What is higher education for?

I have blogged in plenty about how when I was a high school student, an overwhelming majority of students aimed for engineering or medicine.  Even though I never really had any dreams of engineering, I too went that route because I did not know any better as a seventeen year old.

People in India then, and in many developing countries even now, have this obsession with engineering and medicine for very good reasons--they seem to provide a higher probability of jobs and income compared to other routes.  And,  perhaps even a path out of the country should one choose to leave.

As one who has always been interested in understanding the humanity, I schemed and planned to make my exit from engineering and from the country too.  But, the young and idealistic commie in me could have been easily misled into less constructive paths; thankfully, I have never believed in violence.  

Soon after the events of 9/11, and with incidents thereafter, it was interesting to see that many of the agents of destruction had been well educated and, yes, with a technology background.  That set of issues is the context for this essay, which begins with:

In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad hoped to kill dozens of pedestrians when he parked his Nissan Pathfinder near Times Square, loaded with improvised bombs. Four months earlier, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight carrying 289 passengers by igniting explosives sewn into his underwear. Last year, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire on two military facilities in Tennessee, killing five soldiers.
Like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Azahari Husin, and Mohamed Atta, these men sought to commit acts of terror in the name of Islam.
But all six also shared something else. They had studied engineering.
Researchers have long noticed that an oddly large number of jihadists have engineering backgrounds. 

To which we need to also add Osama bin Laden, who graduated with a degree in civil engineering.  (His fellow brain, Zawahiri, was a medical graduate--a surgeon.)  It does not mean that engineering breeds terrorists.  It is simply a reflection of the fact that many of the thinking young in developing countries study engineering.    

My interest in this post is not to explore terrorism, but about one of the threads in that essay:

Donna M. Riley, a professor in the department of engineering education at Virginia Tech, thinks that traditional programs not only attract certain kinds of minds but also reinforce positivist patterns of thinking. General-education courses are intended to broaden students’ perspectives, but those requirements are increasingly being narrowed. And she worries that the less exposure that nascent engineers have to the humanities and social sciences, the less they will be able to appreciate other people’s perspectives. As it is, she says, "engineers spend almost all their time with the same set of epistemological rules."
Gambetta and Hertog describe how traditional engineering programs might inadvertently spur the kind of loss of significance that Kruglanski describes. "Engineering curricula anywhere are a giant showcase of Western technological achievements," they write. In developing countries, such triumphalism carries an edge of humiliation: "They throw the economic backwardness of local societies into sharp relief."

The engineering program that I did was no different from programs at other colleges back then (which is the case even now)--we had no contextualization of engineering against the background of the humanities and the social sciences.  There was not even one course that made us think about what we could contribute to society through engineering.  It was simply engineering for the sake of engineering, which then threw "the economic backwardness of local societies into sharp relief."  To most engineering students this backwardness becomes an incentive for their own material progress.  But, for me, this contrast was unbearable.  I had to understand the reasons for the relative backwardness.  I needed to understand the world.

Contemporary engineering education in the United States is also increasingly about engineering for the sake of engineering, which has serious social implications of a different kind:

Engineering curricula in the United States may unintentionally close minds, too, according to a 2014 study by Erin A. Cech, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University. Cech, who earned undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and sociology, analyzed survey responses by 326 students in four engineering programs. Between their freshman year and graduation, their self-reported answers showed drops in measures of public-mindedness, including a commitment to professional and ethical responsibilities and a social consciousness.
The discipline’s culture and curricula emphasize "an ideology of depoliticization," she argues, which treats nontechnical factors as irrelevant to the work of "real" engineering. The notion of meritocracy also runs through the discipline, she writes, but this ideal tends to accept existing social structures and relationships as inherently fair. "Engineering education," Cech writes, "fosters a culture of disengagement that defines public welfare concerns as tangential to what it means to practice engineering."

Meritocracy run amok is the story of contemporary Silicon Valley.  Public welfare?  Social consciousness?

If only higher education could help us think about issues that are much bigger, and more important, than our selves!