"Engineering Technology and Future of the Profession, Opportunities and Challenges"

This paper gives an overview of engineering technology as an academic disciple and discusses the future of its graduates including their opportunities and challenges.Potential careers and examples of high visibility alumni will also be presented. OriginsThe origins of engineering technology as an academic discipline goes back at least to the 1940s when engineering technicians were educated in two-year schools.One of the first Technology Accreditation Commission (TAC) of ABET (then called the Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD).Later it was renamed the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.Now it is named simply ABET, Inc. Associate degrees were awarded by the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology (then called the Franklin Institute of Boston) in 1947.[1] These programs very successfully educated engineering technicians and made them a valuable part of the engineering team.After Sputnik was launched in 1957 by the Soviet Union, leaders in the United States became very concerned that the Russians were surpassing the U.S.A. in engineering.As a result, more mathematics and science was pumped into the engineering curriculum.Something had to give and that was experiential learning laboratories with most of the engineering classes.As a personal aside, when one of the authors majored in electrical engineering at Purdue University, only five or six of his engineering classes had laboratories with them.Later when he became a faculty member teaching electrical engineering technology, he was surprised and pleased to find that all of the engineering technology classes had laboratories associated