HispanicBusiness

UTEP has made a name for itself by producing quality engineers that don't look like engineers did 50 years ago when the typical engineer was a white male, Natalicio noted.

UTEP is the second-largest producer of Hispanic engineers in the country, just behind Florida International in Miami.

UTEP has 350 to 475 graduates a year from all engineering-degree programs, with about 75 percent of those Hispanic and almost a quarter of them women, which includes some of the Hispanics.

The engineering college's goal is to increase the number of graduates by 25 percent in the next three to five years, and increase enrollment -- now at 3,154 --to 4,000 in the next five to eight years, the dean said.

It's also aiming to eventually have half its graduates be women, he added.

The engineering college is the second largest at UTEP, behind the College of Liberal Arts.

UTEP, Florida International, California State Los Angeles, and other minority-serving schools have been very good at producing Hispanic engineers, Schoephoerster said.

"But we can't handle the burden ourselves," he said.

So, the schools need to be models on how other engineering colleges can graduate more minorities, he said. One way the schools will do that is through the now-forming national Consortium of Minority-Serving Engineering and Technology Programs at Urban, Public Universities, he said.

IBM's Spohrer said he agreed to sit on the UTEP engineering college advisory board because of Schoephoerster's vision for transforming engineering education.

"Specifically, the (engineering education) model of the future may evolve to be more like the medical school clinical model, where faculty are practitioners and their students are working on real-world challenges," Spohrer said.

Schoephoerster said engineering schools can learn from medical schools -- where faculty are typically practicing doctors tied to teaching hospitals -- to attract a new generation of engineers.

Engineering colleges need more practicing engineers to bring "practice-based skills" to students, and more company internships for students to get more hands-on training, he said.

Broadening the undergraduate engineering curriculum will help attract more people into engineering, and by making the curriculum more "practice-based, students will stay more engaged and won't drop out," the dean said.

UTEP is taking a step in that direction with its broad-based Leadership Engineering degree program, set to begin next fall.

"We call it Leadership Engineering because we want to attract future leaders into the engineering field" instead of having those people go into law, medicine, or general business, Schoephoerster said. "Part of the reason we're not producing more engineers is we're losing high-quality students to other fields.

"We are a society so dependent on technology that people driving society forward on a professional level need to have a fundamental understanding of technology," and a broad-based engineering program can do that, the dean said.

"We believe engineering is the liberal arts degree of the 21st century," he said.

UTEP President Natalicio said she doesn't see engineers resembling liberal arts grads. But, she said, there's no doubt they need a broader knowledge of the world.

UTEP started a program --with part of a $10 million gift last year from a former engineering grad, Mike Loya -- to converge engineering and business programs so engineering students get a broader understanding of the economics of engineering, she noted.

Engineers need to "develop a broader range of people skills because job conditions will shift, and the more broadly educated (engineer) will be able to navigate" the future better, Natalicio said.

More information: http://engineering.utep.edu

Degree flow

Engineering degrees awarded, 2010-2011--:
-- Bachelor's: 83,001 (18.4 percent women).
-- Master's: 46,940 (22.6 percent women).
-- Doctoral: 9,582 (21.8 percent women).

--U.S., and Puerto Rico

Source: American Society for Engineering Education.

Degrees by ethnicity

Percentage of engineering bachelor's degrees by ethnic group, 2010-2011--:

-- Asian-Americans: 12.2 percent.
-- Hispanics: 8.5 percent.
-- Blacks: 4.2 percent.
-- Whites: 69.8 percent.

--U.S., and Puerto Rico

Source: American Society for Engineering Education.

Top Hispanic schools

U.S. engineering schools with the most bachelor's degrees to Hispanics, 2010-2011:

1. Florida International University, 359.
2. University of Texas at El Paso, 220.
3. University of Florida, 167.
4. Texas A&M University, 151.
5. California State Polytechnic, Pomona, 143.

Source: American Society for Engineering Education.

UTEP profile

UTEP College of Engineering data:

-- 3,154 students.--
-- 79 percent Hispanic.
-- 19.3-percent women.
-- 299 bachelor's degrees.--
-- 160 master's degrees.
-- 15 doctoral degrees.
-- 103 faculty members.

Source: UTEP