The American Scene; Science & Engineering Education

Good morning. My name is Joel Zanger for the American Scene. This morning we are going to do the third in our series on science and technology. It's the last and our subject this morning shall be the trends in science and technology education, particularly as it affects the university, the graduate school, the institute. We have two guests this morning. I'd like to introduce them to you. Our first guest is Dr. Martin Kilpatrick, who is the chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Our second is Dr. Peter Scherule, chairman of the Department of Mechanics at IIT. I wonder gentlemen this morning if we might start by, since we're talking about trends, I suppose the most important trend that you have to contend with as the given, so to speak, is the students you get in your schools. Are the high school's products you're getting? Are they different today than they were, let's say, five years ago? I think so, the trend has been to teach more science and certainly in the last few years there's been considerable improvement in the quality of the

teaching. And this results in a problem for a school like IIT. The students coming from many different high schools, both in Chicago, greatest Chicago and from the outside, have had different descriptive courses in chemistry. The result has been that it takes a bit of time to bring them all to the same level. And the danger is that for the schools where they've had a better course, the student is somewhat bored for the first five, six weeks, and the result often is he doesn't realize that we're penetrating a little deeper than the high schools and suddenly he finds himself behind the others. Now this is a, the other is that you say that in general the training is not only more advanced, but it varies from schools to schools to schools. What about the attitude of the student? Is that different at all? Mr. Trillian? I think we can find that nowadays the students, at least the science and engineering students, take their studies more seriously. I think all this

noise that we've heard in the press about the elementary schools and high schools not giving enough work to the students, not working them hard enough. I think this is affecting the students, the teachers, the parents, and we're beginning to see this effect. Not only in the sciences, but also I think even more important in the mathematics students coming to engineering schools nowadays have more mathematics than they have. The engineering schools themselves are demanding more mathematics. For example, trigonometry is automatically required nowadays, and we're approaching the point where we will, where we will be requiring also college algebra. College algebra is rapidly becoming high school algebra. College algebra shall be defined as high school algebra. But do you find that this high school training is adequate? Can you count on it? They have the credit on their record, but how does it work out? It varies so much you can't. Now, across the country the trend has been this. For example, schools with very high quality selection like Caltech and Brown have given up the traditional general chemistry course. For example, at

Caltech, they start with quantitative experiments. This is for proposing a general chemistry background. They figure that for their quality selection, they have a sufficient general chemistry background, and they put, then, have time for inorganic chemistry in a senior year. At Brown University, the problem will solve, though, differently. They start with organic, follow that by quantitative, and then physical, and then inorganic. Because inorganic chemistry is a field that needs some physical chemistry to start it, to do it properly. It has been traditionally taught in the freshman year with some possibly other courses and some schools afterwards. But this can only be done in a school which is going to be so selected that can only choose those students which are adequately prepared before and after. Is there any possibility, for example, of placement examinations to place people place out? We do this at IIT, for example. There are placement examinations in mathematics, and some students don't even have to take the college

knowledge, but some of our better high schools are even giving calculus. There are not too many students that do get calculus, but some of the students place beyond the calculus, and the hands can start at a higher mathematical level, and more important for us in the engineering training, they can start at a higher level, rather than at a higher level, they can start sooner with their engineering training, and this makes a big difference. Because we only have four years to train an engineer or a scientist, and that isn't very much time as an undergraduate. Otherwise, if we generalize, you would say that the high school students you're getting are better prepared and more eager to learn, a little more serious about it. I would like to add that at IIT, 99 % of the students that come to us from the high school that had chemistry. But if you take it down to their banner, it's near a 50 % because they have a different problem because they draw from the southern part of the state, whether it is not so much high school or chemistry taught. I think the solution of this problem is to get a better liaison between the people who teach the freshman chemistry, or physics, sort of sophomore physics, and the high

schools, so that we get a heterogeneous group, that not to make it uniform, but to get some level that we can have at a starting place, otherwise we'd have to go to this trend, which will come, I think, of starting with quantitative experiments, or organic chemistry, and putting the other inorganic in the senior year. Now, another thing about students, in general, there are more students in the colleges today aren't there. And one of the great problems is this division at present between the private school and the state school. I'm interested because you mentioned a chemistry at our banner. Well, the problem of the private school and the state school, of course, is a matter of tuition fee. The difference between the tuition student pays, the private school, and can go up as high as $1 ,000. On the other hand, the state school teaches a great many more students. We're getting mass

education on a larger scale, and the function of the private school is to keep the standards up and keep the quality of the teaching up and set a standard of course. The private school is faced with a problem that, unless it is known as a quality school, not only must it be a quality school, but it must be known as a quality school, and this is survival. This is the way of survival for the private school. And you'd say that in terms of trends in scientific and engineering education, the distinction is the one between mass education and quality education as it reflected in the private school. It might not be as big a cut as that, but this is the way I would look at it. Isn't there a problem, though, that certainly the state schools in general tend to pay higher salaries to faculty and staff? They tend to lure away a better people. Not necessarily. Conditions in private schools are more amenable to research activities, and when you get the type of staff member who is very interested in education and in research activities, the salary is not that important. And

salary, of course, always is important, but not specifically. Conditions under which he will work, the type of students with which he will work, the type of faculty teaching loads that will have them. All those are very important factors. I might add that I've been in academic work for 45 years. You never get much money, but you have an awful lot of fun. We're happy. And so, you'd say it would be kind of hasty to generalize about a private and state university education as being different in spite of the fact there is a trend that's toward the large university today. Well, we're talking now at the undergraduate level. On the undergraduate level. Is there a difference on the graduate level? I think there's very little difference at the graduate level, because at the graduate level, it's not to facilitate some building so much as a man, and it depends on the quality of the professors. If they're good scholars, today, the thing is that the fellow who took ten years ago, the subject learned it, and he goes into teaching, and he continues to teach it as he learned it ten years ago, this fellow is on his way out.

He takes a man who was interested in teaching, who was also a good scholar, possibly a good research man, to keep up with the trends today. Things move so rapidly. How many of these men actually got in the classroom? For example, I aren't many of the classes taught by graduate assistants today, isn't it truly one of the situations in the middle of it? Not a significant number. The number of graduate assistants which teach undergraduate classes is larger than we would like, but it's not too serious a problem, because these boys are well -trained before they get there. We certainly, for example, in our own department, we wouldn't let any graduate assistant teach an undergraduate course until he's had at least a master's degree, so that he's had a year's work further, a full year's work further than his bachelor's degree. Again, this is also, this is true essentially in the better schools. There are some of the lesser schools with less money, where a man can get his bachelor's and immediately start teaching. This certainly is not a desirable trend. I think we're slowly getting,

even away from that, because we're getting more and more of our graduate students interested in education. May I disagree a little bit with Dr. Churelli? Let me first cite the chemistry department at IIT, which I know very well, at IIT, no students, until he has a PhD, ever teaches in a classroom in our department. I'd like to go on to... You have a slightly different situation, though, because you have chemistry labs in our department. I'd like to now go on to the laboratory teaching. In the large universities, beginning with 1946, the undergraduate students, seldom sees a full -time professor in the laboratory. The laboratory teaching has been for five, four or five academic generations now, has been left to the graduate assistants who learned it from another graduate assistant and another graduate assistant. Are you generalizing... This is chemistry, or the whole scientific field in general, and specifically chemistry, specifically where they have laboratories, of course, for experimental studies. Teaching, of course,

teaching of experimental techniques and so forth. The result is now very obvious that from the larger universities, and this includes the Big Ten, the quality of the student from an experimental standpoint is much lower than those from the small colleges, because in the small colleges, they have small classes, there are no graduate assistants, and they do work with the professor in the laboratory. Although he may not be as famous a man as the professor at one of the Big Ten universities, he is qualified, and he works with the students, and he teaches the technique, and that teaching is far superior to that from a graduate assistant. Well, you have this generation, you say, a fifth generation graduate student. You would say this is not the case in your field, because this is not an experimental field in the same sense. Where you don't have an experimental field, shall we say, you have an analytical type of course. That you use graduate students. People with masters. People with masters, and many of there are many institutions where full -time staff members have only masters, of course, and at the

better institutions you're certainly in today, shall we say the equivalent of a doctor's degree. But at IIT in chemistry, even our no laboratory has run in our institution in chemistry since 1947, without a professor with a PhD teaching in the laboratory. He may have helped from graduate students, but the professor teaches in the laboratory. In fact, we think this is so important that we give him the same teaching load credit for one hour of the laboratory as one hour in the classroom. On the graduate level, this problem doesn't exist, because they are only the full -time active research staff member. This is a kind of situation, no, that is ideal, but how long can it be perpetuated? We're told about this great population boom, it's to come. When we'll need so many teachers, which we do not have, which are not going to training, ultimately, aren't we going to have, in effect, students have teaching students, big simply because there are no eligible professors, PhDs, or masters, even. That's the excuse that's given by administrators, but my own personal opinion is, you can't afford to have

poorly trained people teaching the students. You won't have people in science, well trained if you do not have people who really know during the teaching. You can hold classes, you know, but this is not teaching, and the less the man teaches. Now the question of numbers is a very important one, we're going to have, at least a comparable increase in the ratio of teachers to students as we have this increase in students when it comes. And the answer to that question is very strongly based on the fact that teacher salaries are going up in colleges. There are nowhere near where they should be, of course, but the rate of climb is a little bit better than it is, shall we say, that it was in the past. And in that sense, we will be able to attract more people into teaching. Relatively, in this way. Well, of course, always relative. Green PhD in chemistry today gets more than our associate professors, and if I would stay on another year and not retire this year, I think there would be some of our green PhDs would get for 12 months, what I get from

Illinois Institute of Technology for 9 months. Green PhD going into industry. Going into industry. Now if he goes to teaching, he will get about $6 ,000 to start for 9 months, and he probably can get an additional two nights in the summer. He will be $2 ,000 behind the man that goes into industry, and this difference will have to be corrected, or they will lose a very great number of teachers, potentially good teachers. There is quite a bit of interest in doing something about this problem, as you can imagine both on the government level and private levels. The Ford Foundation, for example, is very interested in this problem. Just recently they have come out with a program where they will permit a man who is going to school, to go to school almost full time, and earn up to $6 ,000 in 9 months. Now he doesn't keep all of this money, but by staying in college education, again there, this is the idea to keep them as educators, by staying in college education, yes, then he does get to keep the full amount of the $6 ,000. I would hate to become a subsidized professor. It's not a matter of subsidization, it's a matter of a very serious problem which we have to meet, and

there's no question that students will be there, and we must have these staff there to be able to teach them. Aren't you in effect a subsidized professor if you take it, if the money comes from a board of trustees, which is dominated by a half a dozen industries? Aren't you being subsidized as well? Well, I don't like that kind of a board of trustees. That's where the money lives, though, unfortunately. Oh, I shouldn't be that way. No, shouldn't. We're going to be successful in this country on our education programs, and that becomes one of the critical questions. There's no question that there's an awful lot of money which must be put into education. I'll pick a figure out of it, had $10 billion a year, must be put within the next 10 years, if we're going to do even a reasonably proper job in our education. And particularly in science and engineering education, there's no question about the importance of that. I wonder if we might go from the problem of the school, and it's fun, so the trends in the curriculum itself, the courses that you teach, I know one of the customary ways of thinking perhaps of the difference

between engineering and, let's say, science or chemistry is that one is fundamental, and the other is applied. Is this still a meaningful distinction? Certainly, this still applies, but the differential between the two of them is certainly shrunk. Shrunk considerably in the past five years, even. The period is small as that. I think you can just see it in everyday newspaper. Is this a result of the acceleration in research itself, which keeps you pushing you back toward more fundamentals? I think it's rather more closely aligned with the acceleration in our, shall we say, our defense work. That's basically where the stimulus comes from that. We must send missiles up. We must send satellites up. We must have space stations ready within the next five to the next 10 years. When you say the differential is reduced, do you mean that the sciences have become more applied as well as that the engineering courses have become less applied? I think to Dr. Churley and I in partial agreement on this, I think both of us agree that there's

no place for teaching applied stuff in the, even in engineering schools today, you know, vocational stuff of any kind, we must teach only fundamentals, where Dr. Churley and I would disagree, probably, is should the engineers teach the fundamentals on the scientists? And I personally feel it in maybe five or 10 years that engineers can begin to teach fundamentals properly until then I think it has to be left to scientists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and so forth. Well, I think we have a definite disagreement here at this point. I don't think you should distinguish at the teaching level between an engineer, quote, and a scientist, quote. When you get a man who is a research person and we've agreed that the only type of persons that get into engineering education nowadays are the research oriented persons. When you get such a man, if he has had a proper training, he can equally well teach a course, shall we say, in engineering, in an engineering science, I'm not saying this man should go ahead and teach the course in a nuclear physics law, again, now depending on the individual, he,

even such a, you can find such people. But let me ask you with the right question, Dr. Churley, I agree that when the man over such minded, but let's take some specific college as an example, as of today, what fraction of the teaching staff of a technical institute is actually trained in research and practicing research. Oh, but that I'll agree that we're talking in the present or in the future. We're talking about now, I'm talking about now. What I said was in the present, I think, that it will take about five or 10 years for the engineering, present engineering staffs of the colleges and universities to get up to the level where they can teach the fundamentals properly. I think I was just a term for definition here. You used a phrase, an engineering science, and I'm surprised, Mr. Kilpatrick, let it go by. What's an engineering science? Well, this was defined for me by a professor once. It's a

method so that engineers can tap some of the money that's available for science in the government of the government of agencies. This is facetious, of course, and drawn to an extreme. I think it's the very word, engineering science, or engineering science says, is usually used in the plural sense, is indicative of what is happening to engineering and scientific education. The engineers, the engineering education, is definitely approaching at a level where, shall we say, scientific education was in the past 10, 20 years. Again, now, why of necessity? The problems that the engineer, the developer, faces the man who builds the missile, shall we say, have become so serious. He has to push his materials properties to such an extreme. The reliability is so serious that he can no longer afford to take a fairly general broad factor of safety and hope that it works. These problems become so serious, he must be exact, he must be precise. Well, by definition, as soon as you are exact, as soon as you're precise, you're being scientific. Which you accept, but I

put it another way. Science comes first and engineering second. When you use the word engineering science, as you give the impression there are new sciences that have to do with engineering. There are no new sciences. There may be new branches of the fundamentals, I mean, with the coming of space age and so on, but the science comes first. The fundamentals, we both agree. The fundamentals come first. The application and development must come later. Could our student in school be taught only the fundamentals, whether you call it engineering science or physics, chemistry or some other name, the energy barriers or the dividing lines between them is starting to dissipate. We agree. One question that does occur to me, both of you, have had cause to refer to the rocketry of the space age missiles. This, of course, has been the great head line makers in the last 10 years. Has this affected the curriculum in terms of

courses? Do you feel it is of pressure to specialize in, in fact, to become schools of rocketry rather than... It depends on what level. On the undergraduate level, we're specialized to become more fundamental, more rounded. On the graduate level, yes. Then the pressure is to give more special courses. See what we've done is, in 1946, it was still available the war money for the year 1946, which you didn't have to fight. And actually, the engineers had too much money in those days. And what did they do when the army and the Navy and so forth? They built bigger and better installations, less and less thinking. And from 1946 to 1956, we tried to approach this rocket problem, engineering first. And we kicked away 10 years. The Russians didn't do this. They did the fundamentals first, and the result is they seemed to be ahead of us today. There's no question that we... The undergraduate must be rounded and must obtain a

rounded and fundamental education. If there's time for the practical, the vocational type of courses, yes, but there is no such time. And if you must choose between the two of them, definitely give them a firm foundation and then let him go out and have the potential for learning the applied material. Even at the what time? They shouldn't be taught in the colleges. Of course, this encourages the kind of teaching you should get rid of to stay in the school. I can't I get too strongly with that position. I see. What about the graduates themselves? Are they... I'm thinking right now of the first that first graduate, the Bachelor of Science degree. There will be a Bachelor of Science degree in your case, too. Bachelor of Science degree. There will be the same degree. Yeah. What are they trained for today? In general, are they primarily oriented toward a continuation at the graduate school or do they go toward a industry, a government work, what? And is this... Is there a change in the pattern recently? There's certainly a definite change. We try at IIT to turn out a Bachelor of Chemistry

who can go either through government laboratories to industry, all go on to graduate school and we pride ourselves that we turn out a BS that can go on to graduate school and compete elsewhere with anybody from any other undergraduate school. In fact, our own record shows that we've turned out a third of our students have gone on and we have adopted long ago and 48 of their policy that we do not take our own undergraduates at IIT, but we send them out. Now, the competition for BS and chemistry by graduate schools, assistantships are available, both research and teaching and you can get a good man one without any trouble. He never has to support himself from the time he gets a BS if he wants to go to graduate school. The money will flow to send him through. Could we go to a point... I'd like to stop now because you made a point that I'm afraid most listeners might not pick up. You don't keep your graduate but you send him out. Could you explain this? Well, my own attitude on that is if a man is born in the Midwest and goes to school in

the graduate school on the east coast of the west coast and it used to be, I never got a much further than Purdue or Wisconsin, but having gotten a few boys to Caltech and California, I have no trouble getting them to the west coast now and we've had very recently some graduating with PhDs at Harvard and Yale, Cornell and we've gotten to both coasts. I feel very strongly that a boy shouldn't do his undergraduate work and his graduate work in the same place he does his undergraduate work. Would you agree to that? I agree with him. I wouldn't call this a new trend. I think this has been essentially true in education for many years. As a matter of fact, if there is any trend to discuss, there is even a slight trend the other way. The reason for this of course is the competition for graduate students. There's staffs are increasing in these schools. There's more space for graduate students, more need for graduate students, but there are not that many more graduate students, and hence you have competition in nature. The

phrase you use is in breeding with all the problems that in breeding creates. The same idea as being percolatorial. The same idea is going round and round and losing something at each round. The other trend that seems to be coming, it was traditional in my youth that you, by some method or other, you got a chance to either post -doctoral level or even a pre -doctoral level. You got a chance to spend a year in Europe. This was the old tradition. This tradition is coming back now both at the undergraduate level and graduate and post -doctoral level through programs, well through the full -bright age and various exchange programs, and there are many opportunities without cost to the student to get this education without any contribution by his family at all. This is true only on the presumption that the student, shall we say, is unmarried and has no children. This is a very serious problem in graduate work because a great large number of students now have family responsibilities and we don't have the money to support the student and his family. Again

now, something is beginning to be done about something like this. You've never had a situation where money has gone wanting for a candidate. We've had no money than candidates. Yes, well if they come a lot of good graduate students have been put through school by their wives, but of course if they proceed to go and have a family, this means the breadwinner is no longer available. I see. I wonder very briefly, could you generalize what each of you, we have only about a minute in fact, in each of your fields, what are the remain the weaknesses though in education, in your field and mechanics, surely? Weakness as an education is the fact that we have to get more mathematics to the student, not for the sake of the mathematics, but to enable him to use his physics in a better, in an easier way. This you mean on a high school level? No, no, I'm talking about as an undergraduate. As an undergraduate. I think that this is what is the general weakness. There are not enough people with brains who are willing to go and stay

into teaching. I don't realize it's fun. My youth I climb. I still climb mountains. This is fun. Teaching is fun. Research is fun. The attitude is it's a job. Do I get more money somewhere else than I go somewhere else? I like to thank you. I'm afraid our time is up. Good morning for the American scene. Jules Anger.