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OCR for page 83
6
The Doctor's Degree
The training of the Ph.D. engineer has been the subject of debate for
many decades ~d is of special current interest because of the shortage
of Ph.D.s in engineering for faculty positions. While there is a great
need for Ph.D. engineers in academia, there are not equally well defined
needs for large numbers of Ph.D.s in all industries. The Ph.D. engineer
is generally utilized effectively by industry in research or development;
however, that same degree and type of training are much less needed in
operational divisions. While having a Ph.D. is advantageous in busi-
ness, it is by no means a requisite for success.
Industrial research is being driven by major advances taking place
today in science, in analytical tools, and in computing capability as
well as in market sophistication. Highly trained doctoral-level engi-
neers are needed to tackle these complex research and development
challenges. These experts command high starting salaries in industry
relative to academia and are often given challenging assignments with
access to the most modern facilities and equipment.
Regarding the nature and purpose of a doctoral program, the Council
of Graduate Schools in the United States has stated: s3
The doctoral program is designed to prepare a student for a lifetime of intel-
lectual inquiry that manifests itself in creative scholarship and research, often
leading to careers in social, governmental, business, and industrial organiza-
tions as well as the more traditional careers in university and college teaching.
The program emphasizes freedom of inquiry and expression and development
83
OCR for page 84
84 ENGINEERING GRADUATE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
of the student's capacity to make significant contributions to knowledge. An
essential element Is the development of the ability to understand and evaluate
critically the literature of the field and to apply appropriate principles and
procedures to the recognition, evaluation, interpretation, and understanding of
issues and problems at the frontiers of knowledge.
A dissertation is universally required in U.S. universities for the
doctor's degree. The purpose of the dissertation is twofold: {1) to
develop ~ the candidate the independent ability to carry out a scholarly
investigation of a challenging topic at a high level of professional abil-
ity, and {2) to provide for an original contribution to knowledge in the
field. Generally, the candidate is expected to defend the dissertation in
a final examination; sometimes such examinations are open to the
public. A nearly universal doctoral requirement is a comprehensive
examination consisting of written and oral parts, generally imposed
just before the candidate begins work on the dissertation. The purpose
of the examination is to demonstrate an adequate knowledge of the
field and an ability to use academic resources. If the candidate passes
the examination, it is considered likely that he or she will successfully
complete the dissertation. Many schools additionally impose yet
another examination, given early in the student's program, to deter-
mine fitness for doctoral work.
The foreign language requirement tends to vary from school to
school and frequently from department to department within a given
school. Some kind of foreign language reading ability at one time was a
nearly universal requirement. Now many departments have no foreign
language requirement, apparently in the belief that such requirements
generally produce little utility in reading articles published in foreign
languages. The policy statement on the Ph.D. degree by the Council of
Graduate Schools does not specify a foreign language requirement, and
in fact scarcely mentions the topic.s3
Graduate schools generally require two years in residence for doc-
toral programs, in order to provide an appropriate degree of student-
faculty interaction and supervision of the thesis research. The result of
the residence requirement is usually that a candidate must forgo full-
time employment and become a full-time student. However, fully
employed individuals have sometimes been able to complete doctoral
programs without giving up their employment if they are close to a
university campus and if their job assignments are flexible enough to
permit extensive student-faculty interaction and faculty supervision
of the thesis work.
Since Ph.D. programs generally require a minimum of two years in
residence and master's programs require a minimum of one year, the
OCR for page 85
THE DOCTOR'S DEGREE
85
minimum elapsed time between the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees for a stu-
dent enrolled in full-time study would be three years. However, data
collected by the National Research Council show that the average "reg-
istered" time between these two degrees for engineers is 5.8 years, and
the average total elapsed time is 7.5 to 7.9 years;~4 i5 These periods of
time are greater than the minimum time, because few graduate stu-
dents proceed directly from the baccalaureate to the doctor's degree
with unbroken full-time study. There is often a period of employment
before graduate school; also, doctoral students are frequently employed
on a part-time basis by their universities as postgraduate researchers or
as teaching assistants; furthermore, students often are required to take
course work beyond the minimum in order to fill in gaps in their back-
gro~ds; and, finally, there is the classic reason, which is that the thesis
takes longer than expected.
According to Engineering College Research and Gradinate Study,
there were 149 U.S. universities offering doctoral engineering pro-
grams ~ 1983.47 Of these, 137 reported that they awarded one or more
doctor's degrees in 1982-1983.48 Nearly half (46 percent) reported
fewer than 10 doctorates each, and 26 percent reported fewer than 5.
The 30 largest engineering doctorate producers are listed ~ Table 23. In
1982-1983, these 30 institutions produced 62 percent of the engineer-
ing doctorates in the country. Table 23 also shows that the ratio of
doctorates per faculty ranged from 0.12 to 0.75 in 1982-1983, with an
average of 0.32. It is likely that many of these schools could increase
their Ph.D. output, although in order to do so they would probably have
to reduce their undergraduate loads or else expand their resources,
because most schools already are overloaded. It would seem reasonable
that many of the schools which presently have small Ph.D. outputs
could expand their production, and that they have an adequate quality
base from which to do so. The conclusion, then, is that our existing
system of engineering graduate schools is capable of expanding its pro-
duction to the needed levels and that the startup of additional Ph.D.
programs should not be encouraged. Expanding on the present base will
require additional faculty and other resources, but is less expensive
than starting new programs.
Doctoral programs must have a strong base of funded research. Table
24 provides some insight to the magnitude of the cost. The total 1982-
1983 research expenditures for the 30 institutions listed in Table 23 are
shown in Table 24, and are broken down into the following categories:
{ 1 J federal government, t2J state and local government, t3J business and
industry, and {4) an "other" category, which includes private nonprofit
organizations and institutional support. Not all universities reported
OCR for page 86
86 ENGINEERING GRADUATE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
TABLE 23 Thirty Largest Engineering Doctorate Producers {based
On average of 4 years, 1980-1983)
1982- 1983
171
145
170
127
88
79
50
63
64
58
64
55
SS
51
63
44
41
30
50
37
51
41
38
40
35
37
29
36
26
33
1,871
School
MIT
I 11 i n o i s - U r b a n a / C h a m p a i g n
Calif.-Berkeley
Stanford
Purdue
Comell
Calif.-UCLA
Michigan
Northwestern
Wisconsin
Ohio State
Southern Cal.
Texas
Cal. Tech.
Rensselaer
Calif.-Davis
Iowa State
Harvard
Virginia Tech.
Camegie-Mellon
Georgia Tech.
Penn State
Princeton
Texas A&M
Columbia
Minnesota
Univ. of Pa.
Case Western Reserve
Polytechnic Inst. of N.Y.
Colorado State
Degrees per Year
{4-yr alga
166
156
144
124
94
74
66
66
62
57
~6
52
47
45
44
42
38
37
37
36
36
36
36
35
34
34
33
32
32
31
Degrees/
Degrees Faculty Faculty
0.46
0.37
0.74
0.75
0.31
0.38
0.36
0.25
0.50
0.30
0.21
0.39
0.31
0.64
0.39
0.40
0.13
0.59
0.19
0.35
0.19
0.15
0.51
0.12
0.32
0.20
0.29
0.32
0.20
0.32
0.32
373
392
231
169
280
208
139
257
127
192
309
142
176
80
163
110
309
51
265
105
271
282
75
334
108
183
99
111
132
113
5,786
SOURCES: Engineenng and Technology Degrees 1New York: Engineering Manpower
Commission, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983~. Engineenng College Research and Grad-
uate Study, Engineenng Education, March 1984.
data in these categories, and in other cases the data did not match the
totals given for the entire engineering school; in such cases, N/A {"not
available" ~ is shown.
The total 1982-1983 research expenditure for each school has been
divided by the average number of doctor's degrees granted per year in
the 1980-1983 period to give a general idea of the research base support
OCR for page 87
THE DOCTOR'S DEGREE
87
ing the doctoral enterprise. These ratios are shown in Table 24, with
public and private institutions listed in different columns. These "dol-
lars per degree" numbers shouldnot be considered as the cost per degree
and should not even be taken too literally. There are too many differ-
ences in the modes of operation of the different schools to permit such a
simple interpretation. Engineering schools have, for example, varying
kinds of organized research units with various organizational relation-
ships to the schools. Some may be wholly within the schools; others
may be partially or wholly outside the engineering school organiza-
tions, and even though the research of the doctoral students may be
heavily supported by these research units, the schools may report the
dollar amounts in different ways. Furthermore, for some schools a
significant portion of their research contracts may have little involve-
ment on the part of doctoral students. Hence, the figures shown in
Table 24 should be taken as the most general of guides concerning the
dollar magnitude of research required to support a major increase in
doctoral output.
The columns headed "$ per degree" in Table 24 show an average of
$241,000 per doctoral degree for public institutions and $317,000 per
degree for private universities. Thus, if we conservatively use a figure of
$200,000 per doctoral degree, we could anticipate that an increase in
funded research for engineering on the order of $200 million per year
would be required to support an increase from the present level of 3,000
Ph.D.s per year to the projected level of 4,000 or so per year by 1988.
The last column of Table 24 shows that only a small fraction of the total
research funding on the order of 15 percent has historically been
provided by industry. Thus, unless there is a very large increase in
research funding by industry, most of the increase will have to be pro-
vided by government, and this means the federal government primar-
ily, if past patterns prevail. Provision will need to be made also for major
upgrading in research equipment, coming in part from the research
contracts themselves.
A different approach to this same topic may be taken by examining
research support data for the Engineering Directorate of the National
Science Foundation. In Fiscal Year 1983, NSF supported 1,795 graduate
students for a research dollar total of approximately $101 million.
Thus, there was an average of approximately $56,300 of support per
graduate student. Of this, only about $9, 700 went directly to the salary
for each graduate student, on the average, with the rest in salaries for
faculty, postdoctoral students, undergraduate students, secretaries,
technicians, and costs for equipment, travel, computer time, supplies,
and general overhead. The 1,795 graduate students consist of a mix of
OCR for page 88
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OCR for page 90
90 ENGINEERING GRADUATE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
master's and doctor's students, but a comparison with the figure
derived earlier can be made as follows. Let us suppose all of the 1,795
students are doctoral students, and that the students are evenly distrib-
uted throughout the four or five years that are required to complete a
doctoral program. We can then estimate the number of doctor's degrees
per year et one-fourth or one-fifth of the total in the program. If we take
the more conservative figure of one-fourth, then a program with 1,795
doctoral students would produce' about 450 Ph.D.s per year. Dividing
450 degrees per year into the annual expenditure of $101 million gives a
figure of $224,000 of support per Ph.D. degree per year, which corre-
lates well with our earlier figure. Using the assumption of five years to
the degree would give a figure of $280, 500 per Ph.D. degree per year.
The available base of facilities and equipment has fallen well behind
the needs ~ the face of overall enrollment growth. A specific statement
concerning the total need is not possible in the absence of a detailed
nationwide inventory of needs and resources. However, it should be
noted that space needs per student are greater for graduate than for
undergraduate students. The principal need in the case of undergradu-
ates is for classrooms and class laboratories, with related support needs
such as computer facilities and shops. For graduate students, in addi-
tion to classrooms and support facilities there is a substantial need for
research laboratories. For one research university, the University of
California, the space standards provide for 200 square feet of laboratory
space per graduate student, and 300 square feet of lab space per faculty
member, plus another 220 square feet of office and clerical support
space per faculty member. If we made the assumption that all available
space nationally is already utilized and that there is no surplus avail-
able, then the current projection of growth in Ph.D. production by
1,000 per year tunplying 4,000 additional students registered), plus the
space needed to meet the full shortfall of 6,700 faculty, would require
approximately 4.5 million square feet of new space as an upper limit. If
space costs $100 to $250 per square foot, depending upon the sophisti-
cation of the laboratories, then the estimated cost ranges from $450
million to $1 billion {1983 dollars) nationwide. For the states with the
largest engineering enrollments {Califomia, Texas, and New York) on a
proportional basis, this could require an investment on the order of $60
minion to $80 million per state for expansion of facilities and basic
equipment.
There appears to be no definitive data base regarding the true magni-
tude of the need for research equipment in engineering schools. In
Fiscal Year 1984, the National Science Foundation budgeted approxi-
mately $18 million for equipment, out of its total engineering budges of
OCR for page 91
THE DOCTORS DEGREE
91
$123 million.62 NSF accounted for 38 percent of all federal obligations
to Diversities and colleges for basic research in engineering in Fiscal
Year 1983,63 so the total federal support for engineering research equip-
ment probably lies in the range of $50 million to $75 million per year.
NSF has estimated that it has been able to service only a small fraction
of the total need, as evidenced by equipment requests in proposals. A'
part of the need can be met by the $200-million increase in funded
research recommended earlier. This could amount to $35 million to
$40 million per year if past patterns prevail. An additional portion will
be met by the $450-million to $1-billion construction estimate set
forth in the preceding paragraph, since construction budgets typically
include some provision for built-in equipment. The unmet equipment
need could easily be on the order of $100 million, but this figure cannot
be supported by any straightforward analysis. Since much of the need
would be met by the construction budget discussed earlier and by an
augmentation of engineering research of $200 million per year, no sepa-
rate dollar recommendation for this element is included here.
The major increases in federal funding needed to support increased
doctoral programs would no doubt come from a variety of government
agencies. The-traditions of the National Science Foundation have been
productive for the sponsorship of academic research in engineering,
although other government agencies have also found effective ways to
sponsor academic research within their operating guidelines. Increased
emphasis on engineering research within the National Science Founda-
tion, a process that is already occurring, would be a strong stimulus
toward the objectives outlined in this report.
An important issue for engineering schools is the fact that research
leadership in some fields has shifted substantially from academia to
industry, as in the cases of VLSI and automated manufacturing based
upon CAD/CAM. Such shifts are especially likely to occur in fields
where the costs of laboratories are so great that few universities can
afford them. The seriousness of this situation for American technical
education is that graduate work should be couched in a research envi-
ronment at the cutting edge of technology, and if the cutting edge is in
industry, the educational experience will be less valuable than it should
be.
For a handful of universities, industrial funds have been brought
together to establish major research facilities in specialized fields.
Industry should be encouraged to provide such support to the maxi-
mum extent feasible, and it should seek to support a mix of fields rather
than a narrow selection. Government support has also been brought to
bear on the problem of up-to-date research facilities in universities. All
OCR for page 92
92 ENGINEERING GRADUATE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
of these measures are beneficial in helping to establish cutting edge
research environments in Universities, but they cannot cover all the
needs. Additional measures that can be taken include cooperative
industry-university research and consulting relationships for faculty.
These have great potential benefits for academic institutions because
they bring the academic environment closer to the moving frontier of
industrial practice.
Findings and Recommendations
1. The existing system of engineering graduate schools should be
capable of expanding its doctoral production to the increased level that
is needed, and the startup of additional Ph.D. programs should not be
encouraged.
2. An increase of doctoral output will entail a corresponding
increase in fended research. It is estimated that an increase on the order
of $200 million of new funded research per year will be required, princi-
pally from the federal government.
3. The available base of facilities and equipment has fallen well
behind the needs for engineering education. Expansion of the Ph.D.
Output, plus meeting the needs of the full 6,700 "shortfall" in faculty,
would require space on the order of 4.5 million square feet of new space
as an upper limit. The upper-limit cost of such space, depending upon
the sophistication of the laboratories, would range from $450 million
to $1 billion nationwide t1983 dollars).
4. The traditions of the National Science Foundation represent an
excellent model for funding Diversity research. Increased emphasis OF
engineering research within the National Science Foundation is
strongly encouraged.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
graduate schools
