The new method of training engineers

A century ago higher education in American colleges and universities aimed primarily to develop a man for the professional life of a preacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a writer, or a philosopher. Colleges and universities responded to the demands of the life of that time. A college bred man occasionally, from choice or through circumstances, entered business activities, but the direction of the commerce and industry of the country rested chiefly with those who had worked their way up to important positions through all the steps of practical commercial and industrial life. The advantages of the broad culture and of the power of observing and reasoning, secured and developed in institutions of higher learning, were very little recognized in commercial and industrial work; and the mathematical and physical knowledge with which the colleges equipped their graduates found comparatively little call in the business activities.