MANILA, Philippines - In his book Saga and Triumph, O.D. Corpuz tells of Lt. Gen. Edilberto Evangelista who graduated with highest honors in architecture and civil engineering from the University of Ghent in Belgium. He came home in September 1896 to join the revolution and fell on February 17, 1897 in the hard fought battle of Zapote Bridge. Aside from leading men in battle, he designed and built trenches so well that Spaniard Gen. Diego de los Rios was led to remark that although he believed that all the revolutionary leaders were natives and meztizos, the trench works of the Filipinos simply had to be the work of a European engineer.
It wouldn’t be long after when Evangelista’s tribe would begin to increase. Civil engineering programs were instituted at UST in 1907, at UP in 1910, and at Mapua and NU in 1925. Other engineering programs soon followed on the heels of these programs.
Fast forward to the present and we find that the tribe has mightily grown and spread. We have engineering programs being offered by close to 400 schools, graduating about 47,000 students every year. Of these, about 26,000 take the Board exams, about 10,000 of whom pass. In terms of what McKinsey Global Institute calls “suitable young engineers with 7 years experience or less” (suitable because they can qualify to work in multinational corporations), the Philippines has about 60,000.
Such is the scale. How about a perspective? Consider that while China’s population is about 16 times that of ours, their “suitable engineers” number only three times that of ours. While India’s population is 13 times that of ours, they have only 2.2 times more suitable engineers than we. China and India are worthy of mention because at present, together with the Philippines, they are often the top choices for locating IT and engineering-based services for companies from the UK and the US, the main sources of demand. Eastern European countries, which also vie to supply such services, have higher concentrations. (Source: McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), The Emerging Global Market, June 2005.)
A time of national awakening and assertion brought Evangelista back from Europe to the trenches of Zapote. A time of globalization brings today’s Filipino engineers from home to almost every corner of the world. The main challenge of the times is for the Filipino engineers here and abroad to be able to continue to practice the profession at the highest levels of international standards.
The movement towards having global standards in the practice of the engineering profession has been and will continue to be inexorable. Membership in international registers is becoming a must in order to practice across national borders. In Europe there is the EUR-ING register. There is an ASEAN as well as an APEC register. In North America is the NAFTA register. An International Professional Engineers (IntPE) Register has been created. There are formal talks about the consolidation of all these registers. The basic theme is the “mutual recognition of professional qualifications.”
Complementing the globalization of engineering practice is the globalization of engineering education. Discourse on the “mutual recognition of professional qualifications” is much easier if a baseline of required entry-level competencies can be established. These entry-level competencies naturally become part of the educational objectives and desired learning outcomes of engineering schools all over the world. At the moment many countries are tending towards having their students attain the following competencies, which were first enunciated by the US-based accreditation body, the ABET:
• Ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering;
• Ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data;
• Ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability;
• Ability to function in multidisciplinary teams;
• Ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems;
• Understanding of professional and ethical responsibility;
• Ability to communicate effectively;
• Broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context;
• Recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning;
• Knowledge of contemporary issues; and
• Ability to use the techniques, skills, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice.
The attainment of these outcomes becomes the organizing principle for curricula and their delivery. If the degree of attainment of these outcomes can be reliably measured, then a continuous quality improvement (CQI) system can be built upon them.
The Technical Panel in Engineering, Technology and Architecture (TPETA) of the CHED has incorporated these outcomes into its prescribed standards. The accreditation body PACUCOA is moving towards outcomes-based accreditation based on these outcomes as well. The Philippine Technological Council (PTC), the umbrella organization of all the Accredited Professional Organizations (APOs) in engineering, is taking a serious look at these outcomes within the framework of creating a system of accrediting engineering academic programs that would be internationally acceptable.
The accreditation system of educational programs has also gone international. In Europe, the European Network for the Accreditation of Engineering Education (ENAEE) established the EUR-ACE Label in March 2006. It is a decentralized system in which “National Agencies accredit study programs, as they already do, and the EUR-ACE label can be added to the accreditation, provided the Agency and the program satisfy the EUR-ACE Framework Standards.” The Network of Accreditation Bodies for Engineering Education in Asia (NABEEA) is in the early stages of accomplishing a similar set-up in this part of the world. The Washington Accord, signed in 1989, “is an agreement between the bodies responsible for accrediting professional engineering degree programs in each of the signatory countries. It recognizes the substantial equivalency of programs accredited by those bodies, and recommends that graduates of accredited programs in any of the signatory countries be recognized by the other countries as having met the academic requirements for entry to the practice of engineering.” There are currently formal talks of having a common standard for EUR-ACE and Washington Accord or, failing that, a connecting document. If this comes to pass then truly the system becomes global.
Of late, many countries are rushing to join these international accreditation systems. The Philippines is mounting an effort as well. If our engineering programs can be formally internationally recognized as being up to standard in this manner, then the tribe of modern-day doubting Gen. de los Rioses will hopefully cease to exist.
(The author is currently the president of the Mapua Institute of Technology, Malayan High School of Science and Malayan Colleges Laguna.)