Increasing US intellectual capital through career long education for engineers

Ability to compete in the international market–place is largely determined by national resources of engineering and scientific intellectual capital. The high quality of recent graduates from US engineering colleges is a significant factor in sustaining this resource. However, the combination of fierce worldwide economic competition, accelerating technological change, US demographic factors, the decline in the quality of public education (particularly in mathematics and science) and the increasing need for more engineers in organizational functions where they were previously seldom found, causes the total US supply of engineering capital to be insufficient to sustain the US position in the global economic competition. Investment in post–baccalaureate, career–long education of practising engineers can overcome the shortage of engineering intellectual capital. Because practising engineers are widely scattered geographically – frequently far removed from established engineering colleges – and because their educational needs are extraordinarily diverse, new approaches are required to achieve the necessary expansion of the US engineering intellectual capital resource base. The extensive use of modern information technologies can overcome the problems of distance, dispersion, travelling time and availability. A new type of educational institution – the 'televersity' – is emerging as a result.