Growing the national innovation system: Reshaping professional graduate education to ensure a strong U.S. engineering workforce

This is the first paper in the special panel session on reshaping graduate education to better serve the needs of the practicing profession in industry to ensure a strong U.S. engineering workforce for competitiveness. The newly established National Collaborative Task Force of the Graduate Studies Division of ASEE is taking a key leadership role to enact major reform in graduate engineering education at the national level to spur U.S. technological innovation, unleash industrial creativity, and enhance competitiveness. This paper addresses the national urgency for reform in higher education to strengthen U.S. innovative capacity and outlines purposeful action that needs to be taken in transforming graduate education to better meet the needs of engineering practice for leadership of technology innovation. Further, it defines a road map for change to help guide the reshaping of professional graduate education as a "system for lifelong learning" that is specifically designed to support the continuous development of technology in industry and to grow the nation's engineering graduates as technology leaders in industry simultaneously.