elon-musk

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers (Part 2 of a bunch!)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Baby Coho, Windblown, Salmon River outside White Bird, ID

“Manufacturing is insanely difficult. It’s under appreciated in its difficulty.” Elon Musk

One of the things I’ve found to be profoundly curious about the debate regarding fixing our educational systems is how so little discussion occurs around the people delivering the educational content to students. Sure — we’ll argue about topical lists, appropriateness of grade level with material, and such. And then things will then diverge into polemics on the various politics of universities in general (almost always very liberal) or perhaps the politics of individual faculty members.

It’s not that those conversations shouldn’t be occurring — but they will not get at the root cause of the deep problems inside our modern educational systems — especially those in higher education. At some level, we just assume that students are going to get trained, somewhat correctly, with various holes in their knowledge because they did, or did not, take a pedagogy class. FWIW — our Colleges of Education are largely train wrecks, so if you think you’re going to fix the problems in higher education’s pipeline by having everyone take a pedagogy class, I’ve got news for you. My favorite story at my own university happened a while back — there was an “active learning” class — where students were supposed to do exercises themselves, and the classroom would be run by the professor from “the back of the room” (as opposed to the “lecture/sage on the stage” model.)

The class was delivered by lecture.

And I can tell you as well, as the former President/Chair/whatever of the President’s Teaching Academy, no young professor ever called me to ask for advice, nor sit in their classroom. Education is simply an arbitrary venture at the contemporary academy, though I think it’s also fair to say that occasionally, a charismatic individual passes through and makes a temporary difference in how education is structured.

But trust me — nothing sticks. The REASON nothing sticks is that, unless there is a conscious intervention by an individual, Conway’s Law must hold. And universities are inherently rigid hierarchies, with an obsession with titles, and there is a chronic ‘regression to the mean’ phenomenon that goes on in the vast majority of the curriculum. How you lecture can matter, and of course, with the various physical sciences and engineering, you do have labs. But overall, it’s not just the elephant in the living room. That elephant is out roaming on the savannah, eight thousand miles away.

Bottom line — if you want to really change education in general, and engineering education in particular (what this piece is about) you really have to re-think what are the guiding principles that undergird your educational factory. Students are the pieces of work that are being programmed, and at least as much thought has to go into how you are going to create the machines that make those pieces of work as you do arguing about the list of topics. Right now, we don’t do much at all. I find it pathologically fascinating that even at my own university, I have yet to be asked to give a single guest lecture on education, even though I a.) have received university-system-level awards, b.) bring in healthy amounts of money from external sources, and c.) even headed up institutional level organs for improving teaching. My passing is literally a hole in the fossil record.

The problem with even saying that is from an academic perspective, from the primary Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme that the academy operates under, even making that statement is some kind of narcissistic sour grapes. I must be butt-hurt over all of this. Honestly, I’m not. What I do in my Industrial Design Clinic, where students work with real sponsors, on real work, with real deliverables, and real expectations, is more rightly called World Creation. The idea is more like a Live Action Role-Playing game (LARP), except the participants (the students) have no real idea that they’re in a LARP. They do know it’s a class, and they do know they have to accomplish real work or they won’t graduate. At least that’s what I tell them. The reality is that I create the motivational environment, buttressed by sufficient and plentiful resources, and a customer/mentor WITH appropriate process that they are cattle-chuted through the game, learning skills and finding appropriate partners, that the statistics of them NOT getting it done are extremely low.

But I got to this very evolved form of education after serious study AND soul-searching after a ton of work. The principal ethos evolved early. But I’ve been doing this for some 29 years — longer than virtually all my students (and some of the younger professors) have been alive.

So what are we doing now? When we hire new faculty, there are really only two primary criteria we apply before we hire. First is that they have “research” prowess and specificity of the area, and secondly, that they stand out from whoever is in the pool that they’re competing with. Occasionally, there might be a nod to some DEI concerns — but honestly, not much. The faculty in my department are mostly foreign born (Chinese/E. Asian, Indian/S. Asian, and from the Middle East) and we really don’t care much at the time of hiring if they have any industrial experience. We hardly bias anything to folks being American-born. We do think about their ability (it is discussed) to bring in research funding, because without money, they will not make tenure. And then we’ll have to start the process all over again. All things considered, I feel like we’ve been pretty lucky. I like our young faculty. But if there’s any illusion that we have anything other than superficial concerns about classes they can teach, when it comes to education, let me disabuse you of that notion.

What that means is we end up with the v-Meme-NA of our own social structure deeply embedded in our activities. How that manifests itself is shown with the basic characteristics of how Legalistic/Absolutistic systems produce knowledge. It’s Completeness uber alles. One of the most obvious is the number of credit hours we require students to take. I think we’re currently at about 131 hours, whereas our accrediting body only requires something around 95. We don’t teach meaningful synthesis/design until the senior year. Teaching early in the curriculum is almost all lectures, and considered a booby prize by all faculty. What that means is excellence in education early on is highly dependent on the instructor and their own independent ethos on how they deal with a classroom, which in the first two years is very likely to be large. A class in Dynamics, which is a very difficult subject for most students, will likely have 200 students in it.

How to sum this up? We really don’t care about the most difficult part of what we do — building and staffing the factory. Especially at the undergraduate level. And because of this, our reject rate (the number of students that do not persist) is phenomenally high — often, in various classes, over 50%. Imagine a factory whose waste was 50% of the raw material brought through the door. The mind reels.

And the research on all this is appalling. One of the things I absolutely do know about student retention is that if students feel like they are connected to the program, then they’ll likely stay and finish. But instead of meaningfully and deliberately constructing environments so that students are connected, we fractionalize ad infinitum. Working together is called cheating. And the various DEI excuses now definitely come to the fore, though the reality of my classroom, where students actually befriend each other and work together, belies this. Stupid research is historically done on team size, for example, where it’s decided that four is the optimal number of members. But if you look at the actual research where that number was generated from, it was from building marshmallow straw towers in the course of an hour, between strangers. It is literally insane (see earlier comment about how educational research is largely garbage.)

If we want to build an environment that actually links industry and the university in a meaningful way, we are going to have to hire with a very different set of expectations than any current Carnegie R1 institution (the categorization for top research institutions in the US) does. In order to run my clinic, I need on any given week the following skills:

  1. Knowledge of a broad range of topics, at a level where I can sort complexity quickly.
  2. The ability to negotiate contracts and conflicts.
  3. Some knowledge of adolescent/post-adolescent psychology, and the ability to identify the symptoms of various mild pathologies so I don’t over-react if someone’s having a bad day.
  4. Actual knowledge of developmental behaviors and goals for a range of both students AND collaborators. Anyone proposing creation of an educational environment that doesn’t understand what partners need, as well as students, cannot create anything that lasts.
  5. Sales ability to continue to recruit outside collaborators into the fold.
  6. Ability to map procedural steps to educational outcomes.

The biggest has to be to think consequentially. What this means is that one must own a large sense of responsibility if students in your LARP don’t advance past a certain level in an appropriate amount of time. It means you’ve built the game poorly, and you have to own it. We’ve constructed education as a very low responsibility endeavor for teachers. If the students don’t learn it, and it’s an accepted part of the curriculum, it’s the students’ problem, and they will be graded/punished appropriately. The beats will continue until morale improves. This is absolutely counter to the high performance environment one MUST establish if you want students to move through the game over the course of a semester. Further, the more fear you use, the less likely students are to come forward quickly with what’s actually wrong with your creation. At round one, it’s your version of reality you’re creating.

If I had to hire a faculty for starting something like Elon’s Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS), I’d probably split the percentages of people with industry experience and Ph.Ds about 50/50. I’d teach people how to construct meaningful customer relationships, because everywhere you look in making a true paradigm-shifting institution, your primary job is building and maintaining a large social network that has as its priority transfer of information across all its nodes. I’d train directly to these goals as well — and at least some of this is salesmanship and deal creation on an individual level. If you want to pull something like this off, you must have people who have profound, place-taking empathy. A heavy lift. I also don’t think I’d hire all but a few under the age of 35. Younger people developmentally are simply not at the stage where they could be expected to master some of the more complex social dynamics.

There’s more, of course. And there would be coffee. Because coffee is for closers.

Quickie Post — Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Road Trip — outside Winnemucca, NV, December 2024

The LA fires are burning, and while I should be writing something about that, I just can’t yet. Yes, it is a memetic shitshow. Yes, DEI is a problem (though only for a mix of reasons that most people are unaware of) and yes, I think most of it could have been avoided.

But I feel like a little positive writing today. And hey — you get what you pay for!

One of the more positive snippets of news in the last couple of weeks is Elon Musk’s interest in starting the Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS). He was prompted to discuss this (seems like it was before the latest rape ring scandal in Great Britain) before excrement hit the ventilator. The protagonist was one of Marc Andreessen’s (of a16z fame) General Partners, Katherine Boyle, who daylighted the topic. I proposed myself (still will) to be the founding President of the institution, and if Elon had seen any of my comments, my phone would be ringing. People fundamentally miscast the problem with engineering education and our young people by assuming somehow we have DEI problems, and if we would just double down on higher SAT scores, with maybe a little industrial experience thrown in, we’d fix what ails us. As an engineering educator for nigh on 41 years, eh, not so much.

It’s not that excellence in technical education isn’t needed. It absolutely is. It’s just a classic “and” problem. We need that. We just also need a list of other “ands”. Some of these include exposure to industry practice, including participation in industry throughout their education. No engineering school can reproduce a real factory floor for a lab. Which is why I directly partner with companies like Schweitzer Engineering Labs here in Pullman, running mass collaborations with their factory floor, through the generosity and assistance of plant managers there. I am lucky. Those connections come naturally in my world because many of these individuals are my former students. It helps to have an actor at the VP level when someone will open up their facility for a morning just to have students confront actual problems folks on the manufacturing floor are having. And I’m very clear with the messaging to my students about their obligation to return value to the sponsors. If it costs the company $70K to shut the floor down for a morning so the students can participate, they better deliver somewhere north of that $70K with the completion of their projects in value for the company’s trouble.

What is also important, though, are what people in the education business call the “soft skills” lessons. This is a stupid term, because these skills, such as high agency, data-driven decision making, merging opinions from successful collaborations, and on and on, are far more than just an isolated list of skills. They’re actually the function of psychosocial development and maturity, which needs to be just as deliberate as teaching someone vector calculus. The problem, though, is that these types of skills cannot be taught with a PowerPoint presentation. You have to create experiences that are profoundly disinter mediated (you, the professor, are not in the middle) so that students can act within the confines of their own brains. As my mom used to say “Son, the life will teach you.” Absolutely.

But these spaces and lessons need to at least 80% be intentional out of the environment and situation. That means, just like a really great video game, someone has to know what they are doing. The magic just doesn’t happen. An important tool I use is what I call “meaning matching” — understanding how the different ages — both students and sponsors — find meaning. And then you, as the environment designer, create the interaction scenarios so that both sides remain enfranchised around particular goals, and both develop and get work done. For example, 22 year olds want to demonstrate performance and mastery of engineering, whereas 35 year olds are looking for community. Weaving both these developmental goals around a common objective is the ticket, and is your best ticket to success.

One of the principles which absolutely scares academics is that I will only permit REAL work in our exercises. I want students to solve real problems that people are having. No make-believe. And while these are often more complicated than just canned exercises (I like to make fun of the various competitions we have, like mousetrap cars) they also are vastly more rich from an information richness perspective. The boundaries are fuzzy. And that encourages both exploration — going out and finding things one didn’t know — as well as metacognition — the realization that you’re not going to know everything about a space, but you still have to solve a problem.

Someone’s inherent capacity for this is NOT something any standardized test measures. Nor is likely to do so in the future. That doesn’t mean one should throw all standardized tests into the garbage. It’s not a “but” kind of problem. But one must be open to the broader space if you actually intend to revolutionize engineering education.

Another big one that is chronically neglected is peer-level collaboration with students. We are very comfortable with mentor/mentee relationships, and prioritizing them. And these are very important. Complex behaviors in this environment are often directly passed through emulation (think mimicking) of more sophisticated actors. But that does not teach students one of the most important lessons they must also learn — how to assess their colleagues, as well as their efficacy and veracity of their work. You gotta know who you can trust.

The end product that everyone wants is almost meta-the same — a mature, aware, independent individual that can act in the context of group benefit, while also working alone when need be. The term for that is agency, and as I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, agency is self-empathy — being connected on multiple levels with oneself. Which then manifests as actual connections with others, in a high-coherence information transfer mode. Short version — you’re being honest and reflective with yourself, as well as assessing what others told you. That’s how you make complex systems with millions of parts fit together and actually work.

The problem with education like this is that this has basically nothing to do with the current psychosocial DNA of our current university system. Students aren’t just told how to think. They are told how to relate to others (the whole DEI scam) and are hobbled in having productive experiences where they discover stuff on their own. Students now are more obedient than they have ever been. But the end result of such obedience is that students only trade their agency for a lack of responsibility. It’s the natural bargain. And you end up with entire institutions of compromised young folks. And the ones with natural victim/psychopathic tendencies? They float to the top, ready to be waved as flags of dysfunction by those that want our young people to fail. Most young people really are not the problem one sees in the press. But we, as a larger set of institutions, have failed in understanding the challenges involved in raising responsible young people. Instead, we’ve devolved to leading with fatuous efforts about declaring one’s pronouns.

Getting to people wanting to shatter the paradigm (like Elon) is also challenging. Outside-the-box thinkers like me really don’t have any meaningful access to reform-minded individuals, who are largely trapped inside a box of people who are status-driven. No one really wants to change the order of the status line-up, while at the same time, people expect these leaders to be the best. They aren’t — they’re a function of their v-Meme NA more than anyone. So it’s a self-reinforcing trap. It is very frustrating to listen to these people, trapped in their high-status bubble, wondering out loud on social media about problems that they believe haven’t been confronted, largely because the elites haven’t confronted them. Just a word, both Kathryn and Elon — we ain’t many. But there are a handful of us that have been thinking outside the box — and have a success portfolio to prove it works.

Which brings me to developing agency in young people. My X pal, A.J. Kay, just last week, proposed pondering the two categories of Discipline and Control, as a way of doing a self-reflection on one’s growth as a person. I thought this was great. The definition of level of Discipline is the ability to force one to do an activity that is prosocial/beneficial, even when you don’t want to. And Control is just the direct opposite — your ability to not execute behaviors that your brain wants to do for self-satisfaction. I had the students make the two columns and list theirs, then share with the group of students at their table (usually 4-5).

There is only good news here — the students almost uniformly tagged their eating, exercise, sleep and screen time as things they needed to practice. Things like “getting to bed on time” and “not sleeping in” figured prominently, as well as “cooking at home four times a week” (kinda scary when you think about it.) Exercise was almost included at a particular tempo (many students said 4-5 times a week) and certainly justified the expense we’ve put into recreational facilities for fitness. There was a little more advanced behavior as far as assignment completion as well. Overall, I left a little more hopeful. We didn’t quite get to eliminating sugary drinks. But I’ll take it.

The class I performed this exercise in was our introductory design class, where we will cover things like empathy interviews with customers as well as structured problem solving design processes (we are a big LEAN shop.) If you ask how this fits into engineering education, I myself believe in a bildung approach to education. We cannot expect our engineering students to be high performance individuals, while at the same time to act ethically without appropriate internal development. I plan on doing this exact exercise at the end of the semester to see how their personal goals evolve.

Stay tuned!

P.S. For those interested in a deeper dive on how the brain actually learns and retains complex information, read this piece.