Limited local faculty expertise and limited curricular flexibility suggest the need for alternative approaches in education. In response, the way in which engineers are educated is changing. For example, there has been increased attention to continuing education opportunities for practicing engineers, addressing the need for content beyond that available in the four-year program. Additionally, advances in communications technology have opened up opportunities for distance learning, which could enable more depth in topical coverage for students in departments without local faculty expertise.

A second comprehensive National Academies study of MSE was completed in 1989. No convenient acronym has attached itself to this study entitled "Maintaining Competitiveness in the Age of Materials" and authored by a Committee on Materials Science and Engineering co-chaired by Praveen Chaudhari of the IBM Watson Research Center, and Merton Flemings of MIT.⁵ For convenience this document will be referred to here as the COMSE report. In this updated look at the field, the committee once again dealt with education and workforce issues while bringing strong focus to the subjects of synthesis and processing of materials and a changing world in which international advances in MSE would now be increasingly important.

No subsequent comprehensive National Academies study of materials research has been made, although many of the sub-elements discussed in both the COSMAT and COMSE reports have been revisited in stand-alone studies carried out under committees of the National Research Council (both the NMAB and the Solid State Sciences Committee (SSSC) have been and remain active in this regard). While no subsequent peer-reviewed discussion of materials education is available, two relatively recent workshops have led to careful analysis of various aspects of materials education and will be frequently referenced.

In the first of these workshops, the NMAB invited presentations from educators and industrial representatives at a workshop entitled, "Workforce and Education in Materials Science and Engineering: Is Action Needed?" Hosted at the Beckman Center of the National Academies in Irvine, California, the workshop was held in October 2002.⁶ No proceedings are available (in accord with National Academies rules), but publically available presentations reflecting the views of the authors will be quoted by name with the reference to the "NMAB Workshop." A summary by NMAB of the presentations made at the time is reproduced here as Appendix B.

The second workshop, sponsored by NSF in September 2008, was quite broad in nature, covering public awareness of the materials field (informal education), K-12, undergraduate, and graduate education all within a brief two-day meeting. Nevertheless, the reports prepared for this workshop and the final, publically available document offer excellent information on the current state of the materials education enterprise. Identified as "Future of Materials Science and Engineering Education," this report will be referred to here as "NSF Workshop."⁷

Flemings and Ferguson each describe how these departments evolved over the years, beginning at a time when empirical observation of macroscopic and optical microscopic evidence was all that was to be had for the metallurgist. Slowly, new experimental tools and understanding were introduced into the research portfolio and the curriculum. Thermodynamics, kinetics of reactions, diffusion theory, quantum mechanics and solid state physics, dislocation theory, x-ray diffraction, transmission and scanning electron microscopies—these and many other elements of the metallurgy courses of the late 1950s were readily traceable to their first appearance in chemistry and physics research. The impact of science on the more applied area of metallurgy was already being felt in these years, but collaborative efforts among the disciplines were few.

Suffice it to say that when ARPA initiated its call for the proposals for Inter-Disciplinary Laboratories of materials research, academic departments in the materials fields were primarily focused on metals with only a few targeted at ceramics or polymeric materials. We should recall that government sponsorship of research was not yet significant, with small grants available primarily from DoD and also from NSF, then in its early years of growth. Research was strongly influenced by perceptions of industrial need and undergraduate education in these separate fields was focused on meeting those same industrial needs for engineers. This was now to change, stimulated by the ARPA funding and the several other government programs that followed in the 1960s and later.

One convenient way to judge the evolution of technical focus of these materials departments from afar is to examine the names they used to advertise themselves to the world. (This next paragraph is extracted and edited from COSMAT, Vol. III.⁴) In 1970 there were 89 U.S. universities with their degree programs designated as in the materials area. The degrees included metallurgy, metallurgical engineering, ceramic engineering, metallurgy and materials science, solid state science (interpreted as materials science), materials science, and polymers. Of these 89, at least 45 had graduate or undergraduate programs with the word materials in the title, as part of a phrase such as materials science, materials engineering, solid-state science (taken to be equivalent to materials science). There were 31 programs with titles involving only metallurgy, though eight of the 14 materials and solid-state science programs had evolved from those in metallurgy. In contrast, there were only 14 degree programs in ceramics and four in polymerics (not including degrees in chemistry with specialization in polymers), in spite of the wide use of the latter materials. These program titles had changed significantly over the previous decade; in 1960, there were virtually no programs with the word materials in the title. Table I lists the titles existing in 1964 and 1970 as direct evidence of this change. Another reference point for comparison with today is the fact (COSMAT, Vol. III, Table 7.29⁴) that of these departments in the United States in 1970, 78 schools with "materials" departments offered bachelors degrees in 89 departments, seven of them including mining or minerals in their names.

In his presentation to the NMAB Workshop in 2002, Abaschian took a look at the continuing evolution of materials departments. His survey of the ASM Education handbook in 2000 identified 69 departments offering undergraduate degrees in materials, with an additional nine materials majors available in other engineering departments (ChE, ME, EE, and CE). He noted that the total number of departments listed had decreased from an apparent high of 107 in 1993 as 15 were "consumed or merged" with other engineering departments. He also noted an increase in average number of faculty/department, from 16.4 in 1993 to 18.3 in 2000. (Similar data have been presented by others including Flemings.¹⁰) Abaschian and others have described this disappearance of small departments and growth of the larger ones as the "Ostwald Ripening" of MSE departments. Thus after the peak in numbers of departments in the late 1980s or early 1990s, the number decreased through mergers and consumption but the names and technical programs of the remaining programs became more "materials" oriented.

There are two convenient metrics to use to explore the current status of these two trends. In his remarks to the UMC meeting on November 30, 2009, Peter Davies focused on the organization and names of departments. Several of his charts are included here as Appendix C. Davies emphasized that the number of independent (standalone) MSE departments which offer undergraduate degrees is 46 with six additional departments of that name offering only graduate programs. It is important to note that all of these departments are in engineering schools. In addition, there are a variety of other departments that offer undergraduate degrees in materials areas from faculty located in combined departments (ChE & MS [11] and ME &MS [6] dominating) and other programs of various sorts. (Note: I located an ABET-accredited undergraduate degree at the University of Akron named Mechanical-Polymer Engineering in addition to the graduate programs noted by Davies.) Davies compares his current data with that summarized by Flemings in 1999 (last chart in Appendix C) to emphasize the significant changes that have occurred in the past decade.

This compilation of department names and organizations tends to focus attention on organizational and management issues. One may speculate that the trend toward joint departments will be followed by no replacements as faculty retire and is but a first step toward the eventual disappearance of degrees in materials at those schools. On the other hand, one may also speculate that in at least some instances the joint departments will result in further rich development of the field at the natural interfaces between the disciplines. Time will tell, but this may be an interesting subject for further investigation.

A second way to look at the data about materials departments and degrees is to focus on the degree names. Davies identifies those schools with ABET accreditation, but his compilation does not contain the names of degrees nor does it identify those instances in which a department (or school) has elected to accredit more than one degree. I carried out a review of the data from the ABET web pages in 2009 producing the data summarized in Appendix D. Note that ABET categorizes degrees under three general headings, Materials Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, and Ceramic Engineering with somewhat different criteria applied by the evaluators selected with the insight of the participating professional societies. The names of these 70 accredited undergraduate materials degrees are directly from ABET and represent degree names designated by the schools seeking accreditation. Cross comparison of these data and those of Davies makes it clear that many of the combined departments continue to seek degree accreditation for their materials undergraduate programs and that many of these are using MSE (40 total) or materials (19 total) in their titles. Thus fully 82% of the undergraduate programs include a broad range of materials. (The number of ABET-accredited mining and minerals degrees is a significant 13, actually greater than the number listed with such names in 1970, for a total of 83 accredited mining and materials degrees.)

Thus, over the 50 years since the IDLs began, there has been a great shuffle. Many new departments have emerged, some successful, others not. Many mergers and some disappearances have now produced a net result not really much different in numbers of accredited degrees from the 1970s. The resultant academic content and professional orientation of these degrees, however, is profoundly changed and it is on those changes and their impacts on undergraduate education that this paper focuses. In parallel with this historical view of the numbers and names of departments, it is interesting to look at historical trends in enrollment, or more conveniently at numbers of graduates. In the COSMAT report a chart of numbers of materials degrees vs. year appears for the first time. For the departments included in that study (which included mining), graduates numbered as follows: B.S. degrees roughly constant at ~900, ± 100, for the entire two decade period of 1950 to 1970; M.S. degrees starting at ~200 in 1950, gradually increased to ~400 in 1970; Ph.D. degrees increased dramatically from only ~45 in 1950 to ~200 in 1970.

Direct comparison with the COSMAT data is problematical as mining may or may not have been excluded from current data sets. Consider the more recent data shown in Figure 1. This figure is drawn from Heckel¹¹ who states: "The primary sources of data for U.S. universities were the annual surveys of the Engineering Workforce Commission (EWC) of the American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES). These surveys began in the late 1960s and have been a credible source since that time." It might be prudent for UMC to contract with Heckel and his consulting firm Engineering Trends to gain access to consistent data on this and other topics of future analyses.

During the period since COSMAT appeared, the number of undergraduate degrees has not varied much from the average of about 900/year. The downward trend in the 1980s may be readily interpreted as due to students' (and parents') recognition of decreasing job opportunity in the metals areas with little knowledge of future job opportunities yet to be revealed in the application of other materials. The continuing increase in Ph.D. degrees from this same field reflects the expanding federal funding for other materials areas, the expanding and broadening faculties in materials departments, and the enrichment of the field in general. Of course, as federal funding for materials leveled off and then fell in fixed dollar amounts through the 1990s, so did the number of Ph.D. degrees. These same factors may account in part for the transitions in departments described earlier. Recent expansion in funding as a consequence of dramatic increases in NIH (bio-) and NSF (nano-) have more than restored the numbers of Ph.D.s.

More interesting for the purposes of this paper is the numbers of B.S. degrees. Heckel speculated that department sizes, already beginning to grow in 2005 would continue to do so. Data from another reliable source,¹² the AAES annual statistics about engineering education, confirms Heckel's expectations as the number of B.S. degrees in the materials fields increased from a stated 875 in 1999 to 1,095 in 2008. Anecdotal observations noted by those in UMC meetings are that their undergraduate enrolments are continuing to increase, with some departments exhibiting substantial growths. Based on these observations, one may expect the number of BSE degrees in materials to continue to grow well beyond 1,100. It isn't clear what all of the drivers for this trend may be, but certainly one of these is pressure from engineering deans. Recent revised procedures for apportioning revenues based on tuitions received have dramatically increased the pressures on departments with small undergraduate enrollment. One consequence of this is the trend already noted that some small departments have disappeared or merged with other engineering departments. The other, quite clearly, is enhanced attention to recruiting and retention. These latter subjects are of sufficient interest that they will be covered in greater depth in a separate section. Closing this discussion, one would be remiss in not noting that the limits to undergraduate enrollment are closely tied to available laboratory space and faculty who have expertise in and can teach the core courses of the department as well as those in their specialty.

In principal the wide breadth of a typical materials department should not cause problems for the undergraduate educational curriculum, but it does because of limits on faculty size. Balance in size with competing departments within the engineering school, finite classroom and laboratory space and modest interest on the part of undergraduate enrollees has kept the department size of many successful departments near 20 for some years. As the breadth of the research agendas increases, so the number of faculty with any particular area of emphasis decreases. Many departments address the desire for breadth in research areas by joint appointments, but this does not necessarily satisfy the needs for undergraduate teaching. Where is one to find the expertise to teach the varied courses desired for the modern undergraduate engineering curriculum? This subject was clearly on the minds of the committee members who wrote the 1989 COMSE report:

"The historical roots of materials departments are evident in the background and interests of the faculty now teaching in those departments. Of the estimated 1000 faculty members in materials departments in the United States, about 70 percent have metallurgy as a primary research focus. This group includes scientists and engineers specializing in extractive, processing, mechanical, and physical metallurgy, as well as those who have traditionally worked with metallic systems to understand general phenomena that can apply to many types of materials. Of the remaining 30 percent of the faculty members in materials departments, about 12 percent specialize in ceramics, 9 percent in polymers, and 9 percent in semiconducting, magnetic, or optical materials.

The growing importance of materials classes other than metals could undoubtedly lead to a different distribution of research interest among materials department faculty in the future. Already, many former metallurgists and chemists are broadening their research and teaching and are pioneering in the development of the new field of materials science and engineering.

In the future, the hiring policies of materials-designated departments, particularly materials science and engineering departments, should reflect the goal of a comprehensive, generic educational program. This can best be accomplished by achieving a faculty balanced in background and research interests and of sufficient size to adequately address the burgeoning materials area, and by seeking faculty members whose interests extend to more than one materials class. Of necessity, smaller programs must create effective links with other departments to ensure adequate coverage."

A comprehensive update of this data on faculty expertise would certainly be interesting, though gross figures of the research interests of the faculties of all departments is not the most relevant data set. Rather, to fully explore this question of faculty expertise available for undergraduate teaching, one would need to know not only the academic training of the faculty, but what they have learned since, clearly an unlikely accomplishment and not one I'm prepared to pursue as an individual. In lieu of that, this brief examination of the diverse faculty backgrounds in MSE departments will be limited to graduate academic background. Planning ahead for the discussion of undergraduate curriculum to come in a subsequent section on Undergraduate Curriculum in MSE, the focus will be on the 15 materials departments chosen for study by Kevin Jones in his preparation for the NSF Workshop in 2008.

Data from the web sites of these 15 MSE departments was searched (in a few instances aided by direct contact with departments) and compiled in the table included as Appendix E Ph.D. Data for 15 Top MSE Departments. The size distribution of these departments is displayed in the figure in Appendix E. While there are three rather large departments (two at the Institutes of Technology), most are in the 20–30 range. This is certainly larger than 20 years ago, but quantitative comparison is hard to make, since data on these specific departments is not readily available for that time period. (My own recollection of the Northwestern MSE Department is that FTE size was ~18 in the mid-1980s and it has now grown to ~23.) It's important to note that the data in this Appendix represent faculty listed, not FTE. Thus, in some instances the quoted "size" of the department may be greater than that counted by the department budget data. Nonetheless, this list is valuable for determining expertise available, as in general each department may draw from joint appointees for undergraduate teaching as well as graduate and research responsibilities. Certainly, we see in this size growth some evidence of consolidation (ceramic and polymer departments merging with MSE departments), but also some growth to include other areas of research as funding sources broadened their scope.

While a direct comparison with COMSE data is not readily made, it is clear from the tabulated data (and from looking at all of the young male and female faces pictured on the web sites) that these 15 MSE departments are vastly more diverse in every respect from those of the mid-1980s. Specifically, only 15% cite degrees in metallurgy, polymers, or ceramics. While 38% have MSE degrees, many of these are certainly focused on technical activity other than structural materials (functional materials, "soft" materials, bio- and nano-materials, etc.). This is in stark contrast with the observation of COMSE that only 9% of the faculty interests were focused on non-structural materials.

Even more interesting to me in the context of a discussion about undergraduate degrees in an engineering school, is the fraction of these faculty members with degrees other than from engineering schools. More than 30% have degrees in chemistry, physics, or other sciences. I hasten to add that individuals bring many things to undergraduate instruction in addition to the experiences of their academic training, but there is no question that the make-up of these MSE departments differs dramatically from that of their counterparts in the other engineering departments whose faculties are, by and large, educated and experienced in engineering, not science.

While these "top 15" departments have changed dramatically, that is certainly not true for all materials departments. I have not taken the time to explore all departments (a task that might be avoided by a centrally managed web site with encouragement for each department to display this and other data), but I did take a look at several departments that offered more traditional undergraduate degrees in metallurgical and/or ceramic engineering. Typically these departments are quite small of order 8–10 faculty. [The one major exception to this is the Missouri Science and Technology University (formerly University of Missouri-Rolla). Here departments of metallurgy and ceramics have been merged to form one 23 member MSE department. ABET-accredited degrees are still offered in each material area with an MSE "option" also available.] While these departments include an occasional member with some other engineering degree, none that I looked at had any faculty member with a Ph.D. degree from physics or chemistry. In some instances (e.g., University of Alabama-Birmingham-MSE, the course listings and curriculum requirements look rather like that displayed by the top 15 (see section on Undergraduate Curriculum in MSE). In most cases, however, the curriculum superficially looks much as it might have looked 20 years ago, with the presumption on my part that the actual content in each of the topical areas is fully up-to-date.

Does this distribution of faculty backgrounds really matter to the issue at hand, undergraduate education? Well, yes and no. Since ABET is flexible, each department is really being judged against its own clearly articulated goals and metrics. Thus the undergraduate experience at each department is molded collectively by the entire local faculty and is what it is. No comparison with other engineering departments is made by ABET. Furthermore, if the program is successful in recruiting and retaining undergraduate students as well as maintaining a successful research program, most engineering deans will be satisfied.

My own concerns are focused at the undergraduate experience received by the students and the way this meshes with future employment opportunities and continuing education needs. I don't presume to have answers here. I'm too far away from the day-to-day undergraduate instruction and only see what's going on as an outside advisor to one department and an adjunct member of another. I do have concerns that the focus of the undergraduate programs in many departments may be too heavy on science and too weak on engineering and that this may be reflected in a workforce that does not meet industrial needs. I expect that this deficiency can be made up by a robust postgraduate continuing education with many varieties of formats, but worry that as a community we are failing to give sufficient attention to this aspect of materials engineering education.

Professional Associations
As science, engineering, and technical employment developed over the last century, professional associations were a natural complement. Offering arenas for exchange of technical information, networking for jobs, education accreditation service, and continuing education for professionals, and in many instances opportunities for socialization, these societies strengthen the disciplines and assist in the acculturization process for young professionals. For most academic departments, the choice of primary society is obvious and common to all members of the faculty. Physicists join the American Physical Society, chemists the American Chemical Society (ACS), mechanical engineers, ASME, civil engineers, ASCE, and so on. For many members these are their only professional organizations, while for most it is their primary one of several. Those organizations in the case of the engineering societies are the prime caretakers of the accreditation process and the home for discussion of the curricular needs of the professionals in training.

The materials field has grown up in the evolutionary manner described above, and with it has developed an array of professional societies. Even an incomplete list will make the point: ASM International (formerly the American Society for Metals), TMS, Materials Research Society (MRS), ACerS, Association for Iron and Steel Technology (AIST), Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE), National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE), American Welding Society (AWS), and for many faculty in materials departments, ASME, APS, ACS, etc., etc., etc. Clearly there is no single organization that provides the home for the faculties of materials departments and just as clearly there is no one place to seek the society benefits described above. Only through collaborative efforts amongst the societies can many of these issues be addressed, and unfortunately until recently, such collaboration has been rare.

Two examples of independent activity in materials education serve to make this point most clearly. Many professional societies support publications designed to display the pedagogical aspects of education as does the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), which serves all of the engineering disciplines. Papers on materials education have appeared at one time or another in many of these publications, but the only continuing format for such publications is an independent organization formed solely to publish such work and affiliated with no society at all. The Journal of Materials Education is published by the International Council on Materials Education (www.unt.edu/ICME/index.html). According to its web pages, this organization, devoted solely to materials education, is "the continuing agency of the Materials Science and Engineering Community. It deals with all aspects of education in the field of Materials Science & Engineering, organizes workshops and symposia, cooperates with other organizations involved in materials educations and also publishes the Journal of Materials Education (JME)." The Journal of Materials Education began publication in 1979 (as the Journal of Educational Modules for Materials Science and Engineering). The 31st volume of this journal was published in 2009. JME is now published three times a year, and is the vehicle for distribution of instructional information about the expanding world of material science. Papers found in JME range from those of very specific technical nature and detail to broad discussions of accreditation and education principles A brief survey of the council web pages shows little activity beyond the publication of JME although a brief report of the 16th meeting (in 2001) of another independent activity "NEW" is posted.

The National Educators Workshop (NEW) was the brainchild and constant focus of Jim Jacobs of Norfolk State University in Virginia. Jacobs, with the financial and local site assistance of several DOE, DoD, and DOC labs and funding agencies, has organized independent educational symposia (NEW: Update) where materials educators share demonstrations and experiments that they have used in classes. Many of these examples have subsequently been published in JME, on a NASA-maintained web site, and in some instances (with the help of the ASM Materials Education Foundation, MRS, or others) on CDs or on-line. Jacobs is no longer leading this effort, but it continues to be maintained by faculty at Edmonds Community College in Lynnwood, Washington, and is supported by NSF in a large grant focused on the development of materials technology education, largely at community colleges (www.materialseducation.org/educators/new/).

Summary
This section was entitled "Shaping the Discipline" with the intention of being deliberately contentious. There has been much discussion over the years as to whether MSE is a "field," a research area, a discipline, all of these, or something else. These rather tedious discussions will certainly continue, but I come down strongly in favor of "discipline" when referring to the academic degree by that name. Over time, academic departments have assumed the name and the breadth of content consistent with the full spectrum of materials. Forty two (including non-accredited Stanford University and University of Virginia) of the undergraduate degrees now have the title MSE on the diploma and 20 others include the word "materials." It will be seen in the section titled Undergraduate Curriculum in MSE that the curricula of 15 of the leading undergraduate departments with titles of MSE share a common core. All of the 74 undergraduate departments would accept the idea that their common underpinning is the structure, properties, processing, and performance relations of the many materials of interest to engineers. What more is required to affirm the existence of a discipline?

Both the COSMAT and COMSE studies and the NMAB Workshop addressed the issue of workforce and since these were spaced at intervals of ~10–15 years give a useful, if fuzzy picture of the industrial workforce issues.

From COSMAT: "Existing data on scientific and engineering manpower generally are not categorized along the multidisciplinary lines of materials science and engineering. We have used a list of specialties characterizing the field, therefore, to extract manpower data from prime sources. On this basis it appears that materials science and engineering involves some 500,000 of the 1.8 million scientists and engineers in the United States. We estimate that there is a full-time equivalent of 315,000 scientists and engineers in the field, including about 115,000 full-time practitioners. Within the latter group are approximately 50,000 professionals holding materials-designated degrees.

Summary
Undergraduate materials education takes place in the milieu of all engineering education and is subject to all of the pressures and constraints imposed by the surroundings. Many of these pressures are enriching the undergraduate experience, bringing design squarely on to the scene, enhancing the first year and encouraging success, rather than anticipating failure on the part of as many as one-third of entering students. On the other hand, these factors strongly influence the curriculum flexibility and available time that may be devoted to specialization. How are materials departments adjusting? What are the impacts on curricula?

It is in the area of specialization that there appears to be the most variance amongst the 15 departments. Typical curricula have 4–6 course slots available that may be organized into specializations (somewhat less formal than "majors"). Jones presents one example of the variability one might expect to find with the list shown as Table VI. In this list of processing courses available beyond the core course, processing of metals, ceramics and polymers appear with the highest frequency as might have been expected, but the diversity is large, reflecting the broad range of technical focus among the 15 departments.

The arguments in favor of specialization are straight forward. Students will get a deeper understanding and command of the technical issues surrounding a narrow material type (metal, ceramic, composite, semiconductor, etc.) or area of current research interest (nanotechnology or biotechnology). They will presumably be better prepared for the specific industry group targeted by the specialization or will be better prepared for graduate study in the area of specialization. For some faculty, specialization may be seen as a recruiting and/or retention tool. For the student, it offers options that may be ideal for those who "know where they want to go next." For some in industry who really want to hire a "metallurgist," it offers the next best thing, MSE undergraduates with strong knowledge that can be readily expanded with self-study in the specialty area.

The counterarguments to specialization are less clearly articulated. These arguments seem to center around the idea that a B.S. in MSE should be "branded". Just as one might expect that any B.S. graduate in Civil or Electrical Engineering would be prepared for the next stage in career paths normally followed by civil or electrical engineers, so should MSE graduates. Implied here are assumptions about the uniformity in undergraduate degrees in CE and EE that may not be justified in practice, but that are stated goals of these and other engineering disciplines. Thus the arguments against specialization appear to be arguments in favor of further clarifying the disciplinarity of MSE.

Of course, the choices of specialty areas in any department are limited by availability of faculty to teach the desired range of courses and sufficient size in the undergraduate department to justify the inevitable small class sizes in specialty courses. Larger departments have greater flexibility to offer more specialization. Analysis of the top 15 departments showed that: six departments offer structured specializations (typically Metals, Ceramic, Polymers, Electronic Materials, Biomaterials); six departments offer electives to create a specialization (similar to the first category but more flexible); and three departments do not offer specialization. Not surprisingly, the average undergraduate department enrollments of these three categories were ~150, ~90 and ~50, respectively.

Jones closed this part of his presentation with an analysis of the specific changes that have occurred in the University of Florida (UF) MSE undergraduate curriculum, both core and specialization, during the 2002–2008 period. In general these involved dropping courses that are specific to a single material (e.g., intro to metals, intro to ceramics) and expanding offerings that cover common features in many materials (e.g., interfacial engineering, introduction to crystalline materials). He introduced a convenient metric, the curriculum vector, attributed to one of his colleagues, Robert DeHoff, characterizing courses as vertical or horizontal. Vertical (V) courses: those focused at particular materials or narrow single measurement techniques and laboratories; horizontal (H) courses: those with cross-cutting, multi-materials focus or broad characterization laboratories.

The UF 2002 curriculum included 23 H credits and 29 V credits. These are the coordinates of a 52° vector. By 2008, the program had shifted to 34 H and 14 V with a vector at only 22°. This may be as "horizontal" as one can get without completely eliminating specialty courses from the curriculum. Keeping in mind the variety of future first job scenarios anticipated for graduates from this program (Figure 2), the horizontal curriculum seems quite appropriate. However, it does raise front and center the critical issue of what education is needed by actual practitioners of MSE in the years following graduation and the path(s) to such training and knowledge. The next two sections will explore this issue from two perspectives: definition of the body of knowledge of MSE and continuing education options.

Several other aspects of the undergraduate curriculum received attention at the NSF workshop. First is the importance of "soft' versus "hard" skills in the education of materials scientists and engineers. This question should be considered in terms of the impact of globalization of materials science and engineering and the workforce in general. According to the NSF Workshop Summary, "Hard" was interpreted as technical, both core and elective, while "soft" skills are those such as working in teams, oral and written presentation, business (including entrepreneurial) skills, ethics, etc. The workshop came down squarely in favor of introducing the "soft" by integrating it into the "hard" and maintaining balance. [LHS comment: This opens the discussion, but doesn't begin to really address the "how." I think a focused workshop (at one of the professional society meetings or stand-alone) should be organized to look at examples of how this is being done by various educators and departments. Publication of a stand-alone or JME edition would help focus attention on this very difficult challenge for MSE educators.]

Next is the question of whether materials science and engineering should embark on a major revolution of its core curriculum? Can both traditional (e.g., corrosion, phase diagrams, etc.) and modern (biology, computational materials science and engineering, cyber-enabled discovery) topics be taught at an appropriate level within the constraints of limited credit hours? Are undergraduate research experiences important to the development of materials scientists and engineers?

The NSF Workshop Summary response: No revolution is required. Current general agreement about "core" (as evidenced in the Kevin Jones study) suggests that some coherent agreement already exists. [LHS comment: Individual department experimentation built around this common core will continue to be the order of the day in undergraduate education, but learning from one another through shared data bases might facilitate this process. With the initiation of the UECC comes the potential assistance of staff expertise on data mining that might make an appropriately structured data base of course content, not merely course names, valuable to educators.]

Finally is the question of how can the gulf between materials science and engineering designated and related programs be bridged? Given the proliferation of materials science courses in related departments, is there a need for designated materials science and engineering programs?

The NSF Workshop Summary response: Accept the reality that others will wish to teach "their version" of overlapping subjects (thermo, solid state physics, etc.) and take advantage of that by eliminating redundancy and encouraging cross-listing while trying to work with others to jointly teach some of these. Yes, there continues to be a need for the undergraduate materials degree, especially to address the specialty needs of many industrial employers. [LHS comment: Of course, as we have seen earlier, the specialty needs of employers will increasingly not be met by undergraduate education alone, so a strong motivation for the undergraduate materials degree can only be made in the context of a comprehensive educational environment in which it becomes the desired prerequisite for the continuing education that must ensue.]

Master's Degree, Continuing Education, Body of Knowledge, and the Professional Societies
One of the major tasks assumed by professional societies is maintaining vigilance over the development of the next generation of those professionals. Included in this broad responsibility are such activities as making the world aware of the value of their profession, encouraging young people to pursue study toward college and graduate study in the field, maintaining and improving the quality of the educational experience in colleges and universities and providing continuing education opportunities demanded in continuously evolving fields. It is these last two areas of activity that will be addressed in this section. The need for this discussion is particularly acute in the case of the materials "profession" because of the lack of a single society as a home for these critical activities.

We have seen from the discussion about common curriculum and the coalescence of department names toward MSE (and even more completely toward Materials) that a discipline has emerged and is crystallizing. What then are the elements of knowledge and experience that we expect to find in a typical graduate from one of these departments? We have seen a list of course names, most of which are evocative of courses we once took when we were in school, but certainly must have evolved dramatically. We know that the faculty who teach these courses bring experiences and points of view from many disciplines and must certainly have added to and modified even the most fundamental of the "core" courses. Can we dig below the names of courses and clarify what is actually being taught? Is there an agreed upon content? Is there an agreed upon body of knowledge (BOK) that characterizes a degree recipient in MSE? If we can agree on what that BOK is, can it be achieved within the four-year undergraduate experience? If not, is a Master's degree required and should such a degree be accredited? These are questions that will be lightly touched on in this section, but I believe that they form the underlying unresolved issues facing the further development of MSE as a discipline and will continue to engage the academic and society communities for years to come.

These issues are discussed together because they all arise from the fundamental observation made by many but quantified by Jones with his focus on the increasingly horizontal curriculum vector of MSE undergraduate education. Responding to many drivers, the undergraduate curriculum is increasingly "a mile wide and an inch deep." Yet we all know that actual practice of the engineering or science of materials requires depth in the area(s) of application. For those who would pursue the path of science, the Ph.D. (with perhaps a thesis-based Master's degree along the way) followed by life-long continuing education continues to effectively meet the need. But what is the path for those who would join industry and "practice" materials engineering? Their need is for extensive education beyond the BSE level and they obtain it from many sources. The clever Figure 6 shows the continuing education options (Reference 16). One immediate reaction to this cartoon is that all of the education providers are seen as independent. Perhaps it is now time for closer links between at least some of these providers, the colleges and universities and those profit and non profit activities of the professional societies. Are there opportunities for a more structured collaborative "planned" array of options for continuing education that will address the needs of the practicing materials engineer but fall short of the professional Master's degree?

I'll begin this discussion by focusing first on the university provider. Will the next step for the BSE in materials be a Master's degree? Clearly other engineering disciplines are moving in this direction. Among the specific recommendations made in the NAE Education 2020 report on Engineering Education are these:

• "The B.S. degree should be considered as a pre-engineering or "engineer in training" degree.
• Engineering programs should be accredited at both the B.S. and M.S. levels, so that the M.S. degree can be recognized as the engineering "professional" degree.
• Institutions should take advantage of the flexibility inherent in the EC2000 accreditation criteria of ABET, Incorporated (previously known as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) in developing curricula, and students should be introduced to the "essence" of engineering early in their undergraduate careers.
• Colleges and universities should endorse research in engineering education as a valued and rewarded activity for engineering faculty and should develop new standards for faculty qualifications.
• In addition to producing engineers who have been taught the advances in core knowledge and are capable of defining and solving problems in the short term, institutions must teach students how to be lifelong learners."

It would appear that ASCE, acting for the Civil Engineering Profession, has gone the farthest. The American Society of Civil Engineers Policy Statement 465, unanimously adopted by the Board of Directors in 2001, states that the Society ". . . supports the concept of the Master's degree or equivalent as a prerequisite for licensure and the practice of civil engineering at the professional level." Developed over a decade by a committee formed within ASCE, the Civil Engineering BOK for the 21st Century, readily available on their web site (www.asce.org/professional/educ/), describes desired outcomes required for licensure as a CE and suggests locations within the BSE and MS programs at which point those outcomes can be developed. This vision then becomes the framework for discussion of detailed curricular options by a separate, designated Curricula Committee. The current products of this effort are displayed in brief in Appendix G, drawn from Wikepedia and the ASCE BOK 2nd Edition.

The full court press effort of BOK development is an improbable path for materials education, certainly now and perhaps not even in the future. Several reasons for this are apparent. No single society with the resources of ASCE represents the materials community. Materials engineers are rarely inclined to seek professional standing. Perhaps most importantly, the Master's degree in materials has little perceived value. Industrial salaries may be taken as a measure of value. In her presentation at the NMAB Workshop, Merrilea Mayo examined Bureau of Labor statistics and noted that in 1997 for materials engineers, the average salary at the BSE level was $60,360 vs. $66,036 for those with an MS; however, for the same age cohort, the salary difference was in the noise. Thus, there appears to be no financial driver for an M.S. degree. By contrast, in these same data sets, Ph.D.s garnered $74,280-80,364 yielding a significant salary difference of $6,084 for the same age cohort.

Materials educators have considered the issue of a professional Master's degree and rejected it in two formats which I witnessed in recent years (the fall, 2007 UMC meeting and the 2008 NSF Workshop). Objections included those listed above and the complexity of accreditation at two levels (most department chairs are already under considerable time and labor strain when preparing for the re-accreditation of the undergraduate degree).

Of course there already are about 700 M.S. degrees awarded each year (see Figure 2), a number that has fluctuated little since the 1980s. There must be data at each university department describing the curricula, student make-up and demography of these students, and their interests in seeking these degrees, but that information is unavailable in a collective form. How many M.S. degrees are taken by students who return from industry and how many follow immediately after the B.S. How many are paid for by the industrial employer, how many by research contracts and how many by the individual recipient? How many students take courses on the path to the M.S. but don't complete it? How many M.S. degrees are with research thesis, how many with project study (individual or group)? (Certainly these are not all failed Ph.D. candidates! Nor are all M.S. degrees earned on the way to Ph.D.s!) It would be an interesting project (for UMC or a professional society) to begin to aggregate this data to better understand the needs and opportunities at this level of materials education. In any case it is clear from these numbers that nearly match the BSE production, that a significant part of the needed continuing education of materials experts is being addressed in a formal manner. We just don't know how much or of what character. Looked at from a strictly business point of view, this seems to be rather bad management of a major part of the business enterprise.

A second aspect of continuing education at universities, whether leading to degrees or not, is those issues associated with distance learning. Traditional formal classes with students facing the teacher in a closed room at a fixed meeting time are clearly not the only model now proven for university education. The options available with distance learning are limited only by the imaginations of the providers and their administrative constraints. Individual faculty transmitting their courses, joint teaching, including faculty from the same institution and/or others, and involvement of adjunct faculty from anywhere in the world are all options that have been tried and must be expected to expand in the future. University barriers to such experimentation must be attacked and strategies for tuition sharing invented or the students and their ultimate employers will be the losers.

Turn next to the society roles. Professional education of the "next generation" has always been central to professional society concerns and will continue to demand attention. A host of changes in the materials education field of endeavor, the manner of instruction, the need to address not only technical but business and ethical issues, the demands of continuing education beyond the bachelor's level "professional" degree in materials science and engineering . . . all of these issues are properly addressed by professional organizations in collaboration with educators.

There is already a major role for professional societies in this arena of continuing education. Historically, strong programs, such as the one run by ASM International and others, have been the centerpiece of continuing education in the metals fields. Handbooks, courses, both in person and on-line have been seen as both a valuable service to the users and a significant opportunity for society members who wish to pass along their expertise to the next generation. Now, the opportunity arises for closer interaction between the academic world and the professional societies. Quoting once again from the NAE Education 2020 report, "Kansas State University and ASME have created a distance learning partnership to bring a series of online professional development courses to engineering managers and administrators, and to engineering technical professionals. The courses, taught by ASME instructors, offer academic credit through Kansas State University." How many opportunities of this type are yet to be implemented by the materials academic community and its array of professional societies?

Further progress on continuing education by either universities or professional societies may depend on them working together more closely. The conversation between academic departments and professional societies should begin with the full recognition of what is happening to our field: reduced numbers and changing demography of departments; "materials" being taught in other engineering departments; too much to teach as the field broadens and the requirements for engineering education continue to expand; and finally the rather impossible task of teaching both materials science and materials engineering in four years within a single department for students who may go on to scientific research careers or may go on to engineering practice in industry.

We must all certainly agree that no undergraduate curriculum can contain all of the content required to "practice", so the real issue is what form the continuing education will take. Perhaps a better question is: what are the marketable forms that such advanced education will take? The MIT fully industrial financed approach may work for MIT and a few large corporations, but it doesn't seem to fit a world in which pay scales for M.S. exceed those for BSE by only a bit (unlike the situation in business education, where the company sponsored MBA is quite common). My own preferred approach is a non-residential, web-based educational system that enables expanded knowledge in those areas that are job-critical. While advanced degrees might be an option in such a system, they would not be critical and students could be offered credit or non-credit options. Such a "system" already exists, but universities are not universally engaged and administrative issues regarding cross-listing and credit acceptance need to be addressed. Other entities such as the ASM continuing education courses continue to thrive suggesting a waiting clientele with opportunities yet to be met in support of other engineering materials.

Closing this section as I began it, I return to benchmarking, this time examining the international arena. It is not necessary to reinvent every aspect of science, engineering or education! Our materials education formats are similar enough to those in other countries that we may learn from them as they have learned so much from us. I want to focus here especially on the efforts in the United Kingdom, on GRANTA and on the U.K. Centre for Materials Education.

It's always disconcerting for U.S. citizens to learn that the United States is not the leader in everything, but when it comes to materials education resources, we can't really hold a candle to the United Kingdom. Perhaps most technical people in the field are fully familiar with GRANTA and all of its resources for materials design. Perhaps it is totally unnecessary for me to include the GRANTA resources for education in this discussion, but I will do so for completeness. If you've never taken the time to do so, make a visit to www.grantadesign.com/education/ and find the enormous array of materials education "stuff" that will amaze and delight you. Books, software thru the CES EduPack, data bases, etc. are available (for a price). Nurtured by the continuing genius and energy of Mike Ashby, GRANTA and the educational resources it provides have been used by 600 universities world wide. It is not clear from their web site if extensive use is being made or if use as minimal as a specific textbook is included, but the U.S. list includes most of those universities with materials degrees as well as many others. If a survey of departments' educational tools is ever carried out by UMC or UECC, it might be useful to understand better how this great tool is influencing course content and teaching methods. I will close this section with a more complete view of another U.K. product, this one free for the downloading.

The UKCME (www.materials.ac.uk) was initiated in 2000 and later became part of the U.K. Higher Education Academy. "The U.K. Higher Education Academy" was formed in October 2004 to "work with the higher education community to enhance all aspects of the student experience." It aims to promote high quality learning and teaching through the development and transfer of good practices in all subject disciplines, and to provide a one-stop shop of learning and teaching resources and information for the higher education community. The UKCME is part of the Higher Education Academy's subject centre network that consists of 24 subject centers based in higher education institutions throughout the U.K.

The U.K. Centre for Materials Education exists to support and promote high quality education in Materials and related disciplines, by encouraging and coordinating the development and adoption of effective practices in learning, teaching and assessment. The U.K. Centre for Materials Education is a Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy, and is based at the University of Liverpool.

My reaction after scanning this web site and its array of resources is that they've already done most of the things we have only begun to talk about. I'd say this web site should be required reading for anyone in UMC, UECC, or any materials department that intends to focus any attention on undergraduate education. I've earlier referred to the excellent historical review article by Ferguson. I could draw from many other well written and comprehensive articles posted on the UKCME, but will merely list a few titles to whet the reader's appetite to visit this site.

Themes
Education for Sustainable Development: Sustainability is now recognized to be a key area of development for the education sector. In particular, the policy and practice context points to the need to consider how best to embed it into higher education learning and teaching strategies and curricula.

e-Learning: Learning facilitated and supported through the use of information and communication technologies. Flexible and innovative teaching methods are becoming increasingly important for both staff and students, and can help to significantly enhance the educational experience. A number of Materials-specific resources are available on these pages to help you develop your teaching.

Employability: With the expansion of higher education and the rapidly changing labor market becoming increasingly knowledge-based, employability is becoming an increasingly important consideration in most students' lives.

Further Education: Learning and teaching resources for FE lecturers delivering materials units as part of engineering courses.

Interesting subject studies are listed in "Materials Education - 12 Guides for Lecturers:"

• "Attracting Materials Students," Cheryl Anderson
• "Environmental Materials," Cris Arnold
• "Teaching Materials Using Case Studies," Claire Davis and Elizabeth Wilcock
• "Developing Professional Skills," John Wilcox
• "Assessing Materials Students," Lewis Elton
• "Learning Materials at a Distance," Mark Endean
• "Materials for Engineers," Mike Bramhall
• "Tutoring Materials," Adam Mannis and Shanaka Katuwawala
• "Learning Materials in a Problem Based Course," James Busfield and Ton Peijs
• "Materials Chemistry," Stephen Skinner
• "Teaching Materials Lab Classes," Caroline Baillie and Elizabeth Hazel
• "Evaluating a Materials Course," Ivan Moore

Other activities of the UKCME include teaching development grants, outreach to high schools, public awareness of the field of materials and its impact on society, a central repository for materials education articles and more. One of the most interesting new projects is "CORE-Materials: Collaborative Open Resource Environment - for Materials". Headed by Peter Goodhew at The University of Liverpool, and including all of materials higher education and many societies in the U.K., this project "intends to deliver: A comprehensive set of core open and accessible learning resources that provide full coverage of the Materials undergraduate curriculum (in total greater than 360 undergraduate credits); a 'taxonomy' for the Materials discipline that both organizes resources in a coherent way for the user and also identifies resources in need of development by users; changed policies and practices within partner institutions/organizations relating to the release of open learning resources and wider use of Web 2.0 technologies, as a result of project interaction; an active community of practice within Materials, where learning resources are widely shared, used and developed, with the benefit of promoting / marketing the discipline and quality of U.K. higher education."

I suggest that at the least, all U.S. materials departments and societies should be aware of the products of the UKCME and the CORE-Materials project and learn from their concept and processes. At the best, there may be ways of collaborating that could benefit all parties.

Perhaps the reader has already noted the primary conclusions I've drawn in the previous sections, but it may be fruitful to list them here in simple declarative statements:

• Undergraduate MSE has become a discipline within the engineering academic community in every important sense of that term.
• Transformations within engineering schools, the engineering profession and the industrial world in which materials engineers practice have and will further impact the approaches to education that must be a part of the MSE academic world.
• Materials departments in universities will be increasingly judged internally by the same criteria as are applied to their peer engineering departments and must respond or be threatened.
• The materials field is disadvantaged by the fragmented professional societies that address segments of our colleagues, failing by their small size to fully meet the educational needs of their members.

In this section I will draw together recommendations and personal observations regarding roles I see for academic departments, their organized collaborative body, the UMC and the professional societies. When this paper was originally contemplated in 2007 as an NMAB study, one of the recommendations I anticipated was increased collaboration amongst the professional societies on this and many other issues of importance to our profession. As I compose this paper, I take some comfort that in 2009 the Undergraduate Education Coordinating Committee (UECC) of the materials societies has been formed and has begun to define its agenda. Members of the UECC are from the several societies already cooperating on MS&T conferences and on the undergraduate Materials Advantage chapters, joined by MRS which already participates with some of the others on ABET issues. This committee has the potential for representing the vast majority of the faculty within materials departments and in collaboration with them through UMC, may begin to address many of the needed support roles long missing in our field.

This is also a good time for the UMC. Strong leadership over the last several years has returned this body to a position of importance on the education scene. It seems clear to this outsider that the pressure on academic departments in times of financial stress has been a wakeup call for materials department heads and chairs. I am excited about such UMC stimulated ventures as the workshop on expanded focus on computational MSE in the undergraduate curriculum planned for spring 2010 at Northwestern and the increased attention to sharing information on a mutually accessible web site. Issues discussed at future UECC and UMC meetings may be of such general interest that appropriate follow up action will actually occur. The opportunity for collaboration for the mutual good has not seemed so bright during my career.

What are the prime responsibilities that the UECC and UMC might assume? I think that we might see a UMC-UECC committee structure that would set priorities and seek volunteer members from all points of origin, depending on the issue. UECC would identify issues in collaboration with UMC, identify society leaders on an issue-by-issue basis and clarify the society contribution options. Society staff and media publications then could centralize the effort and enable the volunteer efforts. Several specific targeted projects that seem important to me are outlined below in no particular order or priority.

1. Expand support of accreditation. The ABET process must continue to be one element of the collaborative effort. TMS has long had a lead role in this effort, but collaborating ACerS and MRS are already partners. An important step was taken at the UECC committee meeting at MS&T'09 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The members assembled agreed that much of the material that each department prepared in anticipation of ABET visitations could profitably be shared with others to minimize the work load of preparation. Placing this information on a conveniently accessible and searchable site has great potential for reducing duplicative work. Will this site be maintained by TMS with its other ABET information or by UMC?
2. Clarify the Body of Knowledge in undergraduate (and possibly graduate) materials science/engineering. (Body of Knowledge is a compendium of things (concepts and data) that we expect to find in all (or only some) materials education programs.) Preliminary work by Kevin Jones and Susan Sinnott at the University of Florida suggest formats (NSF Workshop) for identifying that which is currently being taught at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Their work should be extended to include all members in UMC and ideally non-members as well. Perhaps the next step is to look down one layer from course titles to "concepts." Then move on to learn what is being taught in other engineering, chemistry, and physics under the rubric of a materials "major." I imagine that the body of knowledge could be formulated in such a manner that "materials chemistry" will show the overlap between chemistry and some (or many) materials departments. Similarly for electronic materials, polymers, etc. One may also see connections across the transition between materials design and design with materials (e.g., in ME and EE) and materials processing and processing of materials (e.g., in ChE). Questions regarding "core" courses (knowledge) are best discussed in the context of the broader available information of a Body of Knowledge. This is a big task. Even if the UECC were able to establish (and staff!) such a committee, it could not function without the full cooperation of the UMC and each of the materials departments. I suspect that this task will not be addressed, if at all, until several years of success in other endeavors gives credibility to the UECC.
3. Organize a web-based system for sharing in-depth information about course content. Typical discussions of curriculum offerings at a given school usually stop with a listing of course names and a reference to the department's web page catalogue. Can we learn from one-another by posting this information in one searchable data exchange along with course outlines, preferred texts and references, etc.? (See course listings in Appendix F for examples of information at one-level deeper than course names). This would also create a venue for identifying teaching methodology. What common teaching tools are now in use? For example, are U.S. educators taking advantage of resources such as CES EduPack software from the U.K.? Might such a data collection project be appropriate for NSF funding in a collaborative effort with DMR, Engineering, and Education and Human Resources? Can this site be organized to allow for chat room inquiry and response to clarify listed information? This database might be kept on only one web site or displayed on the sites of several participating societies. This is a preliminary step that could enable full BOK development, but is less threatening, and only requires organization of the proper home site and an invitation to the individual departments to participate.
4. Employment opportunities. All departments track employment of graduates, but I believe there is little or no sharing. Imagine a single searchable site displaying all of the companies that employed materials graduates last year (or during the last several years). This activity has the potential for transforming the "job opportunities bulletin boards" provided by most societies into a truly interactive and useful tool. Once initiated, access to this page by companies could help them see which schools were sending students to their peer companies. Within the rules governed by privacy considerations, companies could enter data on what their new employees were doing. General (or perhaps even specific) salary information might be displayed. Imagine how effective such a site could be in attracting students at all levels. Data mining could then yield greater results for the members of UMC who might better understand the industrial market and the opportunities and needs their students have. One may imagine such a data base could be a valuable recruiting tool invaluable in describing the field to prospective students.
5. Examine issues related to the professional Master's degree/continuing education. I think these issues are linked, but they could certainly be separated for action. What drives both is the fact that we cannot be both broad and deep ("horizontal" and "vertical") with limited courses in the undergraduate program. Master's vs. a few continuing education courses is an issue of marketing, cost and delivery as well as content. Master's accreditation is a related, but not required option. UMC may not need others to explore this particular issue, but industrial participation through the societies would add immeasurably to the richness of such a study. Furthermore, member societies of UECC are already providers of continuing education. Can UECC and UMC (or some of its members) devise schemes to enhance the array of already existing options for continuing education? One elementary step could begin with a collective effort of data collection regarding the Master's degrees and continuing education currently offered by materials departments. How many M.S. degrees are taken on the path to Ph.D.? How many M.S. degrees are taken by students who return from industry and how many follow immediately after the B.S. How many are paid for by the industrial employer, how many by research contracts and how many by the individual recipient? How many are research/thesis based and how many are project/report based? Are case studies used in the course base for the M.S.?
6. Links with educational committees in ASME, ASCE, IEEE, and AIChE. This is clearly a society-based issue. Perhaps these interactions might be raised through ASEE (Engineering Education) in which each of the materials societies already plays a role. Perhaps only bi-lateral interactions will be appropriate. Working with UMC, the UECC might begin with a summit workshop bringing together representatives from education committees of the several societies to discuss issues and then move on from there. What materials subjects are appropriate for the education of other engineers? How can MSE departments and societies participate in planning and execution?
7. Discussion of education issues at society meetings. Here, the roles of the several societies both coincide and conflict. Each is dedicated to increasing its membership and meeting attendance (sometimes at the expense of its "competitors"). Is education one of the few areas where we can cooperate rather than compete? Sites for major sessions on education issues and for UMC meetings occur at both MS&T and MRS meetings. Let's agree to play nice . . . share, alternate and cooperate . . . this is an arena in which we all win when we don't try to win.
8. Develop stronger links to the International Council on Materials Education and its Journal of Materials Education. This independent publication and its governing body can and should continue to be the organ of communication for the education interests of our collective profession. Are there ways that the several societies could increase the effectiveness, reduce publishing costs, increase circulation of this journal? Let's take a look and see if a better business model would benefit us all.
9. Explore strategies to collaborate in the operation of the National Education Workshop initiated by Jacobs and now run out of Edmonds Community College in Washington. Shared publication of the results of these workshops may dramatically increase their impact. Participation in the NEW:Update workshops has been open to both materials engineering and materials technology educators. This might be an ideal structure to enable the broad interests of societies in both aspects of the undergraduate materials education arena to flourish.
10. Organize a focused workshop (at one of the professional society meetings or stand-alone) to look at examples of how "soft" subject content (such as working in teams, oral and written presentation, business and entrepreneurial, skills, ethics, etc.) is being integrated into "hard" subject courses by various educators and departments. Such a workshop would be a good place to further explore how to integrate subjects such as industrial practice, international experience, and global economic and sustainability issues into the already crowded curriculum. Publication of a stand-alone or JME edition would help focus attention on these very difficult challenges for MSE educators.
11. Develop appropriate relations with the UKCME, identify opportunities for cooperation and do so. Broadcast the existence of UKCME products that would be of interest to the U.S. materials community and modify others that don't fit the U.S. model. In short, take optimum advantage of this extraordinary resource.
12. Identify desired needs for organized data, such as trends in numbers of degrees, diversity, employment opportunities, numbers of materials persons in the workforce, etc. If these needs are not being met, assess whether purchasing assistance from outside sources is an appropriate path to follow. One example of such a source was referenced in the section titled Shaping the Discipline, Richard Heckel and his consulting firm, Engineering Trends. Heckel's purchased access to various data systems could then become available to the UMC.
13. Explore issues of evaluating and aggregating data on program approach and student outcomes. I repeat the recommendation (p. 40 of this paper) from NAE Education 2020: "The National Science Foundation should collect or assist collection of data on program approach and student outcomes for engineering departments/schools so that prospective freshman can better understand the "marketplace" of available engineering baccalaureate programs." What opportunities are now open for NSF funded studies and organization of the materials education enterprise? Are some of our colleagues interested in taking leadership roles here?
14. Participate in efforts to increase teacher capability. Again noting a recommendation (p. 40, this paper) from NAE Education 2020: "American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers are collaborating to offer "Excellence in Engineering Education" teaching workshops for engineering faculty." Through UECC, the materials societies might reach out to this collaborative venture of the other engineering disciplines to seek appropriate participation.

REFERENCES