Engineering in Society (1985) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 120-123
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From page 120... ...
The first reaction to the new level of contextual complexity is, quite naturally, to insist that engineering students spend much more time studying the social sciences and the humanities, but as we saw above, there is little likelihood that more time will be made available for these subjects. A second and more promising response is to say that an instrumental approach to the social/humanistic component of engineering education now compels us to recast instruction in these subjects so that engineering students will be able better to understand the fundamental concerns and claims that lie behind the new public attitudes and policies.
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From page 121... ...
A survey of those who prior to 1920 were doing the kind of work that came to be associated with petroleum engineering reveals that only 9 percent were trained in this field. Of the 147 practicing engineers in the survey who had degrees, over one quarter had received degrees in geology, another quarter had degrees in mining engineering, and the remaining half held degrees in chemistry or other fields of engineering.
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From page 122... ...
For instance, in the area of petroleum engineering the 1973 oil embargo, an event that certainly evaded prediction, created a decade-long sharp increase in the demand for petroleum engineers. While this heightened demand led to increased enrollments in degree programs in petroleum engineering, it was satisfied in the short run primarily by an influx of engineers who moved into petroleum engineering from related areas in science and technology.
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From page 123... ...
While this retreat from the space frontier has received a great deal of highly charged publicity, it appears that during the period of decline the engineers in NASA and in the corporations with which it has contracted have either successfully returned to the jobs they held before the Apollo program- or have taken the experience they gained while on that project and applied it elsewhere. Thus while both the expansion and contraction of the Apollo program had the potential for creating a crisis in the engineering manpower system, that system in fact exhibited a surprising degree of resilience in responding to the stresses placed upon it.
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