I sent in a response to the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) on behalf of the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Engineering Society today opposing the proposed NCEES Model Law. Actually, we are not opposed to the model law itself, only to the part that would require some 30 hours of additional education beyond the BS degree to become licensed as a professional engineer.

My primary objection to the proposal is that the entire process is being driven by civil engineers. I remember a few years ago when this movement first got started, the talk was to require a Master’s degree for licensure. After some objections that was changed to only 30 semester hours–essentially a Master’s degree only without the research and thesis. This entire process has been proposed by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the other professional and technical societies have only talked about it as a result of the ASCE proposal, and that talk has been scarce. As far as I can tell, no other organization is pushing for such a requirement.

My objections to the proposed law are the detrimental effects I think it would have on the professional licensing of engineers. Currently (and regrettably) engineering graduates can work in industry without a PE license; therefore not all graduates pursue licensing. I do encourage licensing but it is oftentimes a tough sell. The exams are not easy, they are not cheap, and the FE Exam is given on Saturday! After four years of experience the engineer is rewarded with the opportunity to take another eight hour exam. If an additional 30 hours of coursework were to be required, the number of engineers pursuing licensure would drop even more.

Now, I’m not proposing that we have lower standards just to get people to participate. On the contrary, I believe we should have high standards; I believe all engineers should be licensed. I simply do not see the need for the requirement of additional education hours. If this additional education is essential to the successful practice of engineering then why are the other engineering organizations not jumping on the band wagon with ASCE? If licensed engineers are lacking in requisite skills, then where are the engineering failures? Why is the public not screaming for reform?

The ultimate solution, I believe, is a re-engineering of civil engineering. Currently the expectations are that civil engineers know something about everything. If a civil engineer wants to design bridges, he or she will still have to learn a little bit about wastewater treatment. If they want to practice environmental engineering then they will need to learn a little something about transportation too. It has always been this way, but does that mean it needs to continue to be that way? I think not.

We live in a different world now than we did even a decade or two ago. Engineers work in teams; the lone practitioner is going away or focusing their practice to a narrow area. Perhaps it is time to break civil engineering into different engineering fields. We could start with environmental engineering–move it out of civil engineering proper, allowing civil engineers to focus on roads, bridges, structures and transportation. Wastewater treatment, water treatment, storm water run-off, etc. could fall under environmental engineering and we could even add pollution prevention, air pollution control, maybe even noise pollution.

It may sound like a radical idea, but is that not exactly what has happened over the last century with other engineering disciplines? Was aerospace engineering, now a separate discipline, not at one time part of mechanical engineering? Was chemical engineering even not part of mechanical engineering? Each of those is now a separate discipline because the information needed to know in order successfully practice each branch grew to the point that it was too much for one person to learn and still be good at it all. An option would have been to keep it all together and require several hundred hours of credit to earn a mechanical engineering degree, but would that solve anything? Does someone designing a machine need to be competent in the design of a chemical reactor or aircraft controls?

Civil engineering needs to change, and the change will be difficult, but it needs to happen. The proposed model law will not solve the problem, if indeed there even is a problem. What it will do, if adopted, is reduce the number of engineers who pursue licensing, and that is bad not just for civil engineering, but for all branches of engineering, and the public will suffer the most.