Attracting New Civil Engineers—Adapting to Changes in Work Force

Abstract

Concerned by the recent decline in civil engineering enrollments, ASCE has declared that one of its goals for 1987 is to increase its efforts to attract students to engineering schools. To accomplish this goal, this article suggests that ASCE should first examine the demographic changes that have occurred in the profession in the past decade. Rising numbers of women and men with working spouses have entered the civil engineering work force in the past decade. Although working parents are becoming more numerous in civil engineering, employee benefit packages have not changed significantly since the 1950's, when they were designed primarily for the male breadwinner with a homemaker wife. The need for changes in benefit packages is explored, and a discussion of whether these changes will help the profession to attract qualified new engineers is presented.