Academic Drift in European Professional Engineering Education: The End of Alternatives to the University?

Abstract

In this chapter, it is argued that insights from comparative studies of higher education are essential to develop an understanding of educational systems dynamics impacting on professional engineering education. Usually such structural dynamics tend to go unnoticed among engineering educators. This chapter is organised in the following way: After a theoretical framing of the argument, three examples of institutional transformations and cognitive shifts that have taken place in similar types of professional nonuniversity engineering education institutions in Great Britain, France and Germany from the massive expansion of higher education in the 1960s to the present are discussed. More precisely, academic drift processes in British polytechnics, French Instituts Universitaires de Technologie (IUTs) and German Fachhochschulen will be examined and compared. In reviewing the relevant literature, the following questions will be considered: (1) What do we know about the processes that have constituted the engineering curriculum? (2) Are such processes inevitable and irreversible? (3) What kind of tensions and dilemmas do they create? It is argued that a particularly powerful and coherent set of values and attitudes characteristic of universities may also be seen as lying at the heart of vocational nonuniversity higher education institutions, causing them to drift towards the university or imitate them as implied in the subtitle.