Engineering program development

Test scores merely reflect family income, GPA varies widely, and self-discipline, curiosity and hard work are very hard to measure without a personal relationship. Perhaps this is why football coaches physically visit recruits:

• School physically visits recruits
• Recruits visit the school

Visiting is expensive. Less expensive ways involve asking students to write essays:

• What do you do daily or weekly that makes you different from your peers?
• What questions have you walked around with for more than two days, that you don't know the answer to, but are looking for answers underneath every interaction with the world?
• Describe when you have worked hard with the hope of future reward and then experienced delayed gratification.

Essays have to be read, compared, sorted and ranked. This is marginally less expensive than the physical visits. Large schools try to create efficient/fair application processes by capturing numbers: Class rank, GPA, test scores and check boxes of things like band, choir, clubs, sports, and documented success of each. But this opens the door for all sorts of bias to creep in. The alternative is to let someone else do this work ... such as a community college.

Four year schools view community colleges as a gauntlet that:

• proves students can work hard
• students can navigate prerequisites
• get into the class that always fills up and is needed for all other classes
• get good grades

Community colleges have to have an emphasis on grades that is different than a four year institution. Four year institutions give entry level students more chances to recover from failure than transfer students. Some four year institutions don't even offer grades the first semester. Community College grades matter tremendously.

The overt goal of community college selection is to improve four year transfer. But there are fine grained, tangible, immediate goals:

• Improve reputation (helps transfer, fund raising, recrutiment)
• Improve projects (markers that indicate uniqueness, opportunity, success)
• Improve placement (internships, workstudy, summer jobs, community participation, student personal network building)

Projects have these characteristics:

• open ended .. never ending, always next steps, always something to do
• unique .. lots of different projects for students to choose among
• broad .. ideally they involve others with expertise in community, not just upper division classes

Small, private four-year institutions can charge more, and give out more in scholarships. They can endow professors more, and leverage the scheduling logistical efficiencies of smaller classes. This leads to a cohort bonding over shared hard work, everyone in one auditorium and sharp in/out group boundaries. Transfer entrance points typically don't exist, so community colleges don't have much of a relationship with them.

Community Colleges are by nature small and need to pattern cohorts after private institutions. The lack of 3rd and 4th year students means that much more emphasis needs to be placed on cohort bonding at the beginning.

Honors provides entrance into the cohort. Cohort group boundaries can not be strictly enforced at a Community College because of open enrollment. Plus there is much more variety and churn than a private institution. Resource scarcity justifies "limited enrollment" in 4 year institutions, but community colleges don't have the luxury of this justification.

The "resource scarcity" narrative of big public institutions on one hand has to be treated as artificial or a myth .. and on the other hand has to be held up as a justification for increased funding. This tension turns into a source of pride ... of accomplishing the same as big institutions with less money.

There are three basic project models in four year institutions:

• Club ... at four year institutions, clubs develop their own facilities, resources, students compete to get into them by taking classes that benefit the club's project. The trouble with a community college is that student government clubs reflect the community at large and are not agents of change.
• Lab ... students are asked to select and work on a short project guided by an open ended criteria or requirement related to a course. Each course results in a different short project that differs from a long lab only in uniqueness and selection context.
• Cohort .. projects span multiple honors/non-honors classes, multiple majors and school departments, are managed (project management) by professors, and sometimes result in professor guaranteed (professors will do the work if students don't) deliverables to business and organizations both inside and outside the school institution.

The Cohort Project focus fits only in small institutions with professors that are not working on grants and publications. The professors have to switch between wearing the client hat (justifying/asking for the project), the project management hat, the customer hat, and fellow engineer, project participant.

Engineers are one of the view professions that are given self policing status by both federal and state law in the US. The others are doctors and lawyers. Self policing is a form of altruistic punishment that is hard to understand. In freshmen terminology the problem is slackers. Without a mechanism to punish slackers, co-operation among the remaining group members drops off dramatically.

Altruistic punishment is an evolutionary model that explains why a purely economic or purely alturistic cooperation model fails to model reality of large group altruistic behavior. It is why self-policing societies do work. And it suggests two different engineering program design considerations:

• allowing team members to punish (negative grade impact) others
• student self governance, code of ethics, ability to punish violators