Chemical Engineering Education Must Modernize
Key Highlights
- Students struggle to define their own field. Many chemical engineering students, even in their second year, cannot explain what chemical engineering actually is or how it differs from chemistry at scale.
- Curriculum hasn't evolved in 50 years. Fundamentals like transport theory and reactor design are still taught in isolation, while graduates increasingly need integrated skills in AI, sustainability analysis and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
- Job market has transformed dramatically. Canada graduates 1,300 chemical engineers annually, but offers only 300 traditional industry positions, yet programs still emphasize deep technical knowledge that most will never use instead of adaptable problem-framing skills.
Chemical engineering degree programs are largely outdated, inflexible and churning out graduates who are expected to use antiquated skills in jobs that require much more from them.
What they urgently need, despite many operating companies being actively involved in curriculum development, are better cognitive skills to deal with AI and machine learning, a deeper understanding of how their work relates to broader environmental and economic issues and far better interaction with other disciplines, both engineering and non-engineering.
Challenges Educators Face
Two recent education studies, one by engineering education specialists and the other by department heads, lay bare the challenges faced by educators, the industry and chemical engineers themselves.
The first, published in May’s European Journal of Engineering Education, found that most students starting on a chemical engineering degree either did not know what the subject was, or else thought it was about undertaking chemistry on a large scale.
The authors, specialists in engineering education, followed 45 students over the course of their undergraduate chemical engineering courses at six (unnamed) universities: two in the U.S., two in England and two in South Africa. All were interviewed annually, with additional input from course leaders and curriculum documents, such as student handbooks.
How Students Described Their Understanding of Chemical Engineering*
- Category 0. I don’t know what chemical engineering is
- Category 1. Chemical engineering is the application of chemistry to a large scale
- Category 2. Chemical engineering is about processes of large-scale production
- Category 3. Chemical engineering is the design of processes of large-scale production
- Category 4. Chemical engineering is the design of multi-scalar processes
- Category 5. Chemical engineering is the design of multi-scalar processes for particular contexts
*Source: European Journal of Engineering Education
Based on analysis of the interview data, the authors identified six ways in which chemical engineering was understood by students at different stages of their education (see Sidebar 1). Their findings make fascinating reading.
One illustration of a Category 0 understanding came from a student in their second year at an English university: “Even till this day, after two years of doing it, I don’t even know how to explain it. I would just say it’s just maths and physics, maths and physics and a bit of chemistry. I honestly don’t know how to explain it.”
The authors regard category 3 as the watershed category because here students focus on chemical engineering in terms of design, and spoke about chemical engineering as something they were involved in rather than describing a process that they were separate from.
For example, a fourth-year student at one of the South African universities said, “Chemical engineering is the design, management, evaluation and optimization of big chemical processes and processes in general.”
“I would say it is an applied science that tries to understand how things work with the aim of improving a process or improving the structure of something or improving the safety of something. So basically, improving processes by understanding how they work,” said a fourth-year student at another South African university.
By Category 5, rather than focusing on chemical engineering being defined by a general design process, students had a sense that the process of design always needed to be undertaken with reference to a particular context.
“A lot of people think it’s just working with chemicals, which it is for a large extent but we’re not making chemicals. We are designing processes that produce different products, whether it be in the food industry, in the medical industry, in oil and gas, mining. Yes, if you want a product made, we’ll design the process which is best suited to what you want. And we take economic and environmental considerations into account when designing those things,” said a fourth-year student at one of the South African universities.
Next, the authors examined how students’ accounts changed over the course of their degrees. Forty of the 45 accounts appeared to be more inclusive in their final year than in their initial interview.
“This shows that, by their final interview, most students gave an account of chemical engineering that included a focus on design,” noted the authors.
Meanwhile, the analysis of curriculum documents and course leader interviews identified three different educational intentions across the six courses: graduates who could problem-solve as chemical engineers; those with the competencies of chemical engineers; and those who saw the world through the lens of chemical engineers.
At one U.S. university, for example, the emphasis on students developing the fundamental underpinnings of problem-solving as chemical engineers and having a sustainable career as problem solvers was listed as the most important program objective in the program documents.
As the course leader put it, “In our core courses, we try to get the students to think about how to set up and solve problems. It isn’t about plugging numbers into equations. It’s about figuring out, what should the equations look like? And once you’ve got that, then plugging the numbers in gets really easy. So that’s just the philosophy of our core courses.”
Both English universities had an emphasis on producing graduates who could see the world like a chemical engineer, which would be useful even if students went into other kinds of role after graduation. For both programs, there was an emphasis on what separates chemical engineers from other fields.
Five Ways to Improve Chemical Engineering Curricula
- Having a “design spine” to the curriculum with courses that focus on building engineering design skills spread throughout all years of the course — sometimes known as a project-centred curriculum;
- Ensuring theory courses focus on key concepts - sometimes called threshold concepts - that are essential to understanding the field rather than being stuffed with content;
- Including structured opportunities in the curriculum for interaction with industry partners which are explicitly linked to assessment;
- Taking the context in which engineering happens seriously by having design projects rooted in a local setting, where possible involving community stakeholders, which can increase critical awareness of engineering responses to local issues and the limitations of engineering solutions;
- Including more flexibility on reassessment to support students to stay on track, which could include flexibility in the form or timing of assessment.
Align Educational Intentions with Curriculum Development
The authors cite two significant outcomes of their study. First, the variation in students’ accounts of chemical engineering and second, how students’ accounts of chemical engineering appeared to be related to the educational intentions of the leaders of their degree program.
Their conclusion crystallizes the scale of the challenges faced by the profession: “The study highlights that if chemical engineering is to move beyond the plant, then students need support to understand its focus on the design of multiscalar processes in particular contexts. Consequently, our findings highlight the importance of explicitly aligning educational intentions with curriculum development to ensure stronger connections between students’ initial and growing understandings of chemical engineering.”
Asked how educational intentions of chemical engineering degree programs can be more explicitly aligned with curriculum development to ensure stronger connections between students’ initial and growing understandings of the subject, the authors made five suggestions (Sidebar 2).
“None of these suggestions is particularly new; they have been used in a number of degree programs,” said study co-author Paul Ashwin, professor of Higher Education at Lancaster University, England. “In a way that is precisely the point – thoughtful curriculum design is not about the latest exciting educational innovation but about careful collective discussions about how to design a program that takes students from where they enter the program to being the kind of chemical engineers that the program seeks to produce,” he added.
Keeping Chemical Engineering Relevant
Is chemical engineering still relevant in the 21st century? It’s a question discussed by the authors of Shaping futures: A dialogue on chemical engineering education, published in The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering late last year.
All chemical engineering professors at Canadian departments considered how engineering education practice and theory should reflect the rapidly changing complexities of global issues, such as the energy transition, health and sustainable food production, in collaboration with the four authors.
Guided by a researcher in education, the four used the concept of “futuring” in their dialogue, whereby their collective engineering experiences are combined in a way that best identifies educational themes for the profession to consider.
The guts of the study were taken up with examining three questions:
- How has chemical engineering education evolved as an instructional practice?
- How can chemical engineering education adapt to the increasing complexities of our world?
- In what ways might chemical engineering education equip students for the challenges of future worlds?
On the first, the professors note that the emphasis on chemical engineering fundamentals, such as transport theory, separation and reactor design, has barely evolved in half a century. Holding on to these, they say, promotes a traditional identity of the profession which is increasingly at variance with what most students do after graduation.
Problems that engineers need to solve are increasingly requiring holistic and integrated ways of understanding: “For example, sustainability and net social benefit analysis and eco-technoeconomic analysis (TEA) models incorporating life cycle analysis are becoming the in-demand skill set as engineers need to negotiate the complex socio-enviro-technical and systemic aspects of engineering work.”
The four agreed that students are underprepared for the integrative thinking and synthesis required for their senior design courses, mainly because the fundamentals are still studied in siloed courses without reference to how they interrelate.
On the other hand, efforts are underway to integrate previously siloed topics, such as ethics/professionalism, and the impacts of technology on society, into courses – along with those related to equity, diversity, inclusivity, and indigeneity.
The professors believe that faculties are now incorporating active learning strategies into their classes and integrating more inquiry- and discovery-based learning into their courses. They note that funding — at least in Canada — is available to boost these opportunities and that dividends are already being paid in terms of better course quality and more innovative pedagogical approaches.
Additionally, they believe that the strategic priorities of the education establishment have evolved to emphasize the community and global awareness of our graduates, as well as their aptitude to tackle the increasingly complex challenges facing society: “There is a lot of exciting work to be done and interest and support to do it.”
When considering the second question, the authors note that while Canada graduates approximately 1,300 chemical engineers annually, there are typically only around 300 job opportunities available in “traditional” industries. However, wherever they find work, modern graduates must come to terms with demands that include the energy transition, data analysis, AI and managing social and geopolitical complexity. “Engineering education must adapt to help prepare graduates for success in these diverse careers and equip them to tackle these increasingly complex roles,” they note.
Again, they emphasize the need to move the focus from deep knowledge that most graduates will never use, to a more general knowledge base giving the skills to dissect and frame problems: “For example, most may never need to design distillation columns or chemical reactors, but will still need understand the underlying kinetic and thermodynamic principles and apply them to other situations.”
The rapid rise of AI brings its own challenges, not least creating a need for graduates to be able to navigate uncertainty by asking it the right questions. Critical and creative thinking, accompanied by collaborative learning and effective communication, will be the necessary skill set for graduates here.
Hold Space for Multiple Truths
The professors acknowledge that introducing the concept of multiplicity and diversity in approaches and thinking often will produce several good solutions to a problem. Still, they wonder how an engineering student, typically more comfortable with binary right/wrong answers, copes in this scenario: “How do we hold space for multiple truths? This seems like a big challenge for engineering students. How does intellectual maturity play a role in their development in multiplicity? We wonder if by emphasizing questions with single-answer solutions, we are delaying this intellectual development.”
In terms of the third question, the professors note that this answer really depends on how future worlds are envisioned. Even so, engineers will need to be equipped to produce adaptive and resilient solutions to forthcoming challenges.
“Acquiring technical knowledge should remain central to undergraduate engineering education but with the recognition that this knowledge base will primarily be used to facilitate and accelerate future learning over a lifetime, rather than being an end in and of itself that provides a static foundation that will be adequate throughout a career,” they note.
From an educational perspective, this means continuing to implement initiatives that are already being adopted in chemical engineering programs and curricula, including more transdisciplinary courses and programs, as well as increased experiential learning opportunities through project-based and community-engaged activities.
The professors also point to the opportunity to learn to “co-learn” that goes beyond simply working effectively in teams: “There is a unique opportunity to prepare our students to be open and collaborative. They should recognize the value of relationship building and fostering partnerships not only across disciplines but also cultures, and in doing so, they should value different knowledge systems.”
The study concludes with the comment that, both as a theoretical framework and a practical discipline for professionals and researchers, chemical engineering must adapt to changing complex systems.
“The field requires higher-level cognitive and metacognitive skills to navigate the intricacies of data, AI, and machine learning, as well as the pressing societal and human needs related to energy, commodities, connectivity, and self-actualization. Moreover, there is an urgent call for relational accountability concerning nature and the environment,” they write.
About the Author
Seán Ottewell
Editor-at-Large
Seán Crevan Ottewell is Chemical Processing's Editor-at-Large. Seán earned his bachelor's of science degree in biochemistry at the University of Warwick and his master's in radiation biochemistry at the University of London. He served as Science Officer with the UK Department of Environment’s Chernobyl Monitoring Unit’s Food Science Radiation Unit, London. His editorial background includes assistant editor, news editor and then editor of The Chemical Engineer, the Institution of Chemical Engineers’ twice monthly technical journal. Prior to joining Chemical Processing in 2012 he was editor of European Chemical Engineer, European Process Engineer, International Power Engineer, and European Laboratory Scientist, with Setform Limited, London.
He is based in East Mayo, Republic of Ireland, where he and his wife Suzi (a maths, biology and chemistry teacher) host guests from all over the world at their holiday cottage in East Mayo.