| : There is a growing hypothesis throughout all the engineering disciplines that the first step toward licensure should be a Master's Degree and not the current Bachelor of Science Degree. The belief is that graduating students are not ready to work with practicing engineers, lacking the skills that a higher degree could afford. Others feel that by making the Master's Degree the first prerequisite we would be aligning our profession with that of Doctors and Attorneys, while distancing ourselves from the sanitation and domestic type engineers. : The other side of the coin is that this would be harmful for the engineering profession as a whole and hurt business as well. The argument is that with the required course work it now takes a student five years to complete the BS Degree, and another two years will only steer qualified students away from engineering disciplines. Another argument is that small business owners could not afford salaries that a person with a Master's Degree will require. : I would be very interested in how this membership feels about this controversial topic. I'm not a member - I'm not even an engineer, or even an engineer in training. As a matter of fact, I'm not even in Iowa. But I do know that if this were the case in Oregon there would be many people that would be forced to either quit their current jobs and go back to college or start taking classes. At the small company I work for, there are two PEs, 1 EIT, and two designers - myself and another person - one of which has an Archiecture degree and the other (myself) is attempting to become an EIT without any formal training - legal in Oregon (4 years experience & FE exam substites for a degree & FE), I don't know about in Iowa. What I do know is that of the three other designers that worked here in the time I've been working, one performed extremely poor calculations, and did not do good details. The second was primarily a civil engineer and yet did not know how to do anything useful in that disciple; well, except for drafting. The last one went on to get his P.E. and leave the company. My point is that schooling is not necessarily the best part of an engineer; as a matter of fact, in my opinion it is the least part. What makes a good engineer is the ability to perform the work, and understand what you are doing. This takes many years, but required schooling is not necessarily the only way to do it. Look at it this way: As an engineer, it's not your responsibility to make sure it looks good. It's your responsibility to make sure it works. Shouldn't the board of engineers - any board of engineers - do the same thing?
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