2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

(532a) Towards Modernization of the Chemical Engineering Curriculum: Findings from a Mixed-Methods Curriculum Assessment

Authors

Saadet Albayrak-Guralp - Presenter, University of Michigan
As the field of chemical engineering continues to evolve and broaden, the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum needs to be periodically modernized and updated, both with regards to pedagogy and content. Core chemical engineering courses are typically heavily theoretical and lecture-based, making it difficult to integrate student-centered, active pedagogical approaches that can better serve students. Further, the content of core courses tends to highlight fluids processing, which traditionally served graduates who went into petroleum or bulk chemical careers. Now, chemical engineering students go into a large variety of industries, such as consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, or even finance, and the fluids-based curriculum may not entirely suit their needs. It is often agreed among chemical engineers that the curriculum could be modernized, but it is difficult to find capacity to do so in a fully-packed curriculum, within constraints imposed by meeting university and accreditation standards and with faculty time being stretched thin.

This work presents the findings of a mixed-methods study aimed to assess the current state of the chemical engineering curriculum, to specifically identify what could be removed, what needs to be added, and what can be changed. Survey data from 116 current students and 306 alumni, focus group/interview data with 29 current students and 24 faculty, and benchmarking across the top 20 chemical engineering programs in the country helped identify the important knowledge and skills that are needed by today’s chemical engineers, and highlight the places in the curriculum where they could be better integrated. Some key takeaways include: alumni identify material & energy balances, and process design and economics are identified as most relevant courses, while process control and reaction kinetics are identified as least relevant; common concerns across all populations include lack of data science and computational tools, lack of design and experiential learning in early to mid years, and insufficient coverage of ‘real world’ examples and industry applications. Additionally, the benchmarking of top 20 programs show that the most notable differences between programs are the number and requirement of tracks/concentrations within the degree and inclusion of courses on numerical methods in ChE, statistics, process safety, and UG seminar in the core curriculum.

While this study was contextualized within one large, public university, we aim for our findings to be applicable to other chemical engineering programs who are also looking to update or evolve their undergraduate curriculum.