The recent study by the National Research Council, entitled Materials Science and Engineering for the 1990s—Maintaining Competitiveness in the Age of Materials, has identified materials science and engineering as an intellectually exciting field crucial to the success of U.S. industries, economy, and defense. The study surveys the needs of eight industries (aerospace, automotive, biomaterials, chemical, electronics, energy, metals, and telecommunications), which employ more than seven million people and have sales in excess of $1.4 trillion. The survey shows the industries' critical requirements for new, improved, more economical materials and processes. Similar needs are documented in such public sector areas as defense, energy, transportation, space, and health. Despite the fact that their economic performance and technological leadership within the global market vary widely, these industries consistently identify materials science and engineering as vital to their ability to maintain or improve their international competitiveness. In every case, the survey indicates a clear need to produce and fabricate new and traditional materials with improved quality and economy. It is also evident that the United States currently leads in certain materials-related areas, but adequate resources, planning, and training are required to maintain this leadership role.

In terms of manpower and educational needs, the study emphasizes the need for more educated personnel to meet current and future opportunities, and recommends basing undergraduate courses and programs in materials science and engineering on the four basic elements of materials science and engineering—synthesis and processing, structure, properties, and performance — and on the relationships among them. The study further recommends that undergraduate materials education be centered in materials departments, and that these departments interact strongly with other science and engineering departments to develop interdisciplinary materials-related educational programs.

Materials research and education is currently one of the liveliest areas of science and engineering and is likely to be so for many decades. It is an outstanding example of an interdisciplinary field; persons who call themselves materials researchers are found in departments of chemistry, physics, metallurgy, ceramics, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, and mechanical engineering, and also in many departments that now call themselves by the name “materials science and engineering.” The field has grown so rapidly that the term “materials science and engineering,” has many different meanings. In fact, most of the funding that supports materials science and engineering research is awarded to investigators in the more traditional disciplines, and the vast majority of scientists and engineers working in the field were educated in these traditional core disciplines.

There is no question that the field of materials science and engineering is a success. However, is materials science and engineering now a discipline as well as a field? Should MS&E departments exist and what should be their educational mission? Should MS&E departments offer undergraduate and graduate majors? These questions are being discussed by many university faculties as they work to devise effective research structures and educational programs to respond to the growth of interest in a field that does not fit neatly into any single traditional discipline, but is far too important to ignore.

Recently, the University Materials Council appointed a committee to consider these issues and specifically address the challenge of creating effective, attractive programs of undergraduate education in materials science and engineering.

A litany has recently emerged which proclaims materials science and engineering a primary enabling technology for most aspects of a modern high technology economy. More materials engineers have been called for, but employers and academia have not yet agreed on what job description or curricula should define a materials engineer. While the research or science aspects of materials science have been functioning well, manpower availability and industrial materials technology for commercial, military, environmental, and other societal needs lag behind our worldwide competitors.

to nucleate the growth of a consensus and to create awareness and understanding of materials science and engineering begs an answer. In the absence of a consensus to help focus curriculum and increase awareness of materials science and engineering, the current diverse educational practices will remain, and a rare opportunity for professional development will be lost.

Much attention has again been brought to the question of undergraduate education for the “materials” field. The present reawakening relates to the release last fall of the report by the National Research Council's Committee on Materials Science and Engineering. This far-ranging study, popularly known as the MS&E Study, revealed the vitality, opportunities, challenges, and needs in materials science and engineering for the future. Education was one area that received much attention in this study because it is the enabling aspect for the field: no educated, trained personnel — no progress.

When one considers the breadth of materials science and engineering, the problem of designing a unique undergraduate program becomes a major hurdle. The diversity of the field is, on one hand, a major asset in addressing problems but, on the other, a major obstacle to unifying an educational approach. This problem is not new since we have faced it over time as information and knowledge expands. However, the problem becomes magnified as the time frame for the doubling of information decreases. The explosion of information over the past half-century has drastically altered our outlook on materials, and the educational programs have been evolving with the changes. We are now at one of those crossroads where revolution versus evolution becomes a factor, i.e., the need to change basic philosophy and/or approach becomes the issue. If one doesn't consider a breakdown of the current materials classes into subgroups, then a reunification approach becomes not only desirable but absolutely necessary.

In the early 1950s when “materials science” was beginning to take shape in the minds of educators in materials departments, discussions were heated on the subject of how (and whether) intellectually rich courses could be developed with such broad coverage. It was argued by many that materials are too complex and vary too greatly from one another in their properties and in their applications to be treated in a single course. These individuals argued that if “materials” was to be taught, then it would have to be in courses or segments of courses broken down by materials classes-metals, ceramic, polymers, semiconductors.

A full generation of faculty has passed through our ranks since those days, and the arguments regarding teaching of at least the beginning materials science subjects are now muted and perhaps moot. Few materials departments begin today with a materials-specific subject (e.g., metallurgy, ceramics) for either their own students or as a service subject for other engineering departments. Most begin with a subject in materials science or materials science and engineering that deals generically with all materials for at least a major portion of the subject. Examples are drawn from individual materials classes, and emphasis may shift to individual materials classes as the subject progresses.

The key to development of these subjects, and the intellectual foundation on which they rest, is structure and structure-property relations. We can understand, and teach, how the building blocks of materials (atoms, molecules, grains, amorphous phases, etc.) fit together to build macroscopic structures.

Materials science is fundamentally an interdisciplinary field. For purposes of discussing undergraduate preparation for work in materials science, I think it useful to take chemistry, physics, and materials science and engineering as three more-or-less separate disciplines which combine to form the overall field of materials science. The primary reason for this particular taxonomy is pragmatic rather than philosophical. Undergraduate students choose major fields of study on the basis of disciplinary boundaries. Thus, in thinking about undergraduate preparation for work in the overall field, analysis of the present situation and/or recommendations for change must revolve around that reality.

The recent report entitled Materials Science and Engineering for the 1990s (the MS&E Study), sets forth the four elements of materials science and engineering as “structure and composition, properties, performance, and synthesis and processing.” An examination of these specific elements permits us to make useful distinctions among the three disciplines that combine to form the field of materials science. For example, while input from the point of view of physics certainly can contribute rather directly to expansion of our knowledge in the first three areas, its possible contribution to the last is, at best, indirect. To somewhat belabor the point, the research field of condensed matter physics is certainly contained within the field of materials but arguably not part of the discipline of materials science and engineering.

The MS&E Study includes a chapter entitled “Manpower and Education in Materials Science and Engineering.” Within that chapter is a section called “Undergraduate Education in Materials Science and Engineering.”

Although solids are one of the three states of matter, and the solid state is pervasive throughout science and our lives, students would not know it from the standard chemistry curriculum, which still emphasizes small molecules. Despite this education, a significant proportion (more than 30%) of all chemists end up as practitioners of materials chemistry, either in inorganic solids or in polymers, and they must therefore obtain on-the-job education. Not only should this need be reflected in the curriculum, but it should be possible through modern areas of chemistry such as materials to bring some of the excitement of the practicing chemist to the undergraduate student's first chemistry course, perhaps turning around the flight from science, and from chemistry and physics in particular. The American Chemical Society is encouraging this approach through the proposal of a certified BS degree in chemistry with emphasis in materials. To place the present position in perspective, one only needs to look at the recent figures tabulated by the National Science Foundation; there is a tremendous attrition of students planning to major in science and engineering during the freshman year (See Table I).

Potential science majors are indeed there, but they are being lost due to their first experiences, which are usually in general chemistry and calculus, and a lesser number in biology and physics. It is therefore imperative that these courses encourage students rather than kill their enthusiasm.

The college-wide interdisciplinary graduate program approach to graduate education is a viable alternative to the departmental structure for areas of study that span two or more traditional disciplines. This article will explore the nature of this organizational style using materials science and engineering as the example discipline. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the graduate program approach in the light of more than 18 years of experience at the University of Texas at Austin.

The primary task of any center for higher learning is the education of students in an environment conducive to the open exchange and dissemination of ideas and knowledge. Traditionally, the university has approached this task by assembling scholars with common foundations of expertise into a collective group, the department. Besides the obvious function of providing a structured setting for the concentration of scholars with similar interests, the department also serves as the front line of faculty governance for matters including tenure, promotion, salary, resource management, and distribution. For example, course content and degree requirements are initiated at the department level. Thus the organizational structure of the college, and hence of the university, is firmly built on the traditional concept of department, a concept that has served education well.

However, there are liabilities to the departmental structure since its natural tendency is to compartmentalize knowledge with the concomitant academic provincialism. This mindset poses a particularly serious problem for a number of subject areas that are intrinsically multidisciplinary. Several examples in the field of engineering science are biomedical engineering, manufacturing and industrial engineering, nuclear engineering, environmental engineering and also materials science and engineering.

Many millions of dollars are invested annually in materials science research and development in U.S. universities. Both the universities and the sponsors, either government or private industry, have enormous incentives for the R&D efforts to become commercial. For private industry a successful development means new or improved products or processes and ultimately more profits. For the government, successful materials development can lead to improved hardware or operations efficiency and lower costs. For a university the payoff can be more than economic.

Ideally, successful commercial development leads to royalties paid to the universities in the form of the most precious of assets — Unrestricted or flexible income. Students and faculty can benefit from the additional income, both privately, depending on university policy, and through their departments. However, benefits can also accrue in the form of experience and knowledge gained while participating in the technology transfer process from university to corporation. Students who take part in such efforts gain invaluable experience in preparing and defending patent applications, designing and developing prototypes, and they are exposed to economic and legal issues that are seldom taught in the classroom. They become more valuable graduates. Taking part in a technology transfer case history is a far more effective form of learning than reading about it.

These benefits to a university are offset by a number of potentially negative factors. The space, time, personnel, equipment, and deadline pressures involved in commercialization are often beyond the capabilities of a university program. However, these limitations may not be realized until the effort has begun, and it is costly to stop in midstream, as is discussed below.

As a follow-up to the recommendations of a 1986 National Science Board Task Committee Report on Undergraduate Science & Engineering Education, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a series of workshops on undergraduate education in science and engineering disciplines. In October 1989, the NSF's Division of Materials Research (DMR) organized a workshop in the materials area. It was held at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Donald N. Langenberg, Chancellor, University of Illinois at Chicago, chaired the panel of 27 invited experts. They were charged to assess the needs and opportunities in the education of undergraduates with career opportunities in any of the areas of materials research or technology, and to recommend possible ways to improve undergraduate curricula in chemistry, physics, and materials science and engineering.

The panel consisted of three subpanels: Chemistry chaired by Gregory C. Farrington, Condensed Matter Physics chaired by Phillip J. Stiles, and Materials Science and Engineering chaired by Reza Abbaschian. Robert J. Reynik, DMR/NSF, was the workshop organizer and coordinator. Each subpanel held separate meetings to discuss undergraduate education in materials and develop recommendations in its respective disciplines; plenary sessions featured group discussions of views and recommendations.

Each subpanel prepared a separate report, and the chairman prepared a summary report, which organizes the findings and recommendations of the subpanel reports into five areas: curriculum development, undergraduate laboratories, computers in undergraduate education, textbooks and other teaching resources, and faculty and student development. These reports constirute the full workshop report, which is available at no cost from the NSF. The opinions and recommendations in the workshop report are those of the expert panel and do not represent NSF policy. The recommendations are currently under review by DMR.