Re-Engineering The Curriculum
Despite the economic downturn, there are professions that even today are having difficulties attracting employees. Both the accounting and civil engineering professions remain chronically short of new employees coming through the educational pipeline.
It seems the problem is math. And, that these two professions, especially civil engineering, are neither especially sexy nor marketed particularly well to the potential engineers and accountants coming through our system.
And CPAs have shown that a little marketing can worik. A recent American Institute of CPAs survey found that in the tough economy, client retention has become the number one concern of CPAs, replacing staffing. According to the Massachusetts Society of CPAs, staffing was “a crisis” 18 months ago, but the profession’s efforts to get students at all levels interested in public accounting has worked and the profesion’s focus has shifted from retaining employees to keeping clients.
The challenge here is to affect the raw number of students who find math relevant beginning at a young age.
Educating Students
That isn’t to say that Massachusetts’ students do poorly in math. In fact, test scores indicate they do better than students in most states and have made great gains in recent years. But test scores give only a brief and narrow glimpse into students’ mathematical potential. A curriculum designed primarily to improve test scores, while effective to that end, provides students with very little practical advantage in the business world. The same can be said for recent talks in the region about lengthening the school day in order to boost MCAS scores.
What students need and deserve is the kind of math education that engages them, and interests them in a wide range of fields. Firms would greatly appreciate a field of job candidates that is prepared for and enthusiastic about beginning a career that has a truly stable future — albeit in an unsexy profession.
We believe the solution lies in programs like those used at the Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science here in Worcester.
Robert Salvatelli, the academy’s director, is well aware of the shortage of engineers, and we believe the academy’s commitment to hands-on, project-based, teamwork-intensive education is key to not only better preparing students, but for staffing engineering firms in this especially demanding time.
What the academy has managed to do is break students of their need for instant gratification. Students in the program come to realize that engineers may work on a single project for a number of years. To that end, teams of academy students take on a 7-month project, an effort modeled after the long-term projects undertaken by students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Salvatelli said out of nine of the academy’s top students, six want to be engineers, but none of those six want to be a civil engineer, the type that is currently in short supply and soon to be in even greater demand.
“All this money from Obama is going in that direction: streets, water, water treatment,” Salvatelli explained.
That, Salvatelli hopes, will make civil engineering seem more relevant to students focused instead on biomedical or chemical engineering, two of the more popular concentrations. We share that hope and we encourage local civil engineering firms to find their ways into public schools, such as Doherty High School in Worcester, that have engineering programs, in order to expose students to an in-demand profession at an opportune time.
As for educators, these difficult and confusing times ought to convince them that the future of their students and the future of fields like engineering depend not on higher test scores, but on a real understanding of mathematics.
As Salvatelli put it, students should be learning “what math is really used for."
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