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Need for a Tough Entrance Exam based Scholarship for US Engineering Schools

An Apology:

 In this web page, I am going to say a lot of negative things about the state of US education, in particular engineering education. However, my intent is not to offend or displease anyone. But I do believe in sticking to the truth, especially when it is without any sugar coating. The exposure to such truth is definitely painful, but I believe America is a great nation that is not afraid of looking at any such bleak analysis. It is a super power in every aspect, is the leader of free world and rightly deserves its reputation of being a beacon to the oppressed people of the world. It has the capacity to learn from its weaknesses and emerge stronger and wiser from such exposure. My favorite example is its bouncing back in the area of automotive manufacturing when the American companies, at one time on their backs due to the overwhelming Japanese competition, bounced back by learning from their weaknesses and regained the competitive edge they had lost. Hence I sincerely hope that America will learn and emerge stronger after learning about its current abysmal state of education.

Vision Statement:

The American undergraduate education in engineering has fallen below international standards. A vast majority of high school students entering the engineering schools are underprepared for carrying out a rigorous, international level and mathematically challenging engineering education. The many scholarship programs tried by various schools seem to have gone nowhere as the quality of incoming students continues to remain deplorable. There seems to be a trend in reducing the mathematical and theoretical content of engineering courses taught at various engineering schools for accommodating such inadequately prepared incoming students. This seems to be a race to the bottom.

To break through this cycle of implementing ineffective schemes, I propose to create tough exams in math and physics at the senior high school level and encourage high school students to undergo intense one- to two-year preparation to pass it. The idea is that during this preparation, the high school students learn all the necessary math and mathematical physics necessary for successfully negotiating an international-level engineering education program.

The reward at the end of it will be an all expense paid yearly scholarship of $50k for four years in the engineering school of choice. This is necessary for inducing the students and their families to undergo this arduous preparation that will ultimately prove extremely beneficial for them and the state of engineering education in our country.

Amount of money needed for such a scholarship is not a big amount, in fact it pales in comparison with the amount we spend on campaigning for not-so-inspiring elections; and it is truly insignificant compared to the money spent on futile wars conducted by US on foreign soils.

Introduction:

Let me start with establishing my credentials. For the last fifteen years or so, I have been working as a professor of mechanical engineering at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). During this time, I have established an active research program at the university where I guide several top-level graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and university professionals. (Visit http://www4.uwm.edu/porous/)

Before joining the university, I have undergone intense high-level professional preparation for this role that included a PhD in mechanical engineering at University of Delaware and a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and National Institute of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD. Before coming to the USA, I had done my basic B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in mechanical engineering at one of the premier engineering school of India, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. I have worked for one year in India at the R&D center of one of the top machine tool manufacturers of India.

While teaching mechanical engineering courses at UWM, I came to realize that whenever I taught a demanding course such as fluid mechanics, I faced a lot of problems with the students in terms of understanding the material and applying math to solve home assignment and exam problems. Especially if I insisted on having a demanding course content involving a lot of derivations and ‘tough’ home assignments. I have also discovered, like several other engineering professors, that there is a big gap in the math and theory content of graduate and undergraduate level courses.

It has been almost impossible for me to recruit graduate students from the native population of Milwaukee and south-east Wisconsin as the mathematical, theoretical and computational preparation of students from UWM and other local area engineering colleges remain pathetically low. If I hire such students to work on research projects funded by government agencies and companies, I will never be able to meet the demanding project objectives. As a result, I always end up recruiting foreign students with superior skills that are needed to meet the project goals. This is perhaps true for the majority of UWM professors. In fact, this story is repeated in all the engineering colleges across the US. Most of the faculty and graduate students in US engineering schools are of foreign origin.  The major positive reason is that the US is still the Mecca of engineering professionals and is able to attract the best and brightest in this area from all over the world. However, it hides another troubling reality which is that the engineering education (especially at the undergraduate level) offered by most US colleges is below international standards, and as a result, most US students who are interested in pursuing research careers at US universities are unable to do so because of their weak training. In fact, one of my industrial acquaintances in a major company (he is a PhD from a good US university and has held very important research positions in US companies) told me that most US engineers are scared of math and are not at all comfortable in dealing with heavy scientific and theoretical/computational aspects of their research work. And this too in a major multinational company that believes in hiring its engineers from the best engineering schools of the country. The observation that US engineers are weak in their math and physics training is borne by my own experience of interacting with US engineers. Except for one or two exceptions, I have not come across any US engineer that can handle the research input with much confidence.

In today’s interconnected world, US engineering students will have to compete with students everywhere to get jobs. Companies will go to places where they can get the best prepared engineers for smallest amount of money. This is the reason why the R&D centers and manufacturing plants of some big companies such as GE, Microsoft, Ansys, etc. are beginning to appear in other countries/regions such as Russia, East Europe, India and China. This leads to the question as to what are these other countries doing that is not being done by the US. In most of these countries, the admissions to the premier engineering schools, often run by governments, is highly selective and is based on some nationally conducted admission exam. Though in US also we have means to select students through exams such as SAT, ACT or AP (Advanced Placement) course exams, but such exams are quite easy compared to the entrance exams of these above mentioned countries (as well as countries such as Iran, S. Korea, etc.) Case in point are the following US exams

http://www.cracksat.net/sat2/math/test903.html

http://www.act.org/caap/sampletest/pdf/Math.pdf

http://www.analyzemath.com/ap_calculus/bc_calculus_1.html

Now compare them with the entrance exams of some select countries:

There are some who many say that by instituting these entrance exams, we will be creating an army of robots, nerds who are merely good at taking such tests but  lack other attributes important in life.  That they will lack qualities which leads to entrepreneurship. I disagree and would invite you to take a look at the following 60 minutes show done on the IITs of India:

There are others who will argue that all this will create a frenzy among the high schoolers and their parents, and lead to high stress levels and other problems. But the present system already does create this frenzy and stress– which it often directed to burnish their resumes by doing all sorts of activities such as SAT and ACT preparations, extracurricular activities, sports, etc. (The high schoolers suddenly develop a lot of ‘interests’ with an eye on getting college admissions and scholarships.) The STEM minded high schoolers  will be better served if this ‘frenzy’ is directed to  increase the expertise in solving tough math and science problems that will help them master the math dominated engineering courses laters on.

Future Work:

My aim is to attract a group of interested educators (professors and high school teachers in math and physics) who do the following:

  1. Meet regularly to create a tough exam in math and physics. This should involve gleaning the tough entrance exams in the world and developing a similar exam for the US students with problems set at the same level of difficulty.
  2. Administer the set exam to high school juniors from Wisconsin
  3. Give out scholarships to the high-achievers in this exam
  4. Develop and submit proposals to agencies such as National Science Foundation, and seek grants for financing such scholarships
  5. Solicit gifts for this purpose from wealthy private individuals and local companies

Our aim will not be just to set the exam and dish out scholarships based on its results, but we will also endeavour to develop/select suitable preparatory material to (a) help the prospective applicants (i.e., high school students) with the preparation for the exam, and (b) help the high school teachers prepare the interested students for the exam. We will also seek to develop suitable coaching classes for this purpose (which can give jobs to our math and engineering graduates, and thus boost the local economy).

THE PAGE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION. DATE OF LAST CHANGE: AUG 24, 2017