Bigger Is Not Always Better In Engineering Education

(As published in the Indianapolis Star in August 2008)

Who says David can’t still beat Goliath. Right here in Indiana Tri-State University students in Angola have won a prestigious chemical engineering design prize in both of the last two national contests.

Sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers university students are given a complex chemical engineering problem to solve. There are prizes for the best design solution as well as the best “safety in design.” Not only did TSU students win the design contest two years in a row, this past year they won both the design and safety parts.

The types of universities who compete in these contests include such schools as Michigan State, Michigan Tech, Kansas, and Columbia, all institutions much larger than TSU.

The complex problems the TSU students dealt with the last two years involved “recovery of pyridine and 3-methyl pyridine from a product waste stream” and
“crystallization of uranyl nitrate hexahydrate from spent nuclear fuel.” These are real problems faced by practicing engineers. The proud TSU winners were Jon Guscinski (Horton, MI), David Hellen (Reford, MI ), and Paul Handke ( Stade, Germany) .

These TSU accomplishments are of particular interest to me as I am also a chemical engineer, educated at two large state universities (Texas and Berkeley), as well as a current member of the TSU Board of Trustees.

There are several lessons in this David vs Goliath tale. First, TSU is a teaching university which can more than hold its own with the giant “research” universities. Second, there is still a very important role for outstanding engineering and other faculty members who want to focus on teaching undergraduates, as opposed to those who primarily want to concentrate on research.

This TSU story also helps illustrate, in microcosm, why the United States leads the world in college and university facilities and programs. Simply put, the key is good old American competition, between large and small and private and public institutions.

TSU is a private university of about 1,300 students, founded in 1884. It has produced hundreds of outstanding, practical engineers who have found great success in the business and academic worlds. Alumni include Professor John McKetta, former Dean of Engineering and Provost of the University of Texas and one of the nation’s top chemical engineers; Ralph Trine who heads a large steel-material handling company in Angola; Ralph W. Ketner, founder of the Food Lion Grocery Chain; and Robert Molitor, inventor of the Spalding Top-Flite golf ball.

TSU also operates extension centers in Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Merrillville, which serve part-time, adult students with evening and online classes in business and criminal justice.

Interestingly, Indiana also has one of the nation’s other smaller schools with an outstanding engineering department. Rose Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute placed first in several engineering categories in U. S. News and World Report’s ranking of “best undergraduate engineering programs.”

Ironically, undergraduate teaching universities like TSU and Rose Hulman are doing well in a federal-funding environment which increasingly favors PhD-producing research programs at major universities. This trend is unfortunate given the fact that the nation needs an increasing number of well-educated B.S. and M. S. engineers who are ready to go to work.

 

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Dr. J. Winston Porter is president of Environmental Strategies in Leesburg, Virginia and Washington DC. Formerly, he was an assistant administrator of the U. S. EPA with national responsibility for hazardous waste programs.