Summary
In recent years, a variety of technologies have been developed that have the potential to reshape manufacturing in the United States and other countries around the world. They promise to make it possible to manufacture parts that cannot be created—or cannot be easily created—with traditional methods, to dramatically increase the customizability of manufactured products, to decrease the time between design and production, and, in some cases, to lower the cost of production. The approach made possible by this array of new technologies is often referred to as advanced manufacturing, and the ongoing transition to and adoption of these new technologies has been referred to as “the fourth industrial revolution.” Advanced manufacturing is of particular interest to the Department of Defense (DoD), as it wishes the defense industrial base to employ whatever means are necessary to produce the most effective, cutting-edge defense technologies possible.
There are, however, a variety of obstacles to the nation’s industrial base taking full advantage of the potential of advanced manufacturing. The one that is the focus of this report is the nation’s system of undergraduate engineering education and, in particular, the fact that U.S. engineering schools do not do a particularly effective job of preparing their students to work in advanced manufacturing. Too few undergraduate engineering students are being exposed to or taught about the use of advanced manufacturing technologies (or manufacturing technologies in general), and of those students who do get some exposure, few are prepared to design for those technolo-
gies when they graduate. The result is a shortage of engineering graduates ready to contribute in this area, which in turn slows the uptake and use of advanced manufacturing technologies in the companies that are part of the defense industry.
To understand the issue in greater detail, consider the example of three-dimensional (3D) printing. The technology is already being put to work in a variety of areas. In medicine, 3D printers are creating prosthetics, hearing aids, and dental crowns. Paleontologists use them to create replicas of the bones of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures. Engineering students use them in makerspaces to produce models of their designs.
But the uptake of 3D printing by industry has been more measured. Both the automotive and the aerospace industries have put 3D printing to work to create parts, for instance, but it is typically done in select cases rather than for volume manufacturing. A characteristic example is the 3D-printed rocket engines that have sent a series of rockets into space; the number of these rockets produced to date has been in the hundreds rather than in the tens of thousands or millions.
The potential uses of 3D printing are practically limitless, and although the printers that most people are familiar with produce mainly plastic or polymer objects, it is possible to print with extremely strong and durable materials such as titanium and stainless steel. Thus, this is one of the advanced technologies that DoD is interested in being taken up by the defense industrial base. But it is not as simple as a company buying a 3D printer and supplies and using them to realize its engineers’ designs. Producing a jet engine, for instance, that does its job reliably and effectively involves a major learning curve, with the engineers and technicians finding many approaches that do not work before they zero in on one that does. Thus, an engineering graduate who has never had the chance to work with 3D printing in a realistic manufacturing setting will start off at a major disadvantage compared to one who has had such experience.
More generally, DoD is eager to have a wide array of advanced manufacturing technologies, not just 3D printing, widely adopted by the defense industrial base and supply chain. The defense industrial base has a history of being innovative—introducing approaches such as the use of composites for aircraft and custom production on major contracts—but its adoption of advanced manufacturing will depend on a number of factors. Some of these are technical, such as judgments about whether advanced manufacturing technologies offer enough improvement over existing methods to justify the investment, but many of them are workforce issues, and one of the major
workforce issues is the availability of engineers who are competent to design for advanced manufacturing technologies. This is not such a problem for the larger defense contractors, as they have the capacity to invest in training programs that can teach engineers what they need to know about advanced manufacturing, but small and medium-sized companies often cannot afford such an investment and have difficulty finding engineers with the proper skillset.
DoD, which has a history of addressing workforce issues for the defense industrial base, has recognized this as a problem and is interested in finding ways to improve undergraduate engineering education so that graduates of U.S. engineering schools can make a more immediate contribution to advanced manufacturing. Thus, this report offers a number of recommendations for actions that universities, the federal government, and industry can take to make training in and about advanced manufacturing a more prominent and effective part of undergraduate engineering education (see Box S-1). This report is the result of a study sponsored by the DoD Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) Program; the study statement of task and work plan are in Appendix A.
The recommendations fall into two broad categories. The first group of recommendations focus on ways to augment and adjust existing mechanisms in ways that can move undergraduate engineering education in a direction that will make it easier to realize the potential of advanced manufacturing in U.S. industry, particularly the defense industrial base. It makes sense to mainly work on modifying existing practices rather than trying to build new ones from scratch, because undergraduate engineering education has a huge installed base and a trajectory that is difficult to alter substantially.
Among the “augment and adjust” recommendations, a key one is to make manufacturing, particularly advanced manufacturing, an integral part of engineering education (Recommendation 2.1). Undergraduate engineering students typically are exposed to manufacturing at some point, but because the essentials of manufacturing have been mostly stable for a couple of decades (e.g., machining as a key component, the use of only a few metals for most applications), most students spend very little time on manufacturing topics, with their exposure generally limited to what they learn in a few labs. But manufacturing’s period of stability is coming to an end, and it will be important for engineering students to spend more time learning about the details of advanced manufacturing.
A further recommendation is that undergraduate engineering programs should offer experiential learning such as project courses and capstone proj-
ects that connect to real, not prototype, manufacturing (Recommendation 3.2). Students should be able to take their projects through to real manufacturing, which would typically be done in conjunction with the industrial sponsors of the projects.
The report also acknowledges the many ways that industry contributes to undergraduate engineering education, beyond its role in universities. Industry provides facilities for use by students and sponsors projects and courses, internships, co-ops, and more. The report encourages industry to continue and amplify these efforts, with a particular emphasis on endeavors that increase students’ familiarity with and understanding of advanced manufacturing technologies.
The federal government has a role to play as well. In particular, the report calls for government-sponsored programs such as manufacturing initiatives (e.g., DoD’s manufacturing innovation institutes) and engineering research support programs to engage more with undergraduate engineering students, using remote learning if necessary.
The second group of recommendations go beyond amplifying existing practices and suggest innovations aimed specifically at improving the presentation and teaching of advanced manufacturing in undergraduate engineering education. One recommendation, for instance, calls for engineering schools to develop and deploy advanced manufacturing curricula that are adaptable to different types of delivery, that are scalable, and that will be easy to update as advanced manufacturing evolves (which is happening rapidly; Recommendation 4.9). Another suggests that the federal government support more applied research in advanced manufacturing as a way to engage undergraduates (Recommendation 4.5); the new Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships directorate at the National Science Foundation is ideally suited for this role. A third recommendation is to develop remote access to (limited forms of) advanced manufacturing so that students in all regions of the United States can experience real manufacturing; such access could be modeled, for instance, on the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (Recommendation 4.8).
In addition to the recommendations and supporting material provided in the report, Appendix B provides a summary of a workshop held in conjunction with the development of this report. The summary contains descriptions of several current best practices in engineering education that can serve as models for other undergraduate engineering programs around the country.
