CHEMICAL ENGINEERING SEEKS A NEW IDENTITY.

Industry and academia recommend curriculum changes to attract mere students and maintain interest in the field

Graduating chemical engineers have little work experience and their degrees don't come with a warranty. So as recruiters look to hire the brightest and the best of the Class of the 2000, they, as always, are using university accreditation as a measure of new hires' preparedness for the job.

With the diversity of courses and specialized programs offered today, what is chemical engineering? Prospective employers are beginning to ask that question as accreditation standards in the U.S., Europe and Japan are being revised and updated to reflect current trends in education, business and technology.

Chemical engineering is the conception, development, design, improvement and application of processes and their products, says John Gillett, chairman of the Working Party on Education (WPE) of the European Federation of Chemical Engineers (EFCE; Frankfurt). In recent years, however, the "fundamental basis of chemical engineering and its very existence as a separate discipline" has been challenged, he says. Mergers and acquisitions, globalization and the Internet have changed the field. So have reengineering and movement of the job base from commodity chemicals to effect based products. "The time is now ripe," says Gillett, "for chemical engineering to re-emerge in a new form."

Chemical …