In his best-seller, The World is Flat, Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Friedman describes the emergence of a global economy based on innovation. It is a world in which both the research that drives innovation and the skilled workers who can translate it into products and services are increasingly dispersed. It is a world in which a growing number of nations are investing in science and technology and developing world-class research universities. It is a world in which the United States, which was the established leader of the world economy in the 20th century, will find itself challenged by ambitious nations with larger populations who are intent on entering the innovation space.

Higher education, which for many centuries was expected to prepare a fraction of the population for a handful of professions, is now called upon to become the engine of an innovation-driven economy. Colleges and universities are finding themselves under increasing pressure to come down out of the ivory tower and become the pillars of prosperity and productivity for society. An article entitled “The Brains Business” in the September 2005 issue of The Economist predicted that “the emerging global university is set to be one of the transformative institutions of the current era.”

What must American universities do to adapt to this new role as an engine of innovation, and what does it mean for undergraduate education? How can we reconcile these rising expectations with our traditional role of educating undergraduates and preparing them for life? These are not just rhetorical questions. The recent report from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education complains that “unacceptable numbers of college graduates enter the workforce without the skills employers say they need in an economy where, as the truism holds correctly, knowledge matters more than ever.” Issues like these and others such as graduation rate, progress towards a degree, and the role of the core curriculum are swirling around us. In this talk on “Making Undergraduate Education an Integral Part of the Global Research University” I will examine the role of our universities in an innovation-driven global economy and how it can be used to enrich undergraduate education. In doing so, we can not only help our graduates adapt to life in highly competitive global economy, but also provide a human dimension to the emerging global research university.

I will focus on my own university, The Georgia Institute of Technology, to demonstrate how an institution can use its rich array of resources to align its undergraduate education with university, national and global priorities and make things happen. The effort I will describe began 12-to-13 years ago, involved lots of people, and was driven by multiple wide-ranging forces:

• Societal forces such as the growing population, fresh water shortages, terrorism, new diseases, global warming and other environmental problems, and coastal development
• Economic forces such as internet/high-speed communications, new markets opening up, the emergences of technology-based economies in other countries, and sustained investment in higher education in countries like China and India
• The need to compete in a world in which more people and nations are “on a more equal footing” (Friedman), the U.S. produces only one of every four-five inventions, and the largest technological workforces are in other nations.

We had two goals: To reshape the undergraduate experience at Georgia Tech in order to ignite a passion for learning within our students and provide opportunities for them to channel their creative juices into productive endeavors, and to ensure that our graduates had the broad knowledge and understanding and prerequisite skills to be productive citizens in a global society. Accomplishing these goals is especially important in the current economy, which requires innovation at all levels:

The big winners in the increasingly fierce global scramble for supremacy will not be those who simply make commodities faster and cheaper than the competition. They will be those who develop talent, techniques, and tools so advanced that there is no competition (Sustaining the Nation’s Innovation Ecosystems, Information Technology Manufacturing and Competitiveness, PCAST)

In tomorrow’s world, a nation’s wealth will derive from its capacity to educate, attract, and retain citizens who are able to work smarter and learn faster – making educational achievement ever more important both for individuals and for society at large. (Spellings Commission Report)

Georgia Tech is a leading research university with an ambitious global agenda. At the same time, it serves as Georgia’s primary provider of bachelor’s level engineers, and undergraduates make up two-thirds of its enrollment. Fifteen years ago, the Institute was losing students, and we knew we had to do something. We started by focusing on our multiple missions and determining the strengths and resources we could and should draw upon in re-fashioning our undergraduate education. We also re-examined our goals for our students.

Research universities are drivers of innovation. Our high quality graduate programs produce virtually all of this country’s doctoral recipients. We conduct fundamental research that leads to discoveries and new knowledge, as evidenced by the fact that 80 percent of the patents cited by private industry come from work done at universities. We promote technology transfer and commercialization. As my colleagues and I undertook our study of our undergraduate education, it seemed essential that we extend the emphasis on research and innovation that is so central to Georgia Tech to our undergraduate programs. We were also influenced by factors outside the University: Our graduates will be competing in a world in which jobs migrate to the place of lowest cost as their economic sector becomes commoditized, an understanding of the global forces driving the world becomes more critical, and the future success for the United States is at the highest end of the innovation spectrum.

The timing of our undergraduate initiative was fortuitous. In 2004 The National Academy of Engineering issued its report Engineer of 2020, which, looking to the future and envisioned how the “shape” of engineering education must change if it is to prepare graduates for the challenges of the next century and create a significant and dynamic role for the profession. With Peter Schwartz, author of The Art of the Long View serving as facilitator, leading engineers laid out several scenarios for the future; all had science and technology at the forefront. Engineer of 2020 described the attributes an engineer will have to have:

He or she will aspire to have the ingenuity of Lillian Gilbraeth, the problem-solving capabilities of Gordon Moore, the scientific insight of Albert Einstein, the creativity of Pablo Picasso, the determination of the Wright brothers, the leadership abilities of Bill Gates, the conscience of Eleanor Roosevelt, the vision of Martin Luther King Jr., and the curiosity and wonder of our grandchildren (National Academy of Engineering)

Simultaneously, ABET ( the accrediting agency of college and university engineering programs), which had long impeded innovation, was responding to need to retool undergraduate engineering education by transforming its existing accreditation standards into criteria that emphasize the specific skills and learning outcomes students must achieve. In addition to scientific and technological knowledge, the new criteria emphasize problem solving, communication skills, and teamwork, as well as understanding of societal and global issues. They also include ethical and social contexts for professional practice.

ABET’s new criteria impacted curriculum, teaching methods, faculty practices, and students’ co-curricular experiences, and they provided a wonderful opportunity for Georgia Tech and other engineering colleges to truly transform their undergraduate engineering programs.

Over the past decade, Georgia Tech has engaged in a multi-faceted effort to reshape its undergraduate education experience. It has “reinvented” its curriculum, “weaving” it from “threads,” so that from the first year on students are compelled to have experience in design, all new majors are interdisciplinary, and undergraduates in computing have the opportunity to “customize” their degrees around “threads” or subject areas and “roles” that are integrated with the threads and help students define what they want to do with their knowledge. It has pioneered educational technology by instituting a requirement for all students to have their own computers that meet certain specifications, creating a complete wireless and walk-up port environment, and enhancing the Web so that it has become a powerful curricular and pedagogical tool. It has transformed physical spaces within classroom buildings and elsewhere on campus in order to create centralized information centers and establish sites at different locations that encourage formal and informal interaction. It has created an array of experiences involving service learning, research, study abroad, and internships at international corporations, for example, in order to take these experiences to the next level, accommodate more students, and deepen students’ understanding of local and global forces. It has established a Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning to help faculty teach better, and it has emphasized pedagogical approaches like problem-based learning in which students work on real life problems and do research to develop solutions It has also created special initiatives that appeal to the higher motivations of students to contribute in meaningful ways to improve society. The Leadership Education and Development Program (LEAD), a certificate program within the School of Public Policy that provides multiple opportunities for students to develop and practice leadership skills, is one such program. Finally, Georgia Tech changed its admission criteria in order to attract a more diverse and engaged group of students. The theme throughout has been “Making the whole greater than the sum of the parts.”

As a result of these efforts, Georgia Tech’s yield of freshman applicants increased, its retention rate grew, and its graduation rate has improved. Forty per cent of its undergraduates are now engaged in structured research. A third study abroad. Moreover, Georgia Tech’s environment is considerably richer than it was a decade or so ago. At any given time, over 1,000 undergraduates are engaged in music and leading poets give readings to packed houses.

Georgia Tech’s goal throughout has been not only to produce the workforce of the future, but also to educate well-rounded citizens of the world. We feel we are on the right track, as evidenced by our receiving the 1999 Hesburgh Award for Faculty Development to Enhance Undergraduate Teaching and Learning and by the recognition Thomas Friedman gave us in The World is Flat.

I have used Georgia Tech to exemplify the centrality of undergraduate education within the global research university and how and critical and integral it is to all our endeavors, because Georgia Tech is the institution I know best. Undergraduate education is equally integral to the missions of all research universities, which are uniquely positioned to offer an undergraduate education that has a global reach and emphasizes research, creativity and innovation

References

Friedman, Thomas (2005) The World Is Flat, New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

National Academy of Engineering (2004) The Engineer of 2020, Washington, DC: National Academy of Engineering, http://www.nae.edu

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (2004) Sustaining the Nation’s Innovation Ecosystems, Information Technology Manufacturing and Competitiveness, http://www.ostp.gov/PCAST/FINALPCASTITManuf%20ReportPackage.pdf.

The Economist (2005) “The Brain Business,” The Economist, 376(8443): 3-4

Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education (2006) Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/index.html