Is engineering education preparing students to take professional responsibility for the social and ethical implications of their work? As the public becomes more reliant on engineering whistleblowers, are we preparing engineering students to play this role? These questions are central to a new study by University of Michigan professors Erin Cech and Cynthia Finelli called “Learning to be Watchdogs: Advancing Engineers’ Ability to Recognize, Strategize About, and Act on Public Welfare Issues.”

“Two decades ago, many people understood how important technologies in their lives, like their cars, worked and could fix basic mechanical issues when they occurred… today, because of the vastly greater complexity of the technologies that shape our lives, many fewer people have the technological capabilities to understand how things like our phones work. For the most part, the lay public has much shallower understanding about how the technologies that infiltrate such important parts of our lives work, especially to know when there are issues of privacy, or security, or inequity,” said University of Michigan associate professor of sociology and mechanical engineering, Erin Cech. “As a society, we rely more and more heavily on engineers to be able to see these patterns in their design work.”

Unfortunately, a 2014 study by Cech found that engineering students’ sense of public responsibility decreased over the course of their education.

“In a sample of students at four institutions, I found that over the course of their engineering education, these engineering students became less invested in their public welfare responsibilities as engineers. That is the opposite of what we would want from an engineering program. We want to train engineering students to understand and respect their professional responsibilities to the public,” Cech said. “Engineering as a profession holds the privilege of a monopoly on entire areas of knowledge and practice in the social world. Processes of social closure prevent people without training from accessing jobs in those privileged positions. In exchange, engineers, as part of this profession, must recognize and live up to their public welfare responsibilities.”

In response to these findings, Cech and University of Michigan engineering and education associate professor Cynthia Finelli, are embarking on a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation to further understand the extent to which public responsibility is part of the professional identity of engineers and to design a master’s level course around the public welfare responsibilities of engineers.

Cech and Finelli’s project includes three parts. The first two parts of the study involve multimethod empirical investigations: first, they are conducting a nationally representative survey of professional engineers employed in the United States to understand the extent to which engineers see public welfare responsibilities as part of their professional identity and whether they received training in these issues as students. Second, their team will conduct a series of longitudinal interviews following a cohort of master’s students in electrical and computer engineering from the second year of their graduate program through their entry into the workforce, to learn what kind of training they receive in public responsibility and how they engage with the ethical concerns that arise in their jobs.

The third piece of the project will utilize the knowledge from the empirical parts of the study to design a new course around the public welfare responsibilities of engineers.

“This course will not only make the case for why these public welfare concerns are central to the responsibilities that engineers have in the workforce, but also teach them tactics for what to do when they face public welfare dilemmas issues in the workplace,” Cech said.

Cech and Finelli will launch a pilot of the course at the University of Michigan next year. Using data from their study and feedback from students, they will adjust the course design to improve its effectiveness and produce a model that they hope other institutions can use in the future.

Erin Cech’s new book, The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality (University of California Press), is available for pre-order and will be released on November 9th.