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.