A Call To Act

Experts within academia and industry suggest that the American university has operated within a regional vacuum of research and teaching for too long. Corporate America has gone multinational and is requiring its research, workforce, and innovation to do the same. As a supplier of knowledge and high technology, universities are looked upon by industry to provide a product, and today that educational product must be supplied at the global scale. But is the United States higher education system ready?

“American universities are not responsive enough to industry needs and have failed to evolve to keep pace with changing economic realities,” says Nicholas Donofrio, an IBM executive vice president. “The last place I go to find out about an economic trend is the university. The sea changes don’t happen there.” According to R. Byron Pipes, Purdue’s John L. Bray Distinguished Professor of Materials Engineering, the university must change. “The geographic monopoly universities like Purdue enjoy today will be lost in the future,” he says. “Universities will have to change, and the need of the educational customer will come first.”

Carol Handwerker, professor of materials engineering, adds, “As the model for U.S. industrial research, development, and manufacturing has changed, the university goal must change from developing the discipline-focused engineer to developing a diverse, globally engaged workforce able to work remotely in teams on complex design and manufacturing projects.”

Predictions Circa 1997

The global university isn’t a new topic of conversation for Pipes-it’s been on his mind for over a decade. Before coming to Purdue, he served as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. During his tenure, Rensselaer received the Theodore M. Hessburg Award (1995), Pew Leadership Award (1996), and Boeing Educator Award (1996) for innovations in undergraduate education.

“I traveled to Seattle in 1996 to meet with Phil Condit, the CEO of Boeing, and to receive their prize,” explains Pipes. “He and I started talking about how the university has to change as the global corporation changes. And we started working together on this.”

That year, Condit and Pipes convened a conference in the Seattle area and brought together corporate vice presidents of research from companies like GE, Lucent, IBM, and Boeing and deans of engineering from various colleges throughout the U.S. “This was 10 years ago, before people really began talking about the role of the global university,” Pipes says.

From the conference’s final report, Condit and Pipes co-authored an article titled “Straight Talk” for publication in Issues in Science and Technology in 1997. Here are some of the article’s findings and predictions:

• Centralized, monolithic engineering operations will give way to integrated project teams that will incorporate workers from across the globe.
• Work will be handed off “down-sun”-across time zones- in sequence to team members around the world.
• As global skill levels rise, Americans will comprise a smaller percentage of the global engineering workforce.
• In the global environment, academe and industry will converge.
• The academic organization will reconfigure itself to the educational needs of students with a particular focus on practicing engineers and scientists.

They predicted then that the university will reshape itself structurally to resemble its primary client: industry. The central core campus is responsible for basic education of entry-level students. But much of the actual delivery of the educational product will occur at branch campuses and remote sites around the world that are located in close proximity to industrial centers.

Pipes says that many of these predictions came directly from Condit and what he was doing at Boeing. Ten years ago, the company was in the midst of taking its operations worldwide and needed a coherent approach and quality in its workforce. “Condit’s idea then was that the only way he can assure this quality is to work through a single provider of talent, rather than multiple providers. To me, this is a good illustrative example of what’s happening in the global practice of engineering today,” he says.

The Tide Changes

The number of engineering degrees, including those in materials engineering, awarded in the U.S. peaked in 1985 and has steadily declined by more than 20 percent since then. And according to the American Electronics Association, one out of five U.S. scientists and engineers are foreign-born, and the number of skilled workers immigrating to the U.S. declined by 27 percent between 2001 and 2003.

“When I was in China recently, I saw a university the size of Purdue built in five years,” says Pipes. “And the students were mostly engineers. They had 3,000 electrical engineers in one building. China is outproducing us almost 4-to-1.”

Competition for engineers also comes from India, where 300,000 young Indians compete for no more than 3,500 freshman class positions in one of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (ITT). “For a corporation, if you can get engineering talent anywhere in the world and at any time, what would make you choose from one university or another? The answer is quality and cost,” asserts Pipes. “In other words, if the university supplying the talent is unique, corporations will flock to the institution for talent. If the university is not unique, the corporation will go to the low-cost provider with the same quality.” According to Pipes, the implications for the university and programs like Purdue’s School of Materials Engineering are straightforward: You must become a steeple of excellence.

The Global University

What will the global university look like in the future, and how will materials engineering teach future students? Anil Sachdev (MSMSE ‘72), a research fellow and group manager for a General Motors research and development lab, points out that the American education system remains predominantly local and does not train students for the new global operations paradigm (see “In My View,” p. 8). “The engineer we educate has to learn how to work in the global environment and has to know enough that global corporations will come to Purdue to hire them,” suggests Pipes. “Our students have to be better than the global average.”

The best bet for universities might just be the international branch campus concept-go where the corporations operate and provide engineering talent locally. Bill Showalter, a professor of chemical engineering at Princeton and a colleague of Pipes, uses a pharmaceutical company that opened a research laboratory in Singapore to illustrate the global model.

“One of the executives associated with the decision said, ‘Why should we bring people from Asia to the United States, train them, and then go through the requirements necessary to keep them here? We should provide jobs for them near their homeland so they do not have to leave it,’” says Showalter. “If this seems obvious to the corporate sector, should it be any less so for academe? The customers of a research university are, on the one hand, students; on the other, they are the corporations. Should we not serve both of these customer bases by being in close proximity to them?”

Pipes adds, “In terms of global education, Purdue thinks of itself as competing just in the Big Ten. Imagine our basketball team-to use a metaphor-not just going to the NCAA championships, but going to the Olympics. That’s how we need to think about Purdue.”

Examples of global partnership locations include the Middle East, where Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Abu Dhabi are asking universities to go there and start branch campuses. Tsinghua University in China has established science parks-where the university is co-located-in five provinces. “I don’t think the global university model has finished evolving,” suggests Pipes. “But the right model ultimately provides the flow of human talent and wealth between the branch campus and the main campus. “One of the benefits of the branch campus is that it’s a cash cow. You can resell all the educational products you’ve already developed. It’s more than that, though. The human talent you can provide, the global reach, and the ability to build excellence on your main campus-those are all related to what will happen in the global university,” says Pipes.

Look Into The Crystal Ball

Simon Lehto, project manager for the development of engineering education at Helsinki Polytechnic in Finland, says, “During the past decade, it has become clear that the discrepancy between the education organizations and their corporate customers can no longer be solved by means of partial solutions with the present operating mode: adding subjects, courses, projects, and work practices. This situation can only be remedied by changing to incorporate a new structure.

“Meeting the needs of societies in the global competition of the 21st century emphasizes the role of engineering and increases the requirements for engineers.” For the university, its educational and research duty takes it to the global customer. American engineering students will have to adapt to new cultures, learn new languages, and live overseas in multiple cities throughout their careers.

“To survive, Purdue’s School of Materials Engineering has to be the best program in the world. That’s essential,” Pipes asserts. “I’m just projecting what I think is happening and why. Then it’s up to my faculty colleagues to think about what the implications are to us and to our students.” As the global university model evolves, one thing is for sure: materials engineering, being a pervasive enterprise, will be at the forefront of change.

-Lee Lamb