Engineering education is like sports: Everyone has an opinion about it. It needs less rigor, more rigor, more hands-on, more mentoring, more involvement, more teamwork, another undergraduate year, and so on. It's a contentious subject, since engineering spans so many disciplines.

There is no single right answer--just a lot of difficult trade-offs. Even the objective of any education reform varies: Is it to make the curriculum more exciting, in order to draw more students to the discipline in the first place, or is to improve the educational results at the output? (Let's not even get into a discussion of the purported "engineering shortage" here.)

Perhaps the engineering education process needs to be revamped along the lines of the medical-school model. If you have ever been to a teaching hospital or have even seen one depicted on TV, you know that educating the next year's crop of doctors is an integral part of their daily work. Sure, the setup also ensures there are enough residents on duty at any given time to cover the endless shifts, but that's only part of the story.

It's a tough and demanding process, but very reality-based. The new doctors are subject to some very visible probing, in a group setting: What do you think is going on with this patient? What else could it be? What conditions might be obfuscating the real situation? What tests would you suggest? Why? What about this other alternative? The doctors-in-training are forced to make their case based on book knowledge, intuition and experience. And as the residents rotate through each specialty, book learning meets biological and hospital-system reality.

Contrast that with the engineering education paths. Engineering schools involve students in individual and team projects, internships and mentoring programs, but those don't offer the "tough love" lessons of the medical residency program. Too often, engineering interns are glorified gofers. Further, there's no opportunity for the student to rotate through the various specialties to get the broad perspective needed for overall product-design balance. While some large companies, such as General Electric, do rotate recent grads through different departments, such workplace programs are the exception.

Teaching hospitals don't perform their mission purely out of a higher sense of purpose, of course. They are paid, through various channels and sources, to take on the task. Private companies in our industry don't have that incentive, and they probably shouldn't, given their structure.

Do we need a new strategy for engineering education, or a broader menu of choices? Is the real problem not in the formation of good ideas, but in their execution?