depended on how closely the jobs they had corresponded to the type of work they did in their capstone projects, while the self-directed learning, teamwork, and communication skills were valuable regardless of the specific technical requirements of a job.

Howe ended her presentation with a brief description of the capstone design course that she teaches at Smith, which is called the Smith College

Design Clinic. Smith is a small institution and has about 25–40 students graduate with its bachelor of science degree in engineering science each year. The two-semester capstone course has a large range of sponsors in such fields as civil, environmental, mechanical, electrical, chemical, materials, and industrial engineering, many of whom have some connection with manufacturing. “And so, while we don’t have a manufacturing degree, we don’t have a manufacturing track or focus,” Howe said, “it turns out that about 15 percent of our graduates have jobs right now in manufacturing and some of them are doing very specific work in advanced manufacturing. So, despite the fact that they are not coming from a manufacturing engineering program, they are pursuing careers in manufacturing.”

The lesson, Howe concluded, is that a career in advanced manufacturing is not necessarily limited to graduates with manufacturing degrees. Even institutions without a manufacturing program can be sending students and graduates out into the manufacturing workforce.

Georgia Institute of Technology

Saldaña is, in addition to being Georgia Tech’s manufacturing group chair, the instructor for Georgia Tech’s capstone design course and also lead faculty for a new NSF industry–university cooperative research center in advanced manufacturing. He spoke about the university’s efforts to build an “ecosystem” for an undergraduate experience centered around manufacturing education.

Like Texas A&M, Georgia Tech is a large university, Saldaña said. Its mechanical engineering department has 1,800 undergraduates and about 850 graduate students. Studio and recitation sessions generally have 20–25 students, but course sections will have 50–300 students. Delivering a high-quality education at that scale is a challenge, he said, particularly as one of the institution’s goals is to provide experiential learning opportunities to students using its physical laboratories.

Georgia Tech’s manufacturing education efforts involve both the school’s formal curriculum (i.e., its required and elective courses) and a combination of supercurricular activities (such as makerspaces and competition teams), undergraduate research, and entrepreneurial activities. “There is a lot of learning that goes on outside of the classroom in these self-directed kinds of activities,” he said, and one of the challenges faculty members face is combining the formal curriculum with the other work in a seamless way.

In Georgia Tech’s formal coursework, he continued, “advanced manufacturing finds a home in our design and manufacturing sequence, which consists of four courses that take students from design to prototyping and then to manufacturing.” The courses are Introduction to Engineering Graphics and Design; Creative Decisions and Design; Design, Materials, and Manufacture; and Capstone Design. The first is a “typical CAD [computer-aided design] course where we learn about 3D modeling and design and mess around a little bit with 3D printing,” Saldaña said.

In the next course, typically taken by sophomores, the students design robotic systems for a competition and realize that design with a rapid prototyping process. The students come in “geared up” to fabricate things, he said. “They want to get hands-on, get out of the classroom and work with equipment, and we find a lot of energy associated with that kind of activity.” Because of the large number of students taking the course, it was important to reduce the amount of time students spent fabricating their items, so the department moved to computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) approaches. And while the move to CAM was made for more practical reasons, Saldaña comments that such CAM-based approaches “port really well to advanced manufacturing kinds of concepts.”

From there, students move into the manufacturing courses. The basic one teaches students about the different kinds of processes that are involved in manufacturing. “That’s where you address concepts related to scaled manufacturing,” he commented. Students can also choose various manufacturing-related electives that cover such topics as process analysis, additive manufacturing, and artificial intelligence and machine learning, where students learn about digital manufacturing.

Finally, students integrate what they have learned in a capstone design course. These are often company-sponsored projects, Saldaña said, such as one time where students worked with Milwaukee Tool to produce new kinds of equipment. In such cases, students must think about whether their designs can be made at scale.

Georgia Tech has a wide variety of fabrication resources on campus so that students can get experience with a range of equipment. To help provide this equipment, the university partners with a large number of companies.

“We also work with companies to actually port some of their materials to our curricula,” Saldaña said. For example, the university has worked with Autodesk to bring in some of its online materials for computer-aided manufacturing and CNC training to include in some of the university courses.

The mechanical engineering department has a number of physical resources that students can use inside and outside of the classroom, he said, “and that has really morphed into a broader set of makerspaces across the entire college.” Now not only mechanical engineering but also electrical engineering, materials engineering, and biomedical engineering all have makerspaces with advanced manufacturing capabilities where students can learn about various techniques in this self-guided format. The manufacturing capabilities in these maker spaces include a wide variety of things, from manual machine and welding to fused deposition modeling, selective laser sintering, stereolithography, 3D scanning, laser cutting, CNC machining, waterjet cutting, textiles manufacturing, and circuit board manufacture.

Students will learn about these techniques things on their own, so one of the challenges that faculty members face is what to do in the classroom to help augment what students are wanting to do. “What we found,” Saldaña said, “is that when you provide the students with those capabilities, you can really enable them to do a lot of great things.” For example, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, some Georgia Tech students went into the makerspaces and produced hundreds to thousands of face shields. Then they developed scaled manufacturing approaches that made it possible to produce millions of units in collaboration with companies that the university was already working with.

Moving to supercurricular activities, Saldaña said that advanced manufacturing plays a big role within its competition teams, which use advanced manufacturing techniques to field their systems. These students use pretty advanced technologies, he said, including composites, CNC machining, and 3D printing.

Georgia Tech also has a university-wide initiative to instill entrepreneurial confidence in students and to empower them to launch startups. Some of the resulting startups have been in the manufacturing field—for example, a company looking at analytics for manufacturing and another developing tools for monitoring manufacturing processes—“so they are making use of those same advanced manufacturing platforms that I mentioned earlier,” Saldaña said. The entrepreneurial work can be done as supercurricular work, as course credit, or as part of a capstone project.

In concluding, Saldaña reiterated that it is crucial to consider how all of these different activities can work together to create graduates who will develop the next generation of manufacturing technologies.

Discussion

Okwudire opened the question-and-answer session that followed the presentations by asking what, if anything, the panelists did in their schools to teach students about scale-up. Fleischer answered first, saying that engineering students at Cal Poly are asked, as part of their senior capstone projects, to think about the transition from the prototype to the finished product and, in particular, to consider what it will cost to manufacture the finished product as opposed to the prototype. They are assisted by senior design advisors, most of whom have worked in industry, she said.

Saldaña said that students in manufacturing courses are exposed to considerations related to developing parts that scale, including costing and outsourcing. When they are working in entrepreneurial teams, for instance, “they have an idea for a widget, some sort of device, and then later they have to develop a business plan where they are actually making hundreds of thousands of that same device.” So, they must reach out to suppliers to determine what things actually cost. “What we found is that in the entrepreneurial courses you definitely have that experience because they are all trying to develop a business.”

Next, Krishnamurty passed along a question that had been asked by multiple audience members: What can engineering programs do to attract women and underrepresented minorities? Fleischer answered that one of the things that Cal Poly does is to emphasize the impact that engineering can have—how it can help people and be used to change society for the better. “There are programs that we have in manufacturing that really emphasize that,” she said, mentioning in particular a laboratory in which students take on projects that can help people with physical challenges.

Aguilar agreed that such programs can make a difference but argued that it is important to start attracting women and underrepresented minorities much earlier, which will require help from those in K–12 education. “We have to start way early,” he said. “Whatever we do at this [university] level is probably a little bit too late.” And he said that various studies have indicated that many of the students who decide to go into engineering have made their decisions by middle school, if not earlier.

Saldaña added that it is important to find ways to increase the retention of women and minority students in engineering programs. For instance, he said, Georgia Tech’s mechanical engineering makerspace does a good job holding demographic-specific focused events, such as a women’s night

that is quite popular and even pulls in a number of people from outside of mechanical engineering.

Howe cautioned that women and underrepresented minorities are not a monolith, but rather have a broad range of interests, so it is important to show them the range of career paths that are available to them. In particular, it is important to be flexible with students and let them see the different opportunities that are available to them. In this way they can see what gets them excited and where they find communities of support and change direction if necessary. “The more that we can embed different experiences and skills in manufacturing and across other different disciplines, then new employees will travel in different directions,” she said. “But ultimately, they need to be in a place where they feel they have a community, they have opportunities, and they can make an impact.”

Next Krishnamurty asked the panelists how many of the faculty at their schools had direct in-the-field experience in engineering. Since Georgia Tech is an R1 university, Saldaña said, many of the faculty are research-focused. About one-quarter of the faculty members have industrial experience, but they have usually come from research organizations within the industrial organizations. “However,” he added, “I would say we are heavily supported by industry in our research, so everything that we do in our research programs and that we expose our students to, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, has a basis in industrial operation … so in that sense we are not developing systems that are never going to be used.”

Fleischer said that with Cal Poly’s learn-by-doing environment, great value is placed on industry experience, and such experience is weighed heavily in considering applicants. Among those faculty who teach senior capstone courses, probably 75–80 percent have had industry experience at some point in their careers, and the lecturers in the engineering departments include many people who came to Cal Poly after several decades in industry. Furthermore, the university has a program designed to allow faculty to get industry experience; every 3 years, an engineering faculty member can work in industry for a quarter, and the university will help make up some of the difference between the industry pay and the faculty pay. Many faculty members take advantage of this, she said.

Aguilar said that Texas A&M has recently hired more professors of practice specifically to get an up-to-date view from industry. These faculty members are generally put in front of students who can benefit the most, he said, and they are usually the professors who run the senior design courses.

Okwudire then asked the panelists to offer their thoughts on how best to find a balance between teaching fundamentals and providing hands-on experience, since departments are limited in the number of courses students can be required to take. Howe answered first, saying that ultimately the goal should be to produce students who learn how to learn because they are going to go to work in an area that will evolve continually. “Even if you teach them everything that is absolutely important right now,” she said, “in 5 years, 10 years, 25 years, that is going to be potentially less important.”

Saldaña agreed but added that the best balance between classroom learning and hands-on learning will be different from student to student. With self-directed learning, students can follow their own interests and see which areas are of most interest. The important thing here is to provide students with a spectrum of opportunities, such as the opportunity to participate in manufacturing.

Krishnamurty commented that while such self-selection may work well for some high-performing students, it does not work for every student, and certain things should certainly not be optional, such as learning fundamentals. Saldaña agreed and drew a distinction between the sorts of fundamental knowledge that every student should have and the additional knowledge and skills that interested students should be able to develop. Some students will be content with fundamental knowledge about something, while others will want to achieve mastery, he said. “Not everyone is going to hop on a CNC machine and learn how to set it up, for example.”

Parekh, the third moderator, then asked the panelists a question: “If you could additively manufacture a magic wand and wave it over your own program, what would be the main change you would make that you can’t today but that you think would significantly improve its impact in terms of preparing your students for their careers?”

Aguilar answered that he would relax some of the general education requirements for engineering students to create more room for teaching engineering concepts and skills. Furthermore, he said, he would like traditional courses to include “at least some level of advanced manufacturing projects at the end” so that students did not have to wait until their capstone courses to be exposed to hands-on training. Howe disagreed about relaxing the general education requirements, saying, “I feel really strongly that the students learning engineering in a much broader context is really valuable, that it makes them much better engineers and much more flexible in terms of where they go in their careers.”

Saldaña said he would like to see a new modular approach to teaching some courses, where the courses are broken up into modules and students can pick which modules to work on, choosing their own paths within the coursework.

Parekh followed up on that by noting how many students had been inspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to jump into health careers because they saw the impact they could have and by wondering whether helping students think about the major, world-changing problems that could be solved through manufacturing might inspire more students to go into manufacturing. Howe answered that it is hard for students to see how manufacturing connects with other large societal and environmental issues when they are learning engineering totally in a silo, “whereas if you are double majoring in government, you suddenly have a completely different perspective on how policies are developed and what the impacts are nationally.” Thus, she said, there is an important role for contextual learning, where engineering is placed in more of an applied setting and students are given more of an opportunity to think across different disciplines. “That is where I see our world going,” she said, “and I think we are setting up our graduates better if we prepare them that way, too.”

Saldaña followed that up by saying that having more challenges seeded by the community could increase interest in engineering. This is already happening in the data sciences field, where companies offer rewards for solving particular problems or developing programs to carry out certain tasks and then individuals and teams work to come up with the best solutions. “So,” he asked, “can we do something like that in manufacturing on a broader scale and democratize addressing these problems by our student teams?”

Krishnamurthy passed along an audience question: “How is robotics and automation integrated into your program’s manufacturing focus?” Saldaña responded that there has been a groundswell of interest in robotics at Georgia Tech, and many of the students coming into the mechanical engineering program have been exposed to robotics in high school through such things as the FIRST Robotics competitions. However, he added, there is little done at the undergraduate level that is aimed at integrating robotics into manufacturing education.

Howe followed up by saying that there are no formal courses in robotics at Smith, but there have been a couple of capstone projects with a robotics focus. Furthermore, she added, “We have a number of students who go into graduate school and pursue robotics further after their undergrad.”

At Cal Poly, Fleischer said, capstone projects may involve bringing together industrial engineers and manufacturing engineers, and since most of those projects are sponsored, the students end up going into active facilities and seeing what is there. “So we do have that direct connection between automation in industry and what we’re doing in our capstone projects,” she said.

Okwudire closed the discussion session with a question about how the different universities handle intellectual property issues arising from projects funded by industry. Howe said that her capstone survey found that the approaches to intellectual property vary by the institution. It is most common that the industry sponsor will own the intellectual property, but it is often split between the institution and the sponsor and sometimes even the students, depending on how the institution is set up. At Smith, she added, all of the intellectual property is given to the sponsor. “It makes it much easier for us to have these projects,” she said. “The students are getting a great educational experience … and they get their name on a patent, but ultimately it is owned by the sponsor organization. I feel really strongly that that method works very well for us.”

Fleischer said that Cal Poly’s process mirrors Smith’s very closely. In the vast majority of the cases, the intellectual property remains with the company, and in those cases where it does not, the details are worked out on a case-by-case basis.

Finally, Saldaña said that Georgia Tech’s policies are similar, although companies will pay a little extra to get the rights to the intellectual property ahead of time. The students in the capstone courses are told ahead of time what to expect, so they can opt out of any such projects if they are not comfortable with that arrangement.

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

In the breakout sessions held during the afternoon of the workshop’s second day, a number of speakers described various efforts at engineering and technical education with application to advanced manufacturing. These comments and the discussions they triggered offered a variety of insights into ways to improve the future of the nation’s advanced manufacturing.

The Iron Range Engineering Program

Neil Schroeder from Minnesota State University Mankato described that school’s Iron Range Engineering program, which is offered to students who have taken pre-engineering courses at a community college, typically Itasca Community College in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Those students then enter the Iron Range Engineering program, taking core and advanced engineering courses and doing engineering design projects that are carried out in partnership with local industries, including U.S. Steel, a local iron mine, and an automation company. After that, the students return to wherever they have come from—including various locations around the United States plus foreign countries—and work full-time in a co-op there to help pay for their tuition. The students also work remotely on courses from the engineering program, typically carrying a 15- to 20-hour workload in addition to their co-op jobs. “So,” Schroeder said, “they leave our program with two-and-a-half years of engineering experience, a bachelor’s in integrated engineering with whatever focus they want to obtain, and two-and-a-half years’ experience in an ABET-accredited program.”

As an example of the sorts of education students receive that would be relevant to advanced manufacturing, Schroeder mentioned the school’s CIOPS (Creative Innovative Open-Ended Problem Solving) program, which has students doing systems engineering framework analysis on particular systems. For example, he said, one of the project teams is working with a local mine on conveyor systems that move processed rock and iron units along. There is spillage at various points, and the students on the team are analyzing the system as a whole in the plant to identify the specific places where there is spillage, the working of the conveyors at those points, and a solution to the spillage. Currently, the mine’s solution is to send a two-person team with shovels to each spillage point to get the material back on the conveyor, but that is both costly and has safety issues. So over the course of a semester, the students, working with the requirements and constraints set forth by the client, define and scope the problem, generate ideas, come up with potential designs, and evaluate those designs with decision matrices. And depending on the timeframe of the project and the expectations of the client, Schroeder said, the students will sometimes move all the way through to the fabrication of a deliverable.

The student body in the program is “pretty diverse,” Schroeder said, and they are recruited from places around the country. “We get into classrooms—and now we get into classrooms via Zoom as well—and build opportunities

for them to learn engineering, learn how our program is structured, so they know ahead of time how they’re going to be delivered content, how they’re going to be learning.” The program uses a very self-directed, project-based approach.

The program was started to address a “brain drain,” he said, with high school students from Northern Minnesota who were interested in engineering actually leaving the area because there were no educational opportunities there. “So this was created to have students from here be trained here and work here,” but as the model succeeded, the program expanded and began recruiting outside of the area and, eventually, outside of the country.

At this point, one major challenge that the program is facing is how to maintain the quality of the product and the passion of the staff as the program is scaled up. In the past year they have hired three new PhD-level faculty members, and they are also working to maintain the current ratio between students and support staff and to pull in more subject-matter experts from industry. The program is also putting a greater focus on preparing students for advanced manufacturing with such things as an increased implementation of automation, efforts to incorporate more data processing, and teaching their students about the new ways that engineers are looking at problems.

Desirable Traits in Engineering Students

In answer to a question about what universities could be doing to address some of the issues that had been discussed, Michael Packer, recently retired from Lockheed Martin and working with SME (previously the Society of Manufacturing Engineers), offered a perspective on what some of the professional societies are looking for in university education. “What we’re looking at from an industrial standpoint is a … healthy fraction of students that have the practicum or practitioner’s perspective and some hands-on experience,” he said, noting that a few university engineering curricula offer this formally, while students at other schools can gain such experience outside the classroom through competitions and other hands-on learning experiences.

Industry also needs students with cross-functional and cross-discipline experience, he said, and he offered the Georgia Tech innovation center as an example of how students from different fields and majors can work together. “There’s obviously a lot of mechanical engineering students, but there are industrial engineering students, there are business students, there are econ students, and it’s great that all of the students are getting those kind of …

transdisciplinary experiences, because that’s the way real world is when they come into industry.”

It is often the small and medium-sized businesses who are most in need of such students, Packer said, because they may not have the time and infrastructure to do the necessary training. Still, he added, even the large original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are getting more impatient about how quickly their recently graduated new hires are productive. “They’re not looking to train over months and months and months,” he said. “They need ready-to-run employees.” Thus, it will be important for industry and individual employers to play an increasing role in defining the requirements for engineering degrees.

At a later point, Packer spoke about the importance of practicums for engineering students, particularly those headed into manufacturing. Years ago, he said, it was common for engineering students to have had some sort of practical experience—say, working on a farm or in a repair shop or a factory, even if it was just sweeping the floors—before they entered college. “If they were in any kind of an industrial setting, they at least had exposure to tools.” That is much less common for engineering students today, so many of the practical laboratories for college engineering students that provide exposure to tools and equipment are aimed at replicating those sorts of experiences. In a similar way, the various types of competitions that engineering students can engage in—designing, building, and racing cars, for instance—“give students the full life-cycle of ideation all the way through product realization and operation.”

However, he continued, students also need exposure to “a social and an emotional practicum” before they go into industry. The goal would be to prepare them for some of the social aspects of, for instance, introducing new technology and innovations in an industrial setting. “They have to be comfortable interacting in a substantive way with the mechanics and technicians on the floor and with customers, beyond just engineers.” Engineering students will generally have a decent amount of experience working on teams of engineers from their capstone projects and their co-ops, but they generally do not get experience working with the other sorts of people that are found in a manufacturing setting. “A lot of engineers that are just simply not comfortable going down to the floor and talking to a mechanic or a toolmaker or a technician before they start to put something together,” Packer said, and with today’s digital tools it is easy to believe that because a computer-aided design exists, the product can be build. “Well, that’s not necessarily the case.”

Thus, one of the opportunities for improving engineering education, he said, would be finding a way to have students go and check their designs with people who have manufacturing experience and can tell them whether the designs will work. One approach is to put “speed bumps” in a CAD system that identify points where the engineer or engineering student using the system to design and model something must go validate the design with a subject-matter expert. “Force them to go to the floor and talk to people that were experts in making holes and filling holes before they committed to something” because CAD designs that look slick on the computer do not always work out that way on the factory floor.

In response, committee co-chair Maxine Savitz commented that the committee had heard from a faculty member at Auburn University that the engineering students there have various ways to interact with community college students, such as getting certified on a machine that is not available at Auburn but is available at a local community college. “It gives them an opportunity to interact with the people who are coming out of the community colleges, who are essentially the technicians you’re talking about on the floor,” she said. Since there are community colleges located near almost every university, this could be a good way to get engineering students comfortable with interacting with technicians.

Committee member Chi Okwudire offered another example of such a speed bump. At the University of Michigan, engineering students who are carrying out design-and-build projects split up the process: a team of students who come up with a design for an object must pass along that design to a second team, which makes the object. “Now they have to communicate it clearly enough that the other team makes it well,” he said. “Otherwise it’s their fault. It frustrated them, but it definitely forced them to make sure they communicated well.” This is a different skill than simply designing something, and it helps students develop some of the abilities they will need to work with people on the factory floor who will be manufacturing the objects they design.

Getting Faculty Interested in Practical Aspects of Manufacturing

On a different topic, Savitz passed along a question to the members of the breakout session: How does one get research-oriented faculty members interested in learning about and teaching about the more practical, hands-on

aspects of manufacturing? Schroeder answered that one thing his engineering staff does is try to bring faculty members to events hosted by various societies, such as the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration and the SME annual meeting. “We bring faculty along for that so they can see the advancements that are happening in the industry, they can attend the technical sessions, and see where the concepts and everything are being applied and how they can put a spin on how they’re delivering the content to our students to teach the applied side of it all.”

Okwudire commented that some faculty are just philosophically opposed to spending time on the practical side. “I don’t know how to change that mindset, because if faculty don’t want to do it you can’t force them to do it because of the way things are structured,” he said. “So there has to be a culture change that will facilitate that.”

In response, an audience member noted that in many schools the most important criterion for evaluating faculty members is research money and direct cost—“and it’s got to be because of the way we fund education in this country.” So the faculty, in order to get tenure, go to where the research funding is. “We have not been funding research in basic kinds of machining things or manufacturing things as they do in Germany,” the participant said. “So I think the issue is a system-wide kind of problem and not so much ‘How do I get somebody interested in this?’ Give them money.”

Hands-On Learning

Workshop participants spoke about the importance of hands-on learning on multiple occasions throughout the 2 days of the workshop. For example, in one breakout session Al Romig, the executive officer of the NAE, made the point that hands-on learning is an important way to get students, particularly in middle school and high school, interested in engineering and manufacturing. “When a lot of us were growing up we had shop class in middle school or junior high school and high school, and I’m glad to see that coming back now in terms of makerspaces, even at the high school level,” he said. “At high school, middle school, even the latter years of elementary school, getting kids learning how to do 3D printing and that other kind of stuff” can really hook them on building things. “Get their hands dirty, to use the old phrase, boys and girls—the earlier you can do that, the better you’ll set the hook.”

Kathryn Jablokow commented that part of the argument for hands-on learning at an early age is developmental. “When you’ve got the kids younger,

they’re not going to understand a whole bunch of advanced theory,” she said, “but what they understand is what’s in front of them, and what they’re touching and seeing and feeling.”

Avik Basu from the University of Michigan added that some students may not get particularly good grades but take very well to working in a machine shop. “They are so enthusiastic. They may not do very well in a regular exam, but they are excellent in the manufacturing shop environment. And those are the types of students that typically excel in manufacturing.”

However, Basu added, it can be difficult to scale up this sort of manufacturing experience to offer it to all engineering students. The University of Michigan has about 1,200 engineering students, but only the mechanical and industrial engineering students—about 20 percent of all engineering students—get manufacturing training. Aerospace engineering students, for example, do not have a regular manufacturing course. But Basu has been teaching a freshman engineering course, Manufacturing in Society, together with members of the social science faculty, and these students do get the opportunity to experience such things as computer-aided design and 3D printing. It is important to expose them early to such experiences, he said, because these are students “who can still change their perspective about manufacturing.”

On a related topic, Chi Okwudire asked how to balance the value of having students work with industrial-grade machines and the value of keeping the students safe. Certain industrial machines, such as lasers or milling tools, can result in serious injuries to the operators if they do something wrong. It is for this reason that universities tend to rely on safer machines, such as a desktop machine tool or desktop 3D printer, that are not high-powered industrial grade machines. Do students learn enough on these safer machines? “My philosophy is that I would rather have them touch it, even if it is not an industrial grade,” Okwudire said, rather than just showing them some industrial-grade equipment and explaining how it works but not letting the students actually operate them. “I find that students would rather play with what people might consider toys but really engage with it and learn something.” But is that enough?

One participant suggested that it is because of transfer learning—the students can learn how to do something on a safer machine and then apply their learning to working with industrial machines later. The key is that the students learn concepts and skills that are applicable across a wide range of machines.

The Value of Experience with Multidisciplinary Teams

In the breakout sessions, a number of people spoke about the value of students gaining experience with multidisciplinary teams. For instance, Chris Saldaña of Georgia Tech spoke about a robotics course that he teaches in which business majors participate as part of a technology minor. He has found, he said, that teams with mechanical engineers and a couple of business majors actually perform better than teams with all engineers. “They look at the problem differently, they don’t assume anything,” he said. “There’s that person in the room that is asking questions, and I think that not only are they looking at different approaches and different ideas, but they’re learning the social cues of working on teams. The business major comes in with this natural kind of apprehension that they aren’t familiar with how to build a robot, or how to do CAD, but what we found is those teams greatly benefit from just the interaction of working with different personalities and being able to listen to those perspectives.”

Saldaña added that while many of the capstone projects in the mechanical engineering department are focused just on mechanical engineering, there are also interdisciplinary projects in which, say, a materials scientist or a public policy person works on the team, “and I think those students are benefiting from that experience too.”

Speaking from an industry perspective, Al Romig commented that his experience in the Lockheed family is that “students who come out of school are good at teamwork amongst their small little group, but many of them don’t have a good sense of interdisciplinarity.” Most universities are not particularly good at bringing different departments together, so students do not get experience working with others from outside their discipline. “I think there has to be some attention paid to how we can get a better sense of working on multidisciplinary engineering teams,” he said, “and by the way you might want to throw a marketing guy in there as well, or a lawyer sometimes. But I think that’s an important thing that I saw as a shortcoming with the people that I hired over the years.”

In response to a follow-up question, Romig said that interdisciplinary skills are particularly important for companies that make smaller numbers of more complex objects. Specifically, he drew a distinction between “manufacturing” and “production.” In companies that make highly complex aerospace and defense products, what they are doing is really production, not manufacturing. “If you make 50 a year, that’s really a lot,” he said. “If you call it manufacturing, somebody who works at General Motors or Toyota,

they’ll laugh at you.” And in situations where highly specialized objects are being produced in small lot runs, he said, it is particularly important that the team of engineers in charge be able to work in an interdisciplinarity team environment.

Doug Nation agreed with Romig’s point and repeated something he had learned from Michael Hammer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “Hammer had many examples of process reengineering, troubleshooting, process change, where teams of diverse individuals came in with very different points of view and were very effective at arriving at remarkably better processes,” he said. So there is great value in engineers being able to work on multidisciplinary teams.

Magdalini Lagoudas of Texas A&M commented that it can be exceptionally challenging for students from different majors and different skillsets to work together. It was her experience in teaching a class on innovations for defense, she said, that while the interdisciplinary projects could be “awesome,” it might take a long time before, for example, a computer science major and a chemical engineering major learned to work together as a team. This was an issue for that particular class.

Speaking specifically of capstone projects, Lagoudas said that there are also challenges to bringing different disciplines into them. At Texas A&M, there are some interdisciplinary capstone projects, but the question is how to scale this so that all students have that opportunity. “Where I see this worked well,” she said, “is when the faculty who is involved is somebody who came from industry, a professor of practice, for example, who has experience in handling a diverse set of skills and mentoring the team to do well.” But not all faculty have that experience. There are other challenges as well, such as the logistical issue of coordinating capstone projects among different programs. Ultimately, she predicted, the university is going to move in the direction of having more interdisciplinary projects, but industry could speed the process up. “If industry comes to our door and says I have a project but I need both of these sets of skills, then I would think we would be seeing more and more of that.”

In industry, Romig said, interdisciplinary teams generally have a majority of people who have previously worked in a multidisciplinary environment with perhaps only a couple of “newbies” who have not, and the newer hires learn to work on such a team from the more experienced ones. It is likely, he continued, that new hires who had experience with multidisciplinary teams in college would be more comfortable talking with people in other disciplines from the beginning and would not take as much time to adapt. On the other

hand, when students have only worked with others in their discipline, that will be a liability for them.

Experience Outside the Classroom

A significant amount of discussion during the breakout sessions was devoted to the sorts of experiences that students gain outside the classroom—from competitions, internships, co-ops, and the like. “I think we under-value and under-resource extracurricular and co-curriculars,” one participant said. “We put so much emphasis on the capstone experience as that one-stop shop, get everything you need for experiential learning, … but there is this huge disconnect in the opportunity window in the middle where students have to take the initiative to go after internships, co-ops, competition teams, research, things like that.” Furthermore, students often have no way to demonstrate to employers the types of skills that they have gained from those experiences. A number of approaches have been tried to address that problem—things like micro-credentialing and digital badges—and more thought should be put into this, he said.

A participant from Pennsylvania State University suggested that one way students can document the skills they develop outside the classroom is through a portfolio. Penn State has undergraduates build a portfolio as they go through their years in engineering. A portfolio might include such things, for instance, as the design of a robot arm, the development and implementation of a particular algorithm, or the solving of inverse kinematics. “We require our students to also finish a thesis at the end of their 4-year educational experience,” the participant said. “The thesis, in combination with the portfolio, can really give you a good overview of the skills of that particular student, especially if they start developing the portfolio early on.”

A related discussion took place about the value of students taking part in competitions, including what students learn from them and how potential employers should weigh such participation. Participants said that the competitions are valuable not only for students learning hands-on skills but also for them developing the ability to work in teams. However, because they are working in teams, it is not always easy for a potential employee to gauge what skills a student gained from such experiences, so the comment was made that universities should examine ways to capture what students have learned from these competitions, perhaps by having a professor of practice or

someone similar monitor what the teams are doing and what contributions the individual students are making.

Lagoudas said that Texas A&M has a program that requires students to get some sort of experience outside of the classroom. The requirement, called Engineering X, is that a student complete something in addition to what is required in the student’s major, and the specifics vary by department. It could be a 48-hour challenge, for instance, or it could be an internship, “but each student is required to complete one of those and do a reflection on that,” she said. And not all of the options are technical. Some departments, for instance, allow a student to qualify by having been an officer in a student organization, so long as the student can demonstrate having acquired skills that the department thinks are important.

THE INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE

The session on industry perspective was moderated by Don Kinard, a senior fellow in production operations at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas, and Keith Hargrove, who currently serves as a provost at Tuskegee University but has a background in manufacturing and engineering, having worked at both General Electric and Boeing. Kinard began by asking the panelists to introduce themselves and offer a bit about their backgrounds.

Tracee Gilbert is the founder and chief executive officer of System Innovation. They deliver engineering and advanced technology solutions to government agencies, educational institutions, and commercial enterprises. They are focused on helping organizations leverage their data, processes, people, and advanced technologies to deliver a new era of systems, products, and services. One focus area of System Innovation is infusing digital engineering with advanced manufacturing (i.e., additive manufacturing).

Mike Packer retired from Lockheed Martin in 2021 after about 45 years in industry.

Mike Sarpu has had a variety of jobs at Lockheed Martin, including running operations for aeronautics, and is now responsible for operations transformation. In that capacity, he is working to use digital processes to manufacture things in ways that could not be done before. Over the past several decades, he said, the company used digital methods essentially to replicate processes that had been used in the past, but it is now looking to use digital approaches to do things in a totally different way. “How do we go

directly from a design to a part without all those interim steps and all of that? How do we speed it up? How do we leverage advanced manufacturing technology … to put tools and augmentation into the hands of our workforce?”

Bill Bigot, the vice president of sales and marketing at Ascent Aerospace, has been in the business of supplying automation to industry for about 38 years. “At Ascent Aerospace we support the commercial defense and space business, including unclassified as well as classified defense programs,” he said. “We, as a company, provide one of the largest breadth of products in terms of tooling, in terms of automation, and integration. We are not only just providing the big, large, static tooling that everyone needs in order to manufacture aircraft components as well as full aircraft, but also the automation, the processes, and the innovation that goes along with being able to support the operations of those lines.”

THE CURRENT STATE OF ADVANCED MANUFACTURING IN THE UNITED STATES

To open the discussions, Kinard asked each of the panelists how they see the current health of the advanced manufacturing industry, especially the defense manufacturing industry, in the United States.

Bigot began his answer by saying that the industry needs some help, which, he said, is why Ascent Aerospace is doing well. “Our customers worldwide are running into situations where they cannot get qualified people,” he said, and when an advanced manufacturing company does find qualified people and train them, it must worry that those employees will move to a competitor. There is so much demand for qualified employees that “there is always the opportunity for people to move around.” What was common decades ago in the industry—that people would spend 40 or 50 years working for the same company—is not very common anymore.

Thus, one of the major challenges facing companies in advanced manufacturing, he said, is finding the right combination of talent and keeping those people on board. The work requires collaborations among people with a range of educational backgrounds and capabilities—for example, someone with a 2-year technical degree, another person with a 4-year engineering degree, and maybe a postdoctoral student or someone with a graduate-level degree. All of these people and talents “need to come together in order to develop the processes, to run the systems, to execute the advanced manufacturing capabilities, and to keep the systems up and running,” he said.

That challenge has been exacerbated by the pandemic, he added, which has forced companies to reengineer their work patterns. “It used to be nothing for several people to be crawling right next to each other all over parts,” Bigot said, but companies—and their employees—no longer want to have so many people working together so closely to produce a product. With advanced manufacturing it is possible to carry out the same tasks with fewer, more highly skilled people using automation or semi-automated techniques. However, this requires companies to develop new capabilities, such as digital techniques that make it possible to monitor processes in detail, understand how well they are working, and even predict when machines will need support or maintenance. These new digital approaches must be integrated into existing processes, he said, requiring that companies—in particular, support companies like Ascent Aerospace—develop new ways of doing things that provide similar or better results when compared with methods that may have been honed over 20 or 30 years.

In response to a question from Kinard about whether Ascent Aerospace has difficulty finding people with skills in such fields as robotics and automation, Bigot said that this is indeed one of the companies concerns, and he offered control engineers as an example. The company must “get them, train them, bring them up to speed, … and then retain them for a long period of time so that lessons learned and things that they do day in and day out get to be quite useful and beneficial down the road.” But people with the requisite skills are difficult to find, so Ascent Aerospace works with local universities—the company has offices in California, Michigan, and Seattle—to find talented people while they are still in school, offer them internships and other opportunities, and then hopefully hire them after they graduate.

Kinard then turned to Sarpu and asked him the same question about the health of advanced manufacturing, particularly in the aerospace and defense area. It is a complex question, he responded, “because we have to look at advanced manufacturing technologies in probably three, maybe four different ways.”

The first perspective is that of what is being done with the technology, he said. “If it is robotics, what are the robotics doing? You first have to have the base process down.”

The next issue is what is being done with the advanced manufacturing technology to make the process better. He offered additive manufacturing as an example. “You have metallurgy going on,” he said, and there is a machine and controls that are controlling the metallurgy, with two different kinds of engineers needed for those things.

Taking another step back, one must then consider how the process is going to be implemented in a factory that will be creating the product. This is where applications engineers become involved.

“And then the one that we never really think enough about,” he said, “is the actual worker that is going to use the manufacturing technology.” He works with a couple of universities with advanced manufacturing technology centers where they focus on the tools and the design but seldom pay much attention to the worker who must operate the machines. Sarpu drew a parallel with the first industrial revolution when Henry Ford and others who created the first assembly lines have trouble finding workers who were willing to do the work. They tended to bring in artisans who were used to working with their hands—but not in the way that was required. “To get 10 people, they hired 100, and 90 of them could not take the monotony of the job,” he said.

“I think we are going through a similar kind of thing now” he continued, “where we are looking for the skills that we needed in the past when in fact the future is going to require people that can actually … become one with the machine. But now, we are looking at human augmentation versus human replacement. I think we all recognize that we still need some of that artisan-ship in the folks on the floor. But they need to be able to incorporate in these other skills that allow them to utilize the technologies.”

Healthy advanced manufacturing requires all these different types of people, Sarpu said: people who can design the machines, people who can install them in factories and get them to work, and people who can operate the machines.

Yet another issue, he said, is that it is now possible, for the first time, to create things that the engineer cannot conceive and that must be designed by a machine. But that raises the question of who is going to create these automated design systems. It requires a totally different kind of engineer.

This sort of machine-assisted or machine-controlled design will be a key to the value of advanced manufacturing, Sarpu said. If it is used just to replace the technologies used today, its value will be lost because, for example, injection molding and five-axis high-speed machining can produce a product more quickly than additive techniques. “But if I come up with a structure that I cannot build any other way, now all of a sudden advanced manufacturing becomes that cornerstone of a manufacturing process.”

Getting back to Kinard’s original question, Sarpu said that the overall state of advanced manufacturing is healthy, but it will be important to understand the different things that advanced manufacturing offers and act accordingly. “Industry 4.0 is not just industry 3.0 with a little bit of internet thrown

in there,” he said. It is a totally different way of approaching manufacturing, and taking full advantage of that will require understanding those differences and making the transition effectively.

Noting that Sarpu’s Zoom background was a Lockheed Martin X-59, an experiment supersonic aircraft designed to have a quiet sonic boom, Kinard asked, “Do you believe that as a nation we have the capability to design and manufacture things like that X-59?” Is the country developing the sorts of engineers and workers that it will take? What are the challenges?

The challenges begin with the basic economics of manufacturing, Sarpu said. In the past, manufacturing had always been a high-level employer of people, and when a factory came into a town, people were excited because it meant that there would be a number of new jobs available. But the more automation that is put into factories, the fewer jobs there are, and today the announcement of a new manufacturing facility does not generate the same excitement. Thus, one of the challenges today is how to make manufacturing more attractive. Sarpu told about the time around 15 years ago when he had run a facility in a small community and had a difficult time getting the people in this community to apply for jobs to “build electronics and cables and those kinds of things” because they saw no future in it. “I had to sit down with the parents and walk them through the kinds of opportunities that were there,” he said, “and then, all of a sudden, they would say yes, I get it.”

In short, Sarpu said, one challenge facing advanced engineering will be to make it attractive to the communities where the facilities are located. “What I fear is it is going to be so easy to make manufacturing jobs portable with advanced manufacturing technology that communities are going to be even more leery of making investments in them,” he said. Fifty years ago, building a factory was a long-term commitment because it could not be moved easily, but many of today’s advanced manufacturing technologies—such as additive manufacturing processes—are much easier to move. Furthermore, the increasing use of automation and human augmentation decreases the number of jobs and, combined with the increased ease of moving facilities, makes communities more leery of hosting such facilities.

To address this, Sarpu said, the manufacturing community needs to decide how it will present advanced engineering to the country. “It is not the dirty old factories of the past,” he said. “It is a new kind of factory,” but exactly what kind of factory? It will be important to have an open and honest discussion within the manufacturing community as well as with the rest of the country about what advanced manufacturing even means.

Kinard then turned to Packer with the same question about the health of advanced manufacturing, particularly defense-related manufacturing, in the United States. Packer offered his answer in the context of his own career. Through middle school and high school he worked in pattern shops, iron foundries, and tool and dye shops and went on to spend another 40 years in the industry and also in professional groups such as the Manufacturing Leadership Council of the National Association of Manufacturers as well as the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council, which focuses on the skill standards and certifications of frontline workers.

Over that time, he said, he developed a philosophy concerning advanced manufacturing education. “I view manufacturing engineers as the architects and … construction managers of advanced manufacturing capabilities whether they are manufacturing engineers [or] application engineers,” he said. “As the architects and construction managers, there are three primary areas that manufacturing engineers focus on.” One is configuring the systems of the future, deploying the latest technologies into those systems. The second area is the components of the various processes; engineers mature and integrate those processes throughout the value stream. And the third area is workforce and skills development. Skills must be updated continually, Packer said, “and the manufacturing engineers have a frontline position in helping update those and crossing, as Mike Sarpu said, between design engineering and starting to use manufacturing as the innovator for design engineering. Things that could not be conceived in the past can now through artificial intelligence as well as capabilities that did not previously exist.”

Workforce development has a number of aspects, Packer said, including “essentially retooling incumbent workers to be able to work in this new environment, orienting and training the incoming workforce, but also outreach into younger ages to, one, inspire and, two, build an enduring pipeline of future talent that is agile and paying attention and driving the continual advancement of the technologies that are deployed.” Another part of workforce development is building a pipeline for engineers, he added. “Manufacturing engineers need to continually upgrade their own expertise and their own body of knowledge to keep pace with all of the digital transformation.”

And from the perspective of the development of the advanced manufacturing workforce, Packer said, “I think in general terms we are below healthy…. We have gaps in terms of skills both on the floor and in those architects and construction managers of that ecosystem.” Undergraduate education is providing some of what is needed, he said, but some of what

these students are learning is already obsolete or becoming obsolete by the time they graduate. One approach to dealing with this is the use of industry internships, which can help maintain the freshness and relevance of the skills and knowledge of developing engineers who are headed into advanced manufacturing.

As a follow-up, Kinard asked Packer how other countries differ from the United States in their attitudes and approach to advanced manufacturing. Packer answered that there are several regions around the world—the Pacific Rim, for example, and Germany and Poland and other European countries—that are much more aggressive at pushing advanced manufacturing technologies and also developing their engineers and workforce. “Most of the engineers in Poland are educated in the German engineering system,” he said, offering a specific example. “They are very familiar with working side by side and actually spending time on the floor frontline doing the work. It helps them develop an ease of working with the people that are on the floor working with the technologies that they deploy. I think that does help set them apart.”

The United States is behind these regions in bridging the gap between engineers and those on the factory floor, he said.

Kinard asked Gilbert if she found many differences between the needs of small businesses and large businesses. “I think the fundamental pain points are very similar,” she said, but one difference is that small businesses may find it more important to work with universities. Because small businesses tend to have more limited resources, it can make a bigger difference to them if they are able to leverage the resources of universities.

ARE UNIVERSITIES PREPARING ENGINEERS FOR ADVANCED MANUFACTURING?

Next, Kinard asked the panelists to address the question of whether universities are appropriately preparing their engineering students for working in industry. Are the programs too academic? Should there be a greater focus on manufacturing? And, in general, what should be done differently in engineering education?

Gilbert answered first and began by saying that in her experience with mechanical engineering departments and manufacturing engineering, the education has been very traditional and that moving to the future it will be important to help students develop multidisciplinary skills and the ability

to work in teams with people from different areas. “The one area that I do appreciate about engineering education today,” she said, “is that they are provided with the critical thinking and logical reasoning skills to be able to learn new skills very quickly.” But much work remains to be done in terms of students developing the skills needed to work in an “end-to-end digital environment” (see Box B-1).

Furthermore, she added, most of the focus in engineering education is on developing technical skills, with the capstone course being one of the few opportunities for students to develop the nontechnical skills, such as “working together in teams, building consensus, helping to drive decisions,” that are very important in working in industry.

Kinard followed up by observing that his experience with engineering classes is that they tend to be very academic but not very practical. Thus,

he learned a lot of theory, but it was often not applied. “Is that part of the issue?” he asked. Gilbert answered that it absolutely is. The upside of this approach is that students with a theoretical background generally have the ability to transition effectively to industry because they have the skills to learn applied processes. “But,” she added, “I think that we do have to reimagine our engineering education curriculum to be more in line with how we apply engineering and practice.”

Next, Kinard asked Sarpu the same question, adding that he had always thought of innovation as laying at the intersection of engineering and manufacturing. That is, one must not only be able to imagine an innovation, but one must also be able to build it. Otherwise, it is not innovation. “Are we preparing our students to handle that interface there?” he asked.

“I think that the universities are doing an okay job,” Sarpu said, but there should be greater emphasis on connecting what engineering students are learning in class with what goes on in a manufacturing facility, particularly as universities are moving away from teaching such things as welding, grinding, and machining. “I grew up working in a gas station and learned how to weld and run a lead and all of that stuff,” he said. “That is what brought me into engineering.” Today, though, people are mainly coming into engineering for other reasons, which can be a problem when a manufacturing company brings in a researcher to do a practical, hands-on type of job.

The bigger issue, however, may be how companies are choosing whom to hire, Sarpu said. A company may, for example, choose to hire an engineer who graduated from a prestigious school with a 4.0 grade point average (GPA) when in reality that would not be the best person to implement technology in a manufacturing plant. A student with a 3.2 GPA who had experience designing and building a vehicle with a Formula SAE team might be a much better choice in terms of being able to apply engineering skills. A related part of the issue is that companies do not always think about which specific type of engineering they should be hiring—an applications engineer, a materials engineer, a process development engineer, or whatever. “I think a lot of time our staffing process lets us down because we just say ‘engineer.’”

So, part of the solution will be to consciously look for the right sort of hires, he said, but it will also be important to recruit hands-on types into engineering. Companies should go into high schools and look for “those really bright folks” who are designing and building cars or doing robotics and encourage them to go into an engineering career and into manufacturing. This is necessary, he said, because at least some of those bright, hands-on students do not see themselves as engineers.

In conjunction with this, industry should consider whether there are ways of finding people who can work in manufacturing other than looking only at graduates of 4-year engineering programs. What sorts of qualifications should be required, if not such a degree? “I think the people are out there,” he said, but it may be necessary to look for them in a different way. And one focus should be to look for potential hires who have a desire to continuously learn because technology is evolving rapidly, and the skills that people learn in college are likely to become obsolete within a decade or two. “The 50-year career of doing the same thing is never going to happen again,” he said, “because technology is changing too fast…. Maybe we have to think differently about the way we hire.”

In response to a question about whether the industry’s difficulty in hiring qualified people is due to not paying enough, Sarpu said that he believes that engineers in some areas are well paid, while other areas may be underappreciated. As an example, he said that he has seen engineers move from one specialty to another, such as from manufacturing engineering to research engineering, because of the difference in pay. Thus, it may be necessary to “re-level things.” At the same time, he added, there are jobs with engineers in them that technicians could do. One solution might be setting up a 2-year certificate program for people to handle certain jobs that would pay better than technicians’ jobs but not as much as engineering jobs.

Moving to Bigot, Kinard asked the same question: “The engineers that you hire and have hired—do they have the right skills? Are we able to turn out engineers that have the skills you need to do the kind of work you do?”

The universities are doing a reasonably good job, Bigot answered, but “what we really need is someone that has gotten in and gotten their hands dirty.” A student who has experience with welding or the other sorts of activities that go into building something will have a better understanding of the manufacturing process, which is important for engineers who design items that must be manufactured or who design new processes. Bigot said his company would like to be able to get such engineers, and he emphasized the importance of programs that allow students to spend 6 months or so working for industry, providing value to the companies they work for and also preparing the students for jobs after graduation.

Ascent Aerospace, which is in Macomb, Michigan, works with engineering programs at both the University of Michigan and Michigan State University with the goal of identifying and attracting some of their best students. It is the universities’ responsibility to prepare their students well and not just by teaching them mathematics and theory but also by teaching them how to apply what they have learned. And it is industry’s responsibility, Bigot said, “to bring them in and to give them a taste of the various disciplines of what they could perhaps do so that when they come out, they really have a better understanding of where they want to go.”

Finally, Kinard asked Packer the same question. In particular, he pointed out that European countries such as Germany tend to have both a technical track and a university track for students, with the technical track providing more hands-on training. Do U.S. engineering students need more of this sort of hands-on experience?

Undergraduate engineering education is a mixed bag, Packer said, with some things done well and some things not done at all. In decades past, he

continued, many of the students who went into engineering had grown up with experience working in various places—gas stations, pattern shops, farms—that helped them develop logical reasoning and critical problem solving related to working with equipment. All of that hands-on work, combined with industrial arts education in the high schools of the time, helped create students with a broader engineering perspective, which made them more comfortable with finding and applying practical solutions to various problems.

A number of universities continue to have such an approach to engineering education, Packer said, and he mentioned Kettering University—previously the General Motors Institute—in Flint, Michigan, as a school where students will spend 6 months on the floor of a factory and 6 months in classrooms. Similarly, some more advanced programs—such as the engineering programs at the Georgia Tech—provide facilities where students can work with industrial equipment and gain hands-on experience with various machines and technologies.

Such innovation centers offer many opportunities to augment the theoretical work done in classrooms, Packer said, with activities such as design-and-build competitions and capstone courses. They also offer the opportunity for students from different areas—not just different engineering areas, but also areas such as economics and business—to interact and work on teams to complete a project. And that is important, he said, because an increasingly important skill in industry is the ability to work in cross-functional teams to identify problems and come up with solutions.

Kinard commented that in some universities students are not allowed to handle equipment because of safety concerns; instead, the students give their designs to technicians, who build them. This prevents students from gaining experience in actually building things, which in turn keeps them from developing a sense of what is involved in the manufacturing of a particular design. Packer agreed that this can be a problem but pointed to the Georgia Tech innovation center as proof that it is feasible to let students handle machinery. In this case, the innovation center is managed and run by students, including the safety training and the certification of students and others to operate the equipment.

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

In the breakout sessions on the workshop’s second day, one set of topics was centered on the general question of how industry can better engage with universities at an undergraduate level in order to assist and improve advanced manufacturing.

In one session, moderator Don Kinard with Lockheed Martin described what his company does to work with universities in order to set the stage. The company has 60,000 engineers and scientists across its various divisions and engages with universities in a variety of ways. At the highest level it has open research contracts with eight universities, and it participates in various ways in most of the universities that are close to Lockheed Martin sites. For instance, he is chairman of the Industrial Advisory Board for The University of Texas at Arlington in mechanical and aerospace engineering, while other company executives sit on engineering boards for Texas A&M, Texas Tech, the University of Texas, and the University of Houston. Kinard also gives presentations to universities that are interested in advanced manufacturing—that’s one way.

Another major connection with universities is that Lockheed Martin hires about 3,000 engineering students as interns every year. The company also hires many permanent employees every year, Kinard said, and “if you intern with us you’re essentially guaranteed to get at least one job offer from us.” After hiring, most of the training is done in-house. Because Lockheed Martin is so large, it is able to run internal training programs that are more comprehensive than anything that colleges could provide in part because the company has many large, expensive pieces of equipment that universities could not afford to provide.

Concerning the question of how companies such as Lockheed Martin could do a better job working with engineering education programs, he noted, the obvious answer is that they could just provide more to universities. But, he said, Lockheed Martin already provides a lot of funding to universities, “so that’s not the right answer.”

One possible answer, he continued, is suggested by his own experience when he was a graduate student at Texas A&M. “Texas A&M had a program funded by the federal government to train engineers, so they were cost-sharing engineers to go to graduate school at Texas A&M to learn composites,” he said. “While I was in the graduate school down there, this program started, and [I had] the opportunity to take a lot of composites processing, composites mechanics, and viscoelasticity classes, and that helped me eventually to

get a job with Lockheed.” That was one of the best examples of cooperation among government, industry, and academia that he has seen, Kinard said, “but those programs for the most part have gone away.” On the other hand, those programs are fundamental in Europe, with governments providing funding for applied research and having strong connections with academia and industry. “And those programs have, I would say, certainly contributed to the fact that a lot of our advanced technology has moved overseas.”

Al Romig, the executive officer of the NAE, offered two possible answers to Kinard’s question of what industry could do to improve engineering education for advanced manufacturing, both of them based on his experience at Sandia National Laboratories and at the Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s advanced development programs. First, he said, both Sandia and the Skunk Works had university faculty members on sabbatical come work with teams there. “That’s a good way to build bridges into the faculty,” he said. “I’ve noticed that ended up turning on some real pipelines of new talent that I thought was very useful.” In a later discussion, Don Kinard of Lockheed Martin said he thought this was an interesting idea. What he has found is that a large percentage of the professors in engineering programs have never worked in industry, and such a sabbatical could provide them with some useful exposure to that segment.

The second approach Romig mentioned was providing internships for high school students. “They weren’t paid,” he said, “but they get three credits for doing it, they come in a couple afternoons a week, and you try to really sink the hook about really getting these kids interested in engineering. And by the way, you stick them off in a prototype laboratory somewhere—you didn’t have them just run around at the Xerox machine.”

One way to attract students into engineering, Romig said, is to get the word out about how compelling much of the work is that engineers do. Helping to build things to defend the nation or improve human health is a compelling mission, he said, and that can be a selling point. “I think incumbent upon us, upon engineers, is to get the message out there about how engineering is about solving problems that help people in society, etc. It could be about improving the nation, it could be about improving human health, it could be about improving sustainability, but the compellingness of missions will attract people to the field and will attract them to companies.”

Sinan Bank of California State University, Chico, praised the value of engineering students having internships with industry but said that it would be valuable if they were longer than the typical 3 months of a summer break. Kinard noted that Lockheed Martin used to offer work–study programs,

where engineering students would spend a summer and a semester with the company, but the problem with that was making sure that the students could get their classes in because classes were not offered every semester. “I think you hit the pain point,” Bank replied. “The structure of universities in the United States is creating the difficulty.” That is why the company he was working with ended up hiring mostly interns from Europe, because universities there had classes dedicated to work–study programs.

EFFORTS BY GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT INSTITUTES

The session on government and nonprofit institute efforts to improve manufacturing and manufacturing education was moderated by committee members Maxine Savitz and Thomas Kurfess. Savitz moderated the panelists’ presentations, while Kurfess led the following discussion.

In introducing the session, Savitz said that the past 10 years have seen exciting advances in advanced manufacturing technologies that have come about through innovations in science and technology as well as improved manufactured products and manufacturing processes. These developments are particularly important for the defense industrial base, she said, which relies on the products of advanced manufacturing to provide the cutting-edge weapons and systems required by the U.S. military. “The education and training of practitioners of these new technologies are essential to applying advanced technology to design, to prototypes, and then, most importantly, to the manufacturing processes,” Savitz said. “Rapid technology transfer from research to manufacturing is a key requirement.”

Manufacturing USA, originally known as the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, was launched about 10 years ago, Savitz noted. It is a joint federal effort among DoD, the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Commerce, working through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to create a network of regional institutes in the United States. The network’s focus is on developing manufacturing technologies through public–private partnerships among U.S. industry, universities, and the federal agencies. Since 2012, 16 individual Manufacturing USA institutes have been established by the federal government, of which nine are managed by DoD, six by DOE, and one by the Department of Commerce. The four presenters on the panel represented activities from four different federal agencies or institutes, she noted.

With that, Savitz introduced the presenters. The first was Jennifer Pilat, the vice president of strategy and engagement at MxD, one of the first DoD manufacturing innovation institutes. In her job, Pilat leads the institute’s efforts to make U.S. manufacturing more innovative, globally competitive, and cybersecure and to develop the necessary workforce.

The second speaker was John A. Hopkins, the chief executive officer of the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI), one of the first DOE manufacturing innovation institutes. It focuses on advanced composites, technology for vehicles, wind turbine blades, and compressed gas storage systems.

Third was Pravina Raghavan, the director of the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) at NIST. MEP works with public- and private-sector partners to strengthen communities in U.S. manufacturing, particularly small and medium-sized manufacturers.

The fourth speaker was José Zayas-Castro, the director of the Division of Engineering Education and Centers at NSF as well as a professor of industrial and management systems engineering at the University of South Florida College of Engineering.

MxD

Pilat began her presentation by explaining that MxD, which stands for manufacturing times digital, is one of the oldest institutes in the Manufacturing USA network. It focuses on research and development projects, workshops, and test beds in a number of areas, including cybersecurity, resilient supply chains, and predictive analytics and maintenance. It houses the National Center for Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, helping manufacturers deal with the cyber threats that arise from digital connections with the outside world. Finally, it has a number of workforce programs aimed at helping manufacturers train and retain skilled workers.

Launched in 2014 with $70 million in funding from DoD and currently on a $60 million renewal from DoD, MxD provides a nonprofit pre-competitive environment that industry, academic, and government members can take advantage of. MxD is based in Chicago, where it has a major location that includes a 22,000-square-foot manufacturing testing, validation, and demonstration facility. It has 320 member organizations, anchored by DoD and 20 global manufacturing and technology leaders. Since its inception, it

has invested more than $100 million into 120 projects that apply technologies to real-world manufacturing challenges and opportunities.

In its cyber efforts, MxD works with DoD to ensure that the manufacturers in the defense industrial base (DIB) are cybersecure. “We want to make sure that as many organizations as possible can be qualified to remain in the DIB,” Pilat said, “and that we can grow the defense industrial base with innovative partners that are secure and thinking about how to integrate cybersecurity and their operations from the outset.” MxD does this, she said, through awareness building, training, providing tools and services, examining the skills that workers need to have, and supporting the standards process for the different cybersecurity requirements.

In MxD’s workforce efforts, she said, the institute is focused on the workforce of the future. What are the skills that engineers who are in school now will need in their jobs after graduation? What roles will they play, and how can they prepare themselves for those positions? “We put out a lot of curricula and training opportunities to make sure that we are mapping students and existing workers to skillsets that they need to be successful.”

In the context of the workshop, Pilat said, the most important thing that MxD does is to provide opportunities for students to be involved in real-life applications of technology in manufacturing. “They do not have to wait to get through their studies before they can see how something that they are studying is actually going to make a difference on a factory floor or help enable the creation of a new product, a new material, or a new process.”

MxD has been involved in a large number of projects since its inception, she said, and the sweet spot for the institute is to deal with technological challenges that are too large for any one entity to solve on its own. It combines its federal funding with contributions and expertise from academic and industry partners to build technological solutions, test and validate them, and then hopefully transition them into real-life applications.

Pilat then offered brief descriptions of several MxD projects in which undergraduate engineering students were involved as examples of how students can be exposed to advanced manufacturing. In one case, an undergraduate student at the Missouri University for Science and Technology worked with the project team to create an automated machining system that compensated for the variation in the casted or forged parts that were being machined. “The project outcome essentially reduced the amount of scrap produced through this process to zero,” Pilat said. This saved the manufacturer, Caterpillar Inc., hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the company hired the undergraduate student to implement the solution in its facility. It is

an example, she said, of a student getting to solve a problem in real time and, at the same time, developing connections that “opened up doors that maybe would not otherwise have been there for them.”

Another example involved the development of a tool to virtually build parts, quantify the quality of the manufactured parts, and predict their mechanical properties. Such a tool would be used in the creation and certification of low-volume, high-value metallic parts. In this case the project was led by a professor, Federico Sciammarella, who directed advanced research and materials and manufacturing at Northern Illinois University. He did not have a PhD program providing students to work with, Pilat said, so he hired undergraduates and master’s degree graduate students to work in his laboratory on the project. “He also routinely presented updates and results of the project to his classes and engaged them in the follow-up research,” she said. Many of the undergraduates stayed on to do master’s degrees in manufacturing. The experience provided the students with “a real-life context that grounded their theoretical and fundamental experience with a real-life practical application,” she said.

A third example was a project to develop a supply chain risk alert—in essence, modeling disruptions to a supply chain using data that are available to an organization or publicly available, and then using that model to predict supply chain disruptions. Again, a number of students were involved in the project. “It has created years of opportunity for students to engage in a problem that is a very real and common problem across the manufacturing supply chain,” Pilat said.

INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED COMPOSITES MANUFACTURING INNOVATION

In the next presentation, Hopkins of IACMI, also known as the Composites Institute, spoke about what the institute is doing to prepare students for the composites manufacturing workforce and thus increase U.S. competitiveness. IACMI was founded in 2015 with funding from DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office. Its goal was to address technical challenges to the large-scale deployment of fiber-reinforced polymer composites intended for use in key energy-related applications, such as building lightweight cars or large and highly efficient wind turbines.

To achieve that goal, Hopkins said, the Composites Institute formed a national consortium with 160 members representing 31 states. The members

included 130 companies, 40 percent of which were large companies (Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Ford, Volkswagen, DuPont de Nemours, BASF, etc.) and the rest were small and medium-sized manufacturers. Other consortium members included universities, national laboratories, trade and professional nonprofit organizations, state economic development offices, and international partners. The consortium, Hopkins said, has invested more than $50 million in strategic infrastructure to carry out validations for composites manufacturing across the supply chain, from precursor chemicals to composite components and systems. It has also cooperated in creating a series of industry-led collaboration spaces for workforce development programs. These programs are targeted at every segment of the workforce pipeline, from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) outreach to graduate education, and a major emphasis of the programs is on providing hands-on experience for technician training and undergraduate students.

The primary way that the consortium engages with undergraduates, Hopkins said, is through the IACMI internship program. The students are recruited nationally and then placed into technology projects at various partner locations. The students are also given mentoring and professional development to build soft skills. The IACMI intern program now includes 124 intern appointments (92 undergraduate and 32 graduate) from more than 40 home institutions working at more than 40 host locations, Hopkins said. And 38 percent of IACMI interns are female—double the national average of people working in the field.

The internship program has incentives to include supply chain partners as collaborators, which means that most of the projects have multiple companies participating. “This helps technical project outcomes better serve as a stepping stone to commercial deployment,” Hopkins said, “and also provides a larger, more diverse network of partners for internship hosting and mentorship.”

The intern experiences are designed to be the start of an ongoing connection for the students’ career and professional paths, he said, so these experiences need not only to be relevant but also need to connect the next steps in the pathway. And, he continued, since the interns are an active part of the composites community, they have a big head start in identifying, qualifying, and pursuing the next steps in their paths.

The interns are also asked, as part of their service to the community, to assist in various sorts of training. This includes STEM outreach, where the students talk to younger students about their experiences in the field about

manufacturing as one option for those interested in STEM opportunities. The interns are also involved in introductory technician training in order to broaden their range of experiences in the composites community.

The multifaceted approach of the internship program, Hopkins said, has been “demonstrated to be successful in supplementing undergraduate engineering career paths.”

HOLLINGS MANUFACTURING EXTENSION PARTNERSHIP

Next, Raghavan described the work of the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) and what it does to help infuse advanced manufacturing into engineering education. MEP is a national network with centers located in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. The various centers work collectively to help provide small and medium-sized manufacturers with the resources they need to improve operations, get to new growth paths, and remain competitive in the global marketplace. “We work hand in hand with the private sector to make sure that they have all the critical needs, including financing, capital, workforce, [and] the new technology out, so that manufacturers can remain competitive,” she said. It is a partnership among the federal government, state governments, universities, and nonprofit organizations, with funding provided by the federal government, state investments, and private-sector fees.

Listing the MEP’s accomplishments, Raghavan said that in fiscal year 2021 it worked with more than 34,000 manufacturers from nearly all industries, helping those manufacturers to make $14.4 billion in new and retained sales and to create or retain 126,000 jobs. With $50 million in funding from the CARES Act, MEP helped more than 5,000 manufacturers pivot and get into new products and new industries, producing such things as personal protective equipment, in order to keep working through the COVID pandemic.

Of the 51 centers in the partnership, 18 are at universities, which provides a direct connection between industry and academia. Another 26 members are nonprofit organizations or are state-based; these non-university members generally have a strong connection with one or more universities. The university connection is important, Raghavan said, because the schools provide access to potential employees as well as to new technologies that small and medium-sized manufacturers can take advantage of.

Several of the MEP–university collaborations take place via a partnership with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. For example,

Northern Illinois University (NIU) is collaborating with the Illinois MEP and Ohio University is partnering with Ohio MEP Southeast, which is part of the Ohio MEP. NIU and the Illinois MEP worked together to expand the applied learning model in NIU’s College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, with a dedicated professor of a practice in manufacturing, Raghavan said. “That professor serves as a link between the small and medium manufacturers and the engineering teams in the university’s multidiscipline senior design program,” she said. The Ohio collaboration established a partnership with small and medium-sized manufacturers to help them address challenges they encounter while implementing new technologies, such as robotics and systems for factory automation. And a third collaboration, between the University of Louisville and the Kentucky MEP Center (the Advantage Kentucky Alliance), helped test an accelerated 3D printing program for use in manufacturing; that program is aimed at helping small and medium-sized Kentucky manufacturers in the automotive and aerospace sectors adopt 3D technology, in part by providing them with technical assistance and guidance on how to adopt that new technology into their current systems.

MEP centers also engage directly with university engineering students to support manufacturing projects, Raghavan said. These are not official internships, she explained, but instead they are more closely aligned with cooperative education. “Students are typically paid for their time spent working in our MEP centers on projects so that the university gets a boost,” she said. “The student gets a boost, and the small/medium manufacturer can access talent, but also the ideas.” Some of these projects were state-funded and put students into internships with smaller manufacturers, she added. “We work a lot with the state government to make sure we can have those happen.”

The MEP centers are also helpful in capstone projects for senior engineering classes, Raghavan said. “We really do try to make sure we can cultivate that partnership with the universities in all of the 50 states so that students get access to what it is like to be a small/medium manufacturer and how they can help drive that economic innovation.”

Finally, Raghavan encouraged participants to look into Manufacturing Day, which is hosted and coordinated by the MEP National Network on the first Friday of October each year. “The purpose of it is to show the reality of modern manufacturing careers and encourage companies and educational institutions to open their doors so that students, parents, teachers, and community leaders can glimpse what it is really like—as opposed to seeing what they think it is like—and inspire the next generation of skilled workers.”

In closing, Raghavan said that the manufacturing industry employs over 12 million people, making it the fifth-largest employment sector in the United States, and that manufacturing jobs offer the opportunity for upward growth and mobility. “More than 81 percent of those jobs require true, real-work level experience,” she said, “but can become a path to growth.”

NSF ENGINEERING AND EDUCATION PROGRAMS

In the next presentation, Zayas-Castro described NSF’s programs on engineering and on student education in science and engineering. He focused on two NSF directorates: the Directorate of Engineering, which provides support for advanced engineering, contains the Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC); and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources contains divisions of undergraduate education and of human resource development and is heavily involved with workforce development. “These divisions and directorates work collaboratively in an interactive fashion to try to advance and to synergize our efforts,” he said.

NSF’s Advanced Manufacturing program supports fundamental research aimed at revitalizing American engineering. It is a funding program, so that it funds researchers doing work in the area of advanced manufacturing. The specific areas being supported include autonomous systems, biomanufacturing, breakthrough materials and materials design, digital design and manufacturing methods, nanomaterials and nanomanufacturing, novel semiconductor design and manufacturing, and smart manufacturing.

Zayas-Castro added that the researchers who receive grants to advance fundamental understanding and knowledge in advanced manufacturing typically are also generating “new ways to infuse their advances into the graduate or undergraduate curriculum” and sometimes even into the K–12 curriculum or K–14 curriculum.

NSF also has two major center-based efforts that seek to bring together work from across the agency and bring it to bear on particular issues. The first effort involves engineering research centers, or ERCs, which are typically funded for 5 years at about $25 million, with a possible renewal for another 5 years. As examples, Zayas-Castro mentioned ERCs focused on creating self-powered sensing, computing, and communications systems to enable data-driven insights for a smart and healthy world (ASSIST); advancing nano-biomanufacturing methods with the ultimate goal of producing functional heart tissue (CELL-MET); and creating a scalable and cost-effective

nanomanufacturing infrastructure (NASCENT). These ERCs generally have participation from both undergraduate and graduate students and help shape the participating universities’ undergraduate and graduate curricula.

The second type of center-based initiative involves industry/university cooperative research centers (I/UCRCs), which conduct research that is directly relevant to their industry and government members. As examples, he mentioned WindStar at The University of Texas at Dallas, the Center for Bioplastics and Biocomposites at North Dakota State University, the Center for the Integration of Composites into Infrastructure at West Virginia State University, and the Center for Atomically Thin Multifunctional Coatings at The Pennsylvania State University.

Turning to workforce development programs at NSF, Zayas-Castro discussed two programs, Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) and Research Experiences for Teachers (RET). REU involves students working with active researchers in summer programs that allow the students to do hands-on work. A typical REU site has a group of 10 or so undergraduates who work in the research programs of the host institution.

The RET in Engineering and Computer Science program supports summer research experiences for K–14 educators with the goal of fostering long-term collaborations among universities, community colleges, school districts, and industry partners. Zayas-Castro offered two examples of RET programs in manufacturing: Integrated Nanomanufacturing at Boston University and MFG Simulation–Automation at Penn State.

In closing, Zayas-Castro spoke of two EEC programs focused on engineering education and broadening participation: Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) and Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE). “It is critical to stimulate new and revolutionary ways of infusing new knowledge, new understandings, and new ways for how students learn,” he said, “and also to develop a much more creative way of broadening participation and being inclusive—as our director says, ‘reaching the missing millions.’ That is very critical for the manufacturing sector.” To that end, RED is intended to (1) develop new and revolutionary approaches and strategies that will enable the transformation of undergraduate engineering education and to implement organizational change strategies at the local level in order to propagate this transformation of engineering education and (2) strengthen the future U.S. engineering workforce by enabling and encouraging the participation of all citizens in the engineering enterprise.

“In summary,” he said, “all these efforts between the divisions and the directorates create synergy and create a chain effect that clearly supports

undergraduate and graduate education, innovation, collaboration between universities, academia, industry, and government, from basic research to translating that basic research into the curriculum and supporting long-lasting partnerships on collaborations.”

DISCUSSION

Kurfess opened the discussion period by asking the panelists about industry’s need for engineers versus its need for “people on the floor”—technicians and other non-engineers. Zayas-Castro answered first and said that both engineers and others with technical skills are in great demand in manufacturing, and he noted that many non-engineers, after having acquired the techniques, tools, and knowledge for working in a manufacturing plant, decide that they want to pursue a degree in engineering—which is something they can do, especially with the advent of online programs such as the ones described in the keynote address by Kyle Squires of Arizona State University,

Raghavan agreed with Zayas-Castro, commenting that the presenters had focused mainly on engineers because that is what they had been asked to do but that manufacturing has a strong need for non-engineers with technical skills. “I think this field is open,” she said. “We do not have enough workers for anything.” This makes it vitally important to figure out how to do workforce development, she added, and part of workforce development will be “getting people to realize that manufacturing is cool and sexy.” Most people do not realize how interesting manufacturing work can be, using things like robots and 3D printing. “How do we change that narrative so people want to come in?” she asked. “Not just engineers. All help is needed and wanted.”

Hopkins answered by referring to a figure he had exhibited that indicated that for every position in manufacturing requiring a master’s degree or higher, two people with bachelor-level professional degrees were required along with six or more workers with a high school degree, a 2-year degree, or a certificate So, he said, the bulk of the workforce need in manufacturing is actually at the technician level, and that is where his group has focused its efforts. “To me,” he added, “one of the big opportunities is to connect across the continuum,” and it is important to help workers at various levels of the hierarchy understand better just what is involved up and down that hierarchy.

Pilat emphasized that there are currently 2 million manufacturing vacancies, and they run the gamut from professional engineers to technicians working on the manufacturing floor. “Yes, we need to focus on all aspects.” Referring to a hiring guide recently released by MxD, which looks at some 250 roles in the area of manufacturing cybersecurity, she said that one option for finding employees is to look in other fields for candidates with skills that can map appropriately into manufacturing roles.

Kurfess then asked a second question, this one focused on the sorts of new and exciting jobs that will be appearing in manufacturing in the coming years, such as those involved with manufacturing electric cars. How do both students and faculty get involved?

Pilat responded that MxD, working with its industry partners, has a variety of ways for students to get involved in manufacturing, including apprenticeship programs on digital skills and cybersecurity. “We have a strategic investment planning process where we go out to our ecosystem to understand the technologies that they are working on [for which] they are looking for funding, and then we put out project calls,” she said. “They can respond to that, and we get very regular engagement with students through the faculty that are responding to those calls.” MxD has also developed an emerging technology program that seeks to get universities and students exposure to and involvement with new technologies at an early stage.

Hopkins mentioned a similar program at IACMI that is focused on innovative technologies but is also concerned with workforce issues. “We have a test bed that we have been running for a year,” he said, “and we are planning to replicate sites at different places with partners in the upcoming months.” This will be important, he said, as it will be a test of how well the approach will scale up—and scaling “is really important for making a dent in the need.”

Raghavan said that the MEPs have various approaches to bringing students into contact with small and medium-sized manufacturers—internships, apprenticeships, etc.—to get exposure and experience.

Zayas-Castro said it would be valuable for university faculty to become familiar with manufacturers, MEPs, and others involved in the industry and then “try to infuse the manufacturers into the classroom and the classroom into the manufacturer, beginning from the first year on. The students can start going back and forth and floating and weaving into that continuum.” He also suggested that students who have had internships at manufacturers should share their experiences with other students through word of mouth and social media.

Kurfess then asked what might be limiting the use of internships and apprenticeships. “Is it funding? It is opportunities? Is it connection to companies?”

Hopkins answered that one factor is “the relative scarcity of faculty who have a true appreciation and capacity to engage meaningfully in a manufacturing context.” Because of cultural differences between academia and industry, it is not always easy to find faculty members who have the awareness, appreciation, and capacity to support meaningful engagements.

Raghavan added that another factor is the awareness of opportunities and the ability to match the talent with the companies. This is a particular issue with the small and medium-sized companies she works with, whose average size is perhaps 30 employees. These companies do not have the resources to go and find the potential hires with the talents they need. Conversely, many students and others who might be interested in a job in manufacturing are not aware of the opportunities that exist. Again, this is a particular issue with small and medium-sized companies.

Kurfess agreed. “I grew up in a machine shop in the Chicago area, and it was just hard to find people,” he said. “But they were out there. I connected up a lot of my buddies in high school with a lot of these different shops. They absolutely loved it. It was a good-paying job. They learned some cool skills. But again, how do you make that connection? How do you go out and recruit?” One possible solution, he suggested, might be to set up area clearinghouses with job opportunities and potential employees.

Next Kurfess passed along an audience question about how the different agencies and organizations interested in manufacturing communicate and collaborate. “We do try to work with each other,” Raghavan said, mentioning various organizations that NIST works with, such as MEP centers, an institute at the Department of Commerce, and DoD. “It is not as formal as people would like it to be,” she said. “Especially on the MEP side, it tends to be more localized because that is where our centers sit…. But we try to make efforts.” NIST also works some with the private sector, she said, adding that it is important to determine the key industries that the United States wishes to be dominant in, particularly in advanced manufacturing.

Pilat commented that many of the collaborations that take place with stakeholder-like organizations happen “because there is an individual relationship or an individual passion.” These are valuable, but it is not enough to simply rely on such individuals. “How do you make the national imperative so that it is occurring to more people that there should be more collaboration and that some of the barriers that do exist to collaboration are overcome?”

Kurfess then asked a question about the values of nontraditional programs such as certification programs. Hopkins said such an approach is very important. “It is important for transportability. It is important with understanding what the pathways are to multiple career paths and helping with resiliency.” IACMI is working to help “deliver composites manufacturing training that fits into some of those traditional training certificates as well as those that are merging in what is ultimately a more digitally driven manufacturing need space.”

Raghavan said that certification is a critical part of what NIST is trying to do. “It is another pathway and another door as people reimagine their careers,” she said. It is important that there is not just one avenue for people to get where they want to go.

In the closing minutes of the discussion period, Kurfess gave each of the panelists a chance to make any further comments that wanted to close with.

Pilat said that one of the most important things to consider when thinking about the changes that need to happen in manufacturing-related education is where the industry is heading and what sorts of skills will be important in coming years. That consideration should shape undergraduate curricula and certification programs. She added that one of the difficulties in this area is that solutions can be very difficult to scale. To that end, conversations of the sort that were taking in the workshop “provide an opportunity to highlight those things that are working and should be tried in other areas.”

Hopkins said that in recent decades there has been decreasing interest in manufacturing as a career and as a subject for education and training. “Our institutes are, to some extent, an experiment in terms of how we build that back and how we recreate it and prepare for the quickly changing needs of the future,” he said. “I hope that we continue this dialogue and continue to ask that question in terms of what is manufacturing for the country and how do we best support it.”

Raghavan said that, especially from the perspective of small and medium-sized businesses, change is difficult, “so sometimes leading them to what needs to be done is tough.” It is important to try different pathways, she said, because there is not likely to be just one solution. “The playbook now has to be expanded, and [we may need to] realize that maybe we do not even need a playbook. We really need to start thinking really in many different paths and many different ways.”

Zayas-Castro concluded the session with two comments. First, he emphasized the importance of collaboration among industry, academia, and all of the various stakeholders involved in manufacturing. Then he sug-

gested to the workshop organizers that the study they are preparing should have some messaging aimed at students and their parents helping them to understand the attractive opportunities available in manufacturing.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

At various points throughout the workshop, panelists and audience members spoke about what should be done to improve advanced manufacturing and the education pipeline that provides the engineers, technicians, operators, and other workers in the advanced manufacturing workforce. Those comments and suggestions are collected and organized in this chapter to provide a synthesis of the workshop participants’ many ideas about how to create a better future for advanced manufacturing in the United States.

IMPROVEMENTS TO ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Much of the discussion during the breakout sessions during the workshop’s second day was devoted to the question of what changes might be made to engineering education in order to provide a better and more-ready workforce for advanced manufacturing. Committee co-chair Bob Sproull framed the issue in this way:

As discussants pondered the sorts of changes that might profitably be made to the current engineering education system to benefit advanced manufacturing, a variety of themes emerged.

Hands-On Experience

The value of hands-on experience for engineers—particularly those involved in manufacturing—was a recurring theme throughout the workshop, and in the breakout sessions on the second day, a number of people talked about the importance of such experiences and how opportunities for them might be increased in the future. In one of the breakout sessions, for example, Michael Packer of SME commented about how few students in K–12 get hands-on exposure to manufacturing now that industrial arts and industrial education are mostly gone from middle and high schools. Thirty to 40 years ago, he said, most of the students coming into mechanical engineering programs in college had practical experience, “either on the farm, fixing equipment and figuring out how to design things, or they grew up in tool and dye shops or machine shops. They may have only swept the floors and got to do some things now and then with machinery, but they were exposed to it.” Such students are rare now coming into engineering programs. “Many of the students in the 4-year institutions, if there is a lab like an IDEA Lab at Georgia Tech, it’s the first time they’ve seen a machine tool in many cases,” he said. “So we’ve got to somehow correct all of that.”

One approach to giving K–12 students more exposure to tools and machinery is SME’s PRIME (Primary Response in Manufacturing Education) Schools program, which exposes young people to potential careers in manufacturing by giving them hands-on experience with industrial sponsors. “So we do have young people who are exposed to it, trained in it,” he said. “Some will go right into the workforce, and some will go into advanced education, maybe 2 years, maybe 4 years.” So there are existing programs that address the need for more hands-on experience; the question is how to spread these more widely. “We need to do a better job of exposing and introducing manufacturing as a … good career choice for anyone at the early fundamental grades.”

Another approach to exposing students to manufacturing, Packer added, is the various sorts of technology competitions—robotics, cars, drones, and so forth. “They do get to at least get exposed to equipment and some of the hand tools.” Kurfess added that at Oak Ridge National Laboratory every summer intern has to print his or her own desk using a 3D polymer printer. “They get very excited about designing and printing their own desk,” he said, but not every place has the set of facilities that Oak Ridge does.

Neil Schroeder from Minnesota State University Mankato agreed with Packer that hands-on experience is important for engineers and others who

are going into manufacturing and added that such experiences separate out these students from “the pool of textbook engineers that get mass produced.” Kurfess expanded on that, saying that at Georgia Tech there are many students who are really good at taking tests but have no real-world experience. When it comes to hiring someone for a manufacturing job, he said, he would choose a student with a 3.0 GPA who has worked in a bicycle shop or repair garage over a student with a 4.0 GPA but with no relevant experience.

Committee member Bob Sproull, who was moderating that part of the breakout session, asked if there might be some type of curriculum focused on hands-on experiences, where students could get a series of relevant experiences and be better prepared for jobs in industry. Schroeder answered that for his program’s students there are just too many different types of possible manufacturing jobs for something like that to be possible. “Getting them into the industry and practicing as an engineer is really what’s helping our students move forward and get that experience,” he said. Since a major part of the engineering program at Minnesota State University Mankato involves the students having co-op jobs with various industry partners, the students get a chance to accumulate practical experience in a manufacturing segment they are interested in working in. “Just getting that hands-on experience through practice so you can thrive once you get that piece of paper is huge,” he said.

Engineering Curricula

In one breakout session there was an extended discussion of the sorts of things that engineering students should learn in their college programs. How much calculus, for example, should be taught in an engineering program? Many engineers report back after graduation that they seldom if ever use calculus, and it can be an obstacle to technicians with a 2-year degree who wish to return to school to get a 4-year engineering degree but never learned calculus. One participant, J. Shelley of California State University, Long Beach, commented, “I have no problem with differentiating a major and saying that a ‘manufacturing engineer light’ position doesn’t have calculus but [it] has systems and logistics and process flow and all of these other things that are not engineering, but they still require classroom time, and there’s theory that goes along behind it. Just because it’s not calculus-based doesn’t make it wrong.”

Continuing with that line of thought, session moderator Bob Sproull mentioned the presentation on the workshop’s first day by Tracy Gilbert in which she mentioned the Digital Engineering Competency Framework

being put together by DoD. It does not mention manufacturing; instead it is about acquisition engineers, who specify and manage acquisition programs. The diagram that Gilbert showed had “a lot of pretty deep engineering in it,” Sproull said, but there was nothing related to calculus. “‘I think that’s pretty interesting, because when you get into high levels of systems engineering, you’re generally not doing the kind of analysis for which calculus is suited,” he said. “There may be other technologies like simulation and so on, or even analytics, that are much more important for that kind of engineering. And I think it should be called engineering.”

Thus, it might be the case, Sproull continued, that there could be types of engineering programs that skip certain courses, such as calculus, that have always been considered part of an engineering education. People with such a background might not be referred to as engineers, or at least not as mechanical engineers or any of the other types of engineers who generally do need to know calculus, but they would be very valuable to industry in many different types of roles. Guillermo Aguilar of Texas A&M pointed out that such an approach had already been talked about, with a distinction being made between B.A. and B.S. degrees in engineering, with the B.S. degree being more math-intensive, but the distinction never really caught on.

Shelley said that the local community college, Antelope Valley College, has gotten special dispensation from the community college chancellor’s office to offer a B.S. program in aerospace manufacturing (with the degree actually awarded through Cal State Long Beach), specifically to feed students into Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for their liaison engineering positions. “So we have a pipeline that we can start talking about some of these unusual credentials, and how do we recruit, how do we keep these people further educated in their careers,” she said. She suggested that it would be very valuable to develop a systems engineering major specifically based on what Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman need for manufacturing. In this case, she said, it could be possible to get students a master’s degree in systems engineering without loading them down with a great deal of additional calculus.

Gilbert emphasized the importance of students developing digital capabilities. “The digital transformation is here,” she said. “It has impacted every aspect of our lives. It is incumbent upon engineering education to really catch up to where we are.” Undergraduate engineering students do get the chance to develop applied skills through capstone projects, co-ops, research opportunities, and internships, but those are all external to the official curriculum within engineering education. “It is incumbent upon our industry partners

and our academic partners to engineer the solution and reimagine how we educate our workforce with applied skills,” she concluded.

Packer contended that engineering education should not neglect some of the less glamorous but essential aspects of advanced processes, such as precision controls, sensors, and gears. There are areas where the United States tends to fall behind the rest of the advanced world.

And on a related topic, William Bigot of Ascent Aerospace said that it will be important to not wait until after high school to start introducing engineering topics to students. Offering a sports metaphor, he said that when he was teaching his son’s elementary school football team, they tried to replicate what the junior high team was using for its their offense and defense. That team in turn tried to replicate what the high school team was using. And the high school sought to replicate what the University of Minnesota was using. The idea, he said, is to start teaching early on concepts that will be important later. Applying this idea to engineering, it is important to think about the sorts of skills that high school students should be taught so that by the time they graduate they have enough understanding to be thinking about what sort of career path they would like to take.

“I really think that the message is, let us get in early,” he said. “Let us teach what we need our students to understand at whatever level that might be. Let us help them … find that niche and what they do well, and then let us help them expand beyond what they are doing.”

Manufacturing Major

Several participants spoke about a manufacturing major or a manufacturing engineering major as one way to prepare students better for jobs in advanced manufacturing. Christopher Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts, said that WPI previously had an undergraduate major in manufacturing that is no longer available, but the school does offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in robotics. Originally, he explained, WPI was created to produce manufacturing engineers for the wire-drawing industry in Worcester, which led the world at the time, but eventually the school abandoned the manufacturing program because of the difficulty of getting research funding in that area from places like NSF. Brown was the director of the manufacturing program until it was shut down, and he described his interactions with the institute as a “constant battle.” “They were asking me to justify manufacturing by who is coming here that wouldn’t have

come here otherwise just to get a major in manufacturing, but it was nothing they were tracking, and they gave me no resources to track it, so it was clear they were setting manufacturing up to lose.” The manufacturing program was inside the mechanical engineering department, which was a big department, and the head of department let the program wither. “He just had too much on his plate, and manufacturing wasn’t his favorite thing, and it wasn’t bringing in the research funding, which is the main metric.”

Kathryn Jablokow, who was a moderator of that breakout session, commented that resource issues like this can be a challenge. However, she added, “being at NSF, I can tell you that the research funding for advanced manufacturing is exploding in lots of new directions and in all different ways. So the amount is certainly strong and the directions are changing a lot.” Indeed, she added, part of the reason she was serving on the National Academies committee that hosted the workshop was “to inform NSF what’s happening in academia and in industry to try to get a better sense of where we should be channeling the funding for advanced manufacturing research.”

Sundar Krishnamurty said that one of the challenges facing a manufacturing major is that there are so many different types of manufacturing that it becomes difficult to know exactly what should be included. “How do we bring in continuous batch and discrete? What are the common set of issues for converting raw materials into finished product? And then bring in the question of sustainability, not only cost quality throughput but also the efficiency of your manufacturing.” Different manufacturing technologies have widely different techniques, so one must ask what the core set of concepts is that students should learn about manufacturing. However, he added, “most of the manufacturing courses start with machining processes and go into robotics and automation” and do not touch on large segments of manufacturing. “I have not seen any comprehensive thinking about what constitutes a manufacturing curriculum,” he said. “Probably you guys have been teaching it for years, so you may have a better idea about that. But where is the curriculum for that?”

In a related thread, Brown commented that one way to teach engineering students so as to prepare them for rapidly changing work is to focus on basic principles of manufacturing. “I have been trying to teach the basic principles that will apply to manufacturing and have applied to manufacturing forever,” he said, “and I think we need to do a better job of defining those and in figuring out what those things are.” For example, while it may be useful to teach students something about 3D printing, that is changing so rapidly that anything they learn may be obsolete in a decade. “But things like tolerances

aren’t changing,” he said. Similarly, uncertainty will remain a major issue, as will the issue of how to integrate tolerances and uncertainty into process design and control. “How do we define value?” he continued. “And how does that translate to produce specifications, and then process design, no matter what the process is? How do we produce value? How do we keep it sustainable?” All of these are basic principles that should be given more attention in engineering education.

In a similar vein, other participants spoke of the possibility of developing a “science of manufacturing.” One participant noted, for instance, that there is a clear distinction drawn between computer science and computer engineering, with a balance kept between learning a concept and putting it to practical use. Could something similar be done with manufacturing?

Brown responded, “Every manufacturing textbook that I have looked at—and I have been teaching manufacturing at WPI for over 30 years now—is basically an encyclopedia of methods and there are no overarching principles that link everything together.” It would be valuable to have a collection of basic principles, axioms, corollaries, and theorems about manufacturing that could be used in teaching manufacturing in the same way that certain physics principles are used in teaching. “So we need an Isaac Newton for manufacturing,” he said. “That would get us away from courses that are just a series of facts and ‘Here’s this manufacturing process, here’s how we analyze it, here is what you can make.’”

The underlying principles could be fairly simple, Brown continued. “We could start with something like ‘Create value and reduce waste.’” He pointed to the development of axiomatic design by Suh Nam Pyo at MIT, which lays out principles for design, and asked if something like that might be done for manufacturing. The benefit of such an approach, if successful, would be that the basic principles would remain even as manufacturing was changing rapidly.

Krishnamurty agreed that this could be valuable, and he offered an analogy to the drawing of designs. Even as design moved from two-dimensional drawings to 3D drawings to computer-aided design and beyond, “still the concept of how to capture the visualization part of the drawing aspect hasn’t changed,” he said. “We are looking for some underlying principles that can be supported whether it is industrial revolution 1, 2, 3, or 4.”

Committee member Thomas Kurfess offered a different sort of argument for the importance of the fundamental when he spoke about the likely results of increased automation on the workforce. In the late 1970s, he said, people were worried about bank employees losing their jobs because of the

introduction of automated teller machines (ATMs), and indeed there was a small decrease in the workforce, but then the numbers of bank tellers went back up—but now, not having to spend so much time on handling money, they were taking on more complex tasks, “and so now you have a more capable workforce.” The same thing can be expected with the future of the manufacturing workforce. “Yes, we’re going to be augmenting our workforce from the lower skill level all the way to the highly trained engineer and sort of moving them forward,” he said. “What does this mean really? And what kind of training do we really need for the engineers?” The best approach would be to retain the fundamentals and then supplement with other skills, he said. For example, even with computers taking on a greater role in design, engineers are likely to still need to work with CAD if for no other reason than that engineers will still need to visualize things. Schools should start teaching new things such as generative design, but it should not be “blind generative design,” he said, but rather teaching students how to lead the computer to optimize their designs and things like that.

Familiarity with Systems

In one of the breakout sessions, Kimberly Sablon of Texas A&M brought up a particular skillset that will be useful to teach engineering students who are headed into advanced manufacturing. Noting that she had recently moved to academia from the defense sector, where she was the director of Army Science and Technology in the U.S. Army Futures Command, she said that the future workforce will need students who are comfortable with a systems-based approach, so, in particular, universities should be introducing the idea of convergence research in manufacturing. “It’s an area that I think is really important,” she said, “especially when you’re talking about things like hypersonic weapon systems.”

In the future, she said, it will be increasingly important for students to be comfortable designing and working with multi-material systems—for example, improving methods to concurrently manufacture dissimilar materials with very high-performance interfaces. So, one thing that universities could do to improve manufacturing engineering education, she said, would be to presenting real-world problems that challenge students to think innovatively about ways in which they can combine various disciplines, such as how to integrate digital technologies with more traditional manufacturing technologies.

Robotics and Automation

Ashwin Dani from the University of Connecticut spoke briefly about a robotics program that is being set up there. It will be offering an undergraduate degree in robotics beginning in the fall. The program will be interdisciplinary, with various departments, including electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, participating. The university has another interdisciplinary program between the schools of management and mechanical engineering, which has a great deal of focus on manufacturing. And as part of that program, Dani has been coordinating a manufacturing robotics course. In short, he said, there is a close connection between robotic automation and manufacturing.

In response to a comment from Kathryn Joblokow, Dani noted that robotics is not a new field—it has actually been around for several decades—and that the main applications of robots in the early days was in the automobile industry. And even today, he added, many of the opportunities and challenges that are emerging in the area of advanced robotics are found in a manufacturing context. “Manufacturing is one of the main domains where robotics finds lots of use cases and lots of job opportunities as well,” he said, and he envisions that there will be ways to integrate robotics and manufacturing in the curriculum in the future.

Data Analytics

Chris Saldaña of the Georgia Tech said that some of the manufacturing companies he works with are trying to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning, so it will be useful to them to be able to hire graduates who are able to analyze data and, more generally, are comfortable using computer applications to work with data. It is particularly important, he continued, that these hires have been exposed to open programming languages, noting that many universities use the proprietary program MATLAB, which many companies do not have access to. Manufacturing engineers—for example, mechanical engineers working in a manufacturing environment—are particularly valuable to companies if they have been trained in data science. “The industry talks about them as unicorns,” he said. “They know a little bit about process, but they also know a bit about computing and analysis, to add value to that data.”

In a related comment, Amy Fleischer of Cal Poly said that manufacturing education at Cal Poly will be getting a greater emphasis on data analytics, smart factories and smart manufacturing in the coming years. Furthermore, she added, “we are looking at integrating coursework that blends together our computer science department with our manufacturing and mechanical engineering departments, with a focus on cyber security.” Not only is this an important area with many opportunities, she said, but she has found that the students there are really interested in these sorts of topics.

Use of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in Engineering Education

As several participants suggested, one opportunity to improve engineering education is with increased use of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). For example, Saldaña mentioned using AR goggles to give students the feel of walking around a factory floor, seeing the machines operate, visiting a machine shop, and so on. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity with the advances that are happening in that space to enhance education,” he said, “but the challenge that we have at the university is it’s evolving so quickly if we buy into a technology now, they’re saying Apple is going to come out with an augmented reality headset later this year, so there’s challenges just in the speed at which those technologies are maturing.” Still, he said, AR and VR should open up a number of potential valuable opportunities for better connecting industry with academia, and the technologies may prove particularly valuable for smaller schools that cannot afford the sorts of facilities that a place like Saldaña’s Georgia Tech can.

Thomas Kurfess, also from Georgia Tech, added that many companies are already using VR in their training to give workers a feel for how to control a machine without the risk of doing any damage to the machine or anything else. Previously, he said, there had been various issues with web-based VR devices, “but now we’re moving to a cloud-based capability, where you’ve got some local processing, some remote processing, and you’ve merged those together and you actually have a much better set of capabilities. The students really struggled when they were trying to do some of this web training and so forth with licenses and all sorts of stuff. Now it seems to be much more seamless. I think it does allow you to move a lot of things forward and to get a feel for things.”

As an example of VR-based training, Saldaña said that Lincoln Electric has a virtual reality welding simulator. “You actually have a torch, and then it gives you a score,” he said. “So it’s like a video game for people who are learning welding.” VR can also be used to simulate machine tools, he said, so it may be possible that VR-based training tools could be developed for various different kinds of manufacturing technologies, which could lead to better manufacturing education.

Kurfess commented that such VR tools could both cut training costs by reducing the use of physical manufacturing laboratories in training and improve safety.

Krishnamurty noted that AR and VR have both been used for a long time in the training of medical workers and also pilots. “For example,” he said, “if you look at the amount of training that a pilot gets in the virtual simulator, it is considered as one of the training aspects of the real-world training. Similarly, doctors are getting trained for surgery using this technology.” So, it seems like that manufacturing education could also benefit from the development of such tools.

Alex Woltornist of Cornell University said that another benefit of AR and VR training tools is that it is much less expensive to keep them up to date than physical equipment. If a university purchases a modern manufacturing machine for students to learn on, that machine may be obsolete in 5 or 10 years, necessitating another expensive outlay. But by investing in AR and VR training technologies, the university can keep its updating costs down to what it takes to replace the software.

However, he added, the initial development of such AR and VR training technologies is likely to be very expensive—too expensive for individual institutions to afford—so it would make sense for a consortium of institutions to work together to develop a VR environment and then share it for training. “I see this incredible opportunity on the VR side,” he said, “and I think we are right at the point now because we’re really thinking about it. Two or three years ago we just couldn’t do it.”

Chi Okwudire did offer one caveat about AR and VR training, however. Using such technologies makes sense, he said, but not if they are the sole training methods. There should still be physical hands-on training of some sort, and the goal should be to find a happy medium between the physical and the virtual.

Communication and Collaboration Skills

A number of workshop participants spoke about the importance of engineering students developing communication and collaboration skills. Michael Packer, for instance, talked about the “India ink and vellum days” several decades ago, when engineers did their designs in ink on vellum. However, before an engineer would commit a design to ink on vellum—which was a permanent design—he or she would go down to the factory floor and talk with various people, such as toolmakers, machinists, assemblers, and so on because “you didn’t want to have to go to the supply room to get another sheet of vellum.” Today, however, with so much done digitally, there is not the same pattern of thinking about a final design, so engineers tend to be more cavalier about their designs. Still, he said, “just because you could do it on CAD doesn’t mean that it can be executed,” so it remains important to speak with the people on the floor before deciding on a design. This in turn means that it is an important—albeit often overlooked—skill for engineers to have a comfort level with and a capability in talking to and asking questions of the technicians, operators, and others who make a factory run. But this social ability of engineers—being comfortable interacting and communicating with technicians and other non-engineers—is something that engineering schools struggle to develop, Packer said. More should be done to help engineering students—especially those headed into manufacturing—develop this skill.

Al Romig made a similar point, telling a story about a part that had been designed with modeling and simulation. “It took a six-axis mill and about $20,000 in 1980 dollars to make this part,” he said, “and if they would have talked to the metallurgists and the engineers before they actually designed the part and put it as part of the computation, that could have been avoided.” The lesson is that the people who design a part need to communicate with the people who will have to build it, and this is particularly important today, with the growing emphasis on modeling and simulation in design. “People sometimes forget that you need to keep yourselves grounded in the reality of what you can actually build.”

Self-Directed Learners

In one of the breakout sessions, there was discussion about the importance of training engineering students to be self-directed learners. The discussion was triggered by a presentation by Susannah Howe of Smith College on the

transferrable skills learned from capstone projects; the first on the list was self-directed learning. “There is not nearly enough emphasis on how we look at self-regulation, motivation, lifelong learning,” one participant commented. “I’m trying to think about where does that fit in this push to change how we develop a specific type of curriculum.”

Bob Sproull agreed that this is an important characteristic for engineers to possess and said that if engineers could be safely assumed to be self-directed learners, “we wouldn’t be so concerned about what is exactly in the curriculum this week or what’s going to arrive on the factory floor next week because we’ve got workforce that will figure it out. And they will probably teach other and they will do all kinds of things that are much better than the classical education pipeline.”

Another participant said that a modern engineer should be flexible and adaptable in the face of new technologies. “It’s knowing how to adapt to things,” he said. “I think that is where self-direction and self-regulation really come into play.” There should be a way to shape curricula and credentialing so that not only do students get the opportunity to develop their self-learning capabilities, but potential employers have a way to judge how well a student has developed such capabilities.

NONACADEMIC ISSUES

While most of the focus on engineering education was aimed at the sorts of things that students should learn, there was also some discussion on nonacademic issues that affect the engineering workforce.

The Cost of Education

Throughout the workshop a number of participants noted the high cost of an engineering education in the United States and contrasted that with Europe, where college educations are generally free to the student. For instance, Michael Sarpu of Lockheed Martin said that when he went to college, he got a 4-year engineering education for less than $15,000, and his first-year salary was $19,000, so in his first year he made more than it cost him to go to 4 years of college. Now college students may have $100,000 or $150,000 or more in student loan debt when they graduate, he said, and while that may make sense for students going into high-paying jobs, it does not necessarily make sense for students going into engineering. “We have to come up with

this middle spot where it does not cost $150,000 to get an education,” he said. “If we are going to build manufacturing in the United States, we have to create jobs at that level.” Not every employee is going to be a graduate of a top engineering program with a GPA of 4.0. Instead, many of the most valuable employees will be graduates of state schools with a GPA of 3.0 but with plenty of hands-on experience, and programs should be built with that in mind.

This is a particular issue with advanced degrees, said Christopher Brown, a workshop participant. “In a lot of countries [in Europe], they fund right through the doctorate and not on a meager stipend as we do here,” he said. “Generally they fund you with an engineer’s salary. So … as a result, they have a large number of people from their region and from their schools that go on for doctorates, more than we do. Very few of our undergraduates go on for advanced study because they need to get out and pay back those loans.” Kinard responded by commenting how when he gave presentations to graduate engineering programs at The University of Texas at Arlington, he found that several of the classes had absolutely no U.S. citizens. “It’s pretty wild when you think about that,” he said. “Most engineers tend to leave as an undergraduate for the reason you pointed out—they have got to pay back those loans.”

Attracting More Students to Engineering

A number of workshop participants said that the current demand for engineers is high, with at least one participant characterizing an engineering degree as a near-certain ticket to a good job. Thus, manufacturers and other employers of engineers are interested in drawing a larger and more diverse crop of students into the field. Thus, it will be important to determine ways to make engineering more attractive to students.

One participant, for instance, said that it will be important to change the narrative of what working in manufacturing means. “Students have this perception of manufacturing as this ugly factory type of idea, but that is not what modern manufacturing is,” he said. “It touches so many other places and disciplines and you can work in manufacturing in a ton of different ways. Nearly every engineering discipline has overlap with manufacturing to some degree.”

It will be important to get this message across to students, he said, and there are various possible approaches. “Maybe that means opportunities at the K–12 level through different types of extracurricular activities,” he said, or

perhaps manufacturing could be infused into existing courses, activities, and competitions in order to expose students to it and change their perceptions.

Concerning diversity, Don Kinard asked Tracee Gilbert of System Innovation how academia and industry can attract a more diverse engineering workforce. Gilbert said it is important to start very early. “It is very hard to recruit students once they have gotten to the undergraduate level,” she said, since students have to take advanced classes in high school and do well in those advanced classes to even be accepted into an undergraduate institution. “I think it is very critical to start very early on in the pipeline, attracting diverse students to STEM,” she said. “But also, I think the applied side is very critical as well because engineering … actually touches every aspect of our lives. I think that we can attract diverse candidates by opening up that space of allowing diverse candidates to see how they can contribute and make an impact across a number of different applications.”

Kinard then asked specifically about attracting women to engineering, noting that people have been trying to increase the number of women in the field for many years without much success. “Just as the practices of engineering in our undergraduate schools are antiquated,” Gilbert said, “I would also say the culture is very antiquated and not inclusive…. There has been progress, I have to say. But there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of creating inclusive environments for diverse candidates and diverse students and women in engineering.” She added that there do exist some exemplars—schools that do a good job of creating an inclusive and supportive environment for women and minorities—and the community can learn from those exemplars.

Michael Packer said that employers can play various roles in attracting more students to engineering—and to manufacturing in particular. For instance, industry employees take part in various activities designed to increase the engineering pipeline, from supporting engineering competitions and facilitating merit badges for boy scouts and girl scouts at a plant to serving on university industrial advisory boards or acting as ABET evaluators. “What I think employers can do,” Packer said, “is recognize and acknowledge that those are investments and provide the time away to go and do that.”

Industry could also work in various ways to increase the number of manufacturing programs offered in U.S. universities, he said. There are more than 400 mechanical engineering programs accredited by ABET and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, but only about 50 programs in the United States that are accredited by ABET in manufacturing engineering or manufacturing technology. Industry can help change that, Packer said, by

showing the need and helping flesh out what the appropriate body of knowledge should be that is passed along to students in such programs.

Gilbert suggested that there are ways to make better use of the country’s 2-year college programs in advanced manufacturing. While the country could certainly make better use of all of the different pieces of the engineering pipeline, from high school through 2-year and 4-year colleges and graduate programs, the community colleges may be a particularly valuable focus, since the education there is now free in a number of states and because a growing number of students are choosing to enter community colleges instead of 4-year programs out of high school, even if they go on to a 4-year program later. “I think it is incumbent upon us to determine how we can better utilize community colleges,” she said.

Finally, Packer said that in preparing their students for careers, many high schools focus on college preparation, yet college prep is just one dimension of career planning—not everyone will be going to a college or university—so career planning should also take into account those students who may be going to a community college or other 2-year program or into some other type of training or straight into a job. But no matter what path a student will take, it is important for students and their counselors and parents to see the relevance of a STEM education to achieving the student’s desired career.

IMPROVING ADVANCED MANUFACTURING

While the general topic of the workshop was approaches to improve engineering education as a way of assisting and improving advanced manufacturing, some discussion took place on the topic of how to improve and expand the U.S. advanced manufacturing sector and, more broadly, the country’s entire manufacturing enterprise. This topic is tied to the issue of improving engineering education, as Don Kinard of Lockheed Martin noted, because a stronger manufacturing sector will be more attractive to students. “I think engineering students are smart enough to realize that a lot of manufacturing isn’t in the United States anymore,” he said. “Is that having an effect? Does anybody think that the lack of manufacturing and the lack of advanced technology development is, in fact, one of the factors that is discouraging people from being more manufacturing-oriented?”

So, toward the end of the workshop’s second session, moderator Don Kinard asked that session’s participants what the United States needs to do as a country to improve advanced manufacturing. He mentioned in par-

ticular that the nation is lacking in such things as machine tool businesses and robotic businesses. “Those essentially do not exist in the United States anymore,” he said. “They have all moved overseas.” And something similar is true in biotechnology, where few U.S. companies operate the sorts of biore-actors needed for industrial production. So, he asked, how can government, industry, and academia collaborate to improve the country’s capabilities for doing advanced manufacturing?

William Bigot agreed with Kinard that it is important to bring such manufacturing back to the United States, most probably with the assistance of government-sponsored programs with that purpose. But rebuilding that sort of capability in the United States will require having a workforce with the necessary skills, and it will thus be important to have workers that are familiar with the processes that are being automated. “Before you actually create a new process … that is more automated, you have to know what the existing process is,” he said. “If you do not have any idea what that is, you are not going to do a very good job of optimizing the automated version of it.”

So, Bigot continued, the first step will be to look into the sorts of programs that can encourage the building of those types of advanced manufacturing capabilities in the United States. “We need to then make sure that our universities and 2-year colleges and trade schools allow students to actually do that work,” he continued. They need to have the hands-on experience with manufacturing processes, whether it is using a bandsaw or operating an additive manufacturing process. And, he added, “it is really the students teaching the students. I think that is the kind of mindset that we need to think about and figure out a way to implement.”

Kinard followed up by asking Bigot if he thought that free market capitalism could restore manufacturing in the United States, and he commented that countries such as China and Germany have industrial policies that target specific industries to build. “President Biden recently talked about a $52 billion bill for chip manufacturing,” he said. “He is also talking about battery manufacturing. Is that what it takes to make the difference here?”

Bigot answered that there are certainly things that the United States can learn from these other countries. In particular, the United States should decide which directions it should take in manufacturing and then invest in those areas. “I think your example on battery technology is a really good one,” he said. “How do we build the manufacturing capabilities and bring the people to the level they need to be in order to support that business?” Furthermore, he added, the country is nowhere near where it needs to be in terms of aerospace and defense manufacturing. It is important to take a criti-

cal look at those industries and decide what is needed for the future and what will be needed to get to that future. Then industry, academia, professional societies and other stakeholders will need to get behind that effort.

Kinard then asked the same question of Michael Sarpu of Lockheed Martin. “Do you feel like, as a country, we have to pick technologies that we are interested and then develop this government, industry, academic kind of connection? Is that what we need to do to make sure that we can do what we have to do as a country?”

“I think we need to pick our spots,” Sarpu answered. The days of Henry Ford, when steel and rubber went in one side of a plant and automobiles came out the other, are gone. “Are we going to 100 percent vertically integrate the F-35 within the walls of Lockheed Martin? Absolutely not. It does not make sense.” So, it will be important to decide which parts of manufacturing to focus on based on which bring the most value to the nation, although, he added, there are different ways to determine what constitutes “value,” and that is a decision that will have to be made. But once a decision has been made as to which aspects of manufacturing to focus on, it will be important to pursue those in a big way. “We cannot do a little bit here, a little bit there, because the problem is then you are still competing with overseas sources or other sources that maybe are not playing by the same rules that we are playing by,” he said.

But the real key will be deciding which industries to focus on. He offered an analogy with additive manufacturing: “Do not build a coffee cup with additive,” he said. “Build something that you cannot build any other way. I think we have to look at what technologies we bring into the country the exact same way.” As an example, he pointed to the question of manufacturing semiconductor chips, which has been an area of focus recently because of how global chip shortages have affected the U.S. auto industry. Should the goal be, he asked, to manufacture domestically all of the chips that are needed for U.S. manufacturing? “Or do we want a chip foundry for critical things that are of importance to our nation or to our national security or to our power grid? How do you want to do it?” Creating such capacity will require a partnership with industry, government, and academia, he said, but choosing what capacity to focus on should come down to what will have the biggest impact.

Echoing Sarpu, Michael Packer of the SME then said, “I think we have to pick our spots and we need to not get too enchanted with the advanced technologies in and of themselves.” Manufacturing USA and the various related institutes are doing a relatively good job of advancing the clearly

important technologies, but what has been missing are the “less glamorous, but absolutely critical technologies that are components to those advanced technologies,” he said. As examples, he pointed to precision motion control, where Japan dominates; precision gearing, which is a German specialty; and precision sensors and advanced sensors, which generally are sourced from China and Taiwan. It may not be particularly glamorous to set up an institute for precision motion control, he said, but the United States cannot afford to be dependent on other countries for such critical components. “We have to very carefully dissect what an integrated advanced system consists of and identify those that are absolutely crucial success factors to that advanced system,” he said.

Later, in the breakout sessions on the workshop’s second day, participants returned to the issue of whether the United States should have some type of industrial policy on several occasions. In one session, for instance, Kinard mentioned Denmark and China in particular as two countries that choose desired areas of focus for their manufacturing sector and then fund research and development in those areas. “In fact,” he said, “I want to say that we are probably one of the only countries that I am aware of in the Western world that does not have industrial policies that select business areas that they want to develop and keep in-house. We tend to be in pretty much a free market kind of world over here, and we may be the only ones in that free market, to be perfectly honest.”

One of the results is that the engagement among employers, industry, universities, and government is much tighter in most other countries than in the United States, which Kinard suggested explains some of the loss of manufacturing that the United States has experienced. “For example, pretty much all robotics is overseas now,” he said. “All machine tools are overseas. You heard about chip production—basically we don’t have capabilities for it anymore. Biotechnology is much more overseas than it is in the United States because we haven’t incentivized or funded that as a country.”

Christopher Brown said that his experience with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, agreed with Kinard’s assessment. “There are all kinds of things we could do in Lausanne that we can’t do here because our basic costs were all taken care of,” he said. “We could do all kinds of service for industry without worrying about paying for it or them paying for it. It hurts us competitively.”

Another factor that limits U.S. competitiveness in advanced manufacturing, Kinard said, is that while the U.S. government generally relies on market forces to encourage manufacturing innovation, those market forces

may at times restrict it. As an example, he mentioned that Intel had recently announced it was going to spend about $20 billion to get back into chip manufacturing in a major way, and, as a result, the company’s stock price dropped because of concerns over short-term profitability.

“The free-market economy is not going to save us here if we want to make stuff in the United States and we want the jobs and the protection of our supply chain,” Kinard said. “People don’t realize it, but almost every drug comes from China, and certainly the precursors do. Most all of them do. All of the robotics and most of the advanced technology that supports manufacturing all comes from somewhere else, and most of that is because we decided to let companies just go for—how would I call it?—shareholder value.”

CONCLUDING REMARKS

To wrap up the workshop, Alton Romig, the executive director of the NAE, offered some closing thoughts. After thanking the speakers and participants, he commented that he had heard a number of really interesting topics at the workshop and mentioned in particular the area of cybersecurity in manufacturing. One of the ideas that has been discussed within DoD, he said, is building arsenal ships or arsenal camps that can create weapons and other items on demand. For instance, a ship close to the theater of action might have 3D printers or other advanced manufacturing devices along with the supplies and raw materials required by those machines “so that all you had to do was move a file and build a part and deliver it to the warfighter.” But then it becomes crucial to ensure the integrity of the files that provide instructions to the machines and to make sure that the files have not been corrupted in a way that produces defective parts; this requires paying attention to cybersecurity. “I thought that was very important,” he said.

One of the lessons of the workshop, Romig said, was that the problems facing advanced manufacturing are complex and will require teamwork and consortia to solve. “I don’t know who the smartest person is in a given room,” he said, “but all of us together are smarter than any one of those individuals.”

On a different topic, Romig said he found the distinction between manufacturing and production to be interesting. Some manufacturers—automakers and companies that produce consumer electronics, for instance—may turn out hundreds of thousands or even millions of products in a year, while other types of companies, such as aircraft manufacturers, may build just a

few hundreds of their product over the course of a year. “Building these very complex systems where the numbers are relatively small brings a whole set of challenges that are different than you would find in truly mass production,” he said, “and I think that is an important thing to keep in mind as we move through this.”

One of the key lessons, from the workshop, he continued, was the value of hands-on experience in manufacturing. “You can’t teach someone how to do joining, do machining, do casting, do direct printing, whatever it might be, purely from a textbook,” he said. “You have got to actually be able to build and make something.”

A related lesson was the value of getting manufacturing into engineering education, and workshop participants offered various suggestions on how to do this, Romig said, including having specific manufacturing engineering programs or putting manufacturing components into existing engineering classes. However it is done, he said, the key is that engineering students get some exposure to manufacturing.

One particular way that engineering students can be exposed to manufacturing is through capstone projects. Those projects are most valuable, Romig said, when they involve more than just a collection of mechanical engineering students or chemical engineering students and instead involve students with expertise in a variety of areas. “As I said earlier, real-world engineering is really much more of a team sport and it is multidisciplinary,” he said. “I think it will be useful if more universities got the notion of building multidisciplinary teams in order to attack capstone projects.”

By contrast, he continued, many of the team competitions that engineering schools participate in—such as the ones where students design, build, and operate a solar-powered car, say, or a drone—tend to involve individual students from a variety of disciplines and provide a much better simulation of what students are going to find when they get to the real world.

Engineering students need to learn to think beyond simply designing devices to considering whether there is a market for a given device, Romig said. “People are not going to pay for you to develop something that is only going to sit on a shelf and never actually be used.” Engineering students also need to get involved in research and development, he added, whether it is through internship programs or any of the various types of industry–academic collaborations.

Finally, Romig said, it will be important for government, academia, and industry to work together to shape engineering education to help improve advanced manufacturing. In other countries, the government may set the

direction through industrial policies and pick fields that the country will focus on, but this generally does not happen in the United States. There are a few exceptions, such as the establishment of Sematech, a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers established in the late 1980s to revive the U.S. semiconductor industry, but for the most part the U.S. emphasis on the free-market economy limits the options for such approaches in this country. “So,” Romig said, “we need to have other vehicles by which we can get government, universities and industry to work together through collaborations, internships, sabbatical leaves, etc.”