Chemical engineering from the student's perspective

Analyses of undergraduate degree programs in chemical engineering generally come from two perspectives, educators and employers. What's needed is an analysis from the perspective of the student, with emphasis on financial aspects. ngineering programs, and chemical engineering in particular, are expensive. Costs continue to increase, with salaries comprising 80% or more of most budgets. A crude way to view the efficiency of a chemical engineering undergraduate program is the number of undergraduate degrees per tenure-track faculty member per year. A new curriculum inevitably increases costs, a fact not lost on college administrators. An alternative is to create a control engineering specialty within chemical engineering, but the course requirements for chemical engineering don’t permit sufficient flexibility. Universities must focus on developing piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&ID) using steady-state relationships and steady-state simulation models as the primary source of the required process understanding.