Engineering professors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

• Chalkboard1823–1900

  Chalkboard, drafting instruments, and physical models (pre-industrial pedagogy)

  The first engineering professors taught with chalk, physical demonstration models, field surveys, and hand-drafted engineering drawings. Amos Eaton at Rensselaer used specimens and hands-on experiments as primary pedagogical devices. The chalkboard, introduced to American schools in the early 19th century, allowed professors to derive equations in front of students for the first time rather than dictating from a text. Engineering drawings and physical scale models of machines, structures, and surveying instruments were the primary media for conveying design intent.

• Slide rule1900–1972

  Slide rule (universal engineering calculation tool from the 1880s to 1976)

  The slide rule was the defining physical artifact of engineering education for nearly a century. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a slide rule case clipped to a belt was as common a sight on engineering campuses as a cell phone case in the 1990s. Professors taught with the slide rule as the primary computation medium: numerical solutions to structural, thermodynamic, and electrical problems were derived by hand and slide rule together. The HP-35 scientific calculator, introduced in 1972, began the end of this era. The last slide rule was manufactured in the United States on July 11, 1976. For engineering professors, the shift from slide rule to calculator changed not just the precision of answers but the pedagogical emphasis: the calculator made exact numerical answers cheap, shifting the teaching challenge toward physical intuition and problem-setup rather than computation.

  Effect on the work

  The slide rule era defined what an engineering faculty member taught: dimensional analysis, order-of-magnitude estimation, and the discipline of working within the precision limits of the tool. The calculator's arrival did not reduce faculty headcount but substantially changed the content of the curriculum.

• FORTRAN + mainframe computing1957–1985

  FORTRAN + mainframe computing (IBM 704, CDC 6600, VAX era)

  IBM released FORTRAN in 1957 as the first practical high-level programming language for scientific and engineering computation. By the mid-1960s, FORTRAN programming had become a required component of engineering curricula at major universities. Engineering professors who had previously used slide rules and log tables to assign numerical problems could now assign programs that ran overnight on the university's mainframe, producing results the slide rule era could not have generated at all. FORTRAN enabled finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and control system simulation to enter engineering education. WATFOR and WATFIV, educational FORTRAN implementations from the University of Waterloo, spread through engineering schools in the late 1960s and 1970s. The VAX minicomputer of the late 1970s brought computation into engineering department laboratories for the first time rather than requiring a separate computing center.

• PC + CAD + MATLAB1984–2000

  PC + CAD + MATLAB (desktop engineering tools era)

  The IBM PC (1981) and Apple Macintosh (1984) brought computing to individual faculty desks and student workstations for the first time. AutoCAD (launched 1982) began displacing hand drafting from engineering education; by the early 1990s most engineering programs had replaced drafting tables with CAD workstations. MATLAB, first released by MathWorks in 1984, quickly became the standard numerical computing environment in electrical, mechanical, and aerospace engineering courses. MATLAB's command-line interface and matrix-native language were pedagogically accessible in ways FORTRAN and C were not, allowing professors to write and run simulations live in lecture for the first time. By the late 1990s the combination of MATLAB, CAD, and finite element packages (ANSYS, first commercialized in 1970 and widely adopted in universities by the 1980s) had restructured engineering curricula around software-mediated simulation and design.

  Effect on the work

  The PC-and-software era expanded what engineering faculty could teach rather than contracting who was needed to teach it. Laboratory instruction remained unchanged because physical equipment still required physical presence; the software tools multiplied the complexity of problems students could tackle without reducing faculty headcount.

• Internet + course management systems1993–2010

  Internet + course management systems (email, Blackboard, Coursera precursors)

  The World Wide Web, reaching US universities in 1993-94, transformed how engineering faculty distributed course materials, communicated with students, and collaborated with research peers. Blackboard (1997), WebCT, and later Moodle moved course logistics, homework submission, and grade distribution online. Email replaced office-hours queues as the primary channel for student questions. Lecture slides in PowerPoint largely displaced the blackboard-derivation format that had defined engineering teaching since Eaton. For faculty who embraced the transition, asynchronous communication reduced the administrative burden of course management; for those who did not, a technology competency gap emerged between faculty generations for the first time.

• MOOCs + simulation software2012–2022

  MOOCs + simulation software (Coursera 2012, edX, ANSYS Academic, Gradescope)

  Coursera launched in 2012 offering Stanford engineering courses at scale; edX followed with MIT and Harvard; within two years MOOCs were widely cited as an existential threat to engineering faculty employment. What did shift was the competitive landscape for lecture content: engineering professors whose primary value was delivering standard course material found themselves competing with world-class recorded versions. The premium shifted toward faculty who added value through mentorship, lab supervision, and research training. Simultaneously, ANSYS SimAI and commercial FEA tools expanded university licensing, and Gradescope (launched 2014, acquired by Turnitin 2018) introduced AI-assisted grading that began reducing the time burden of large homework-set grading for the first time.

  Effect on the work

  MOOC adoption reduced postsecondary enrollment in some continuing-education and professional-development segments, but did not measurably contract degree-program engineering faculty employment. ABET-accredited engineering programs require faculty presence; MOOCs cannot satisfy those requirements.

• Generative AI tools2022–present

  Generative AI tools (ChatGPT, MATLAB Copilot, Ansys SimAI, GitHub Copilot for Education)

  ChatGPT's public release in November 2022 arrived in engineering classrooms immediately: ASEE 2025 research documented ChatGPT-4o performing with "robust explanations" on mechanical engineering concept inventories, sufficient to complete many traditional take-home problem sets. MATLAB Copilot launched in R2025b (October 2025), integrating natural-language-to-MATLAB code generation into the standard environment already site-licensed at most engineering schools. Ansys SimAI, deployed at 2,750+ universities in many countries as of 2026 R1, enables surrogate-model-based simulation at 10-100x less compute time, making FEA and CFD computationally accessible to courses that previously could not afford the solver runtime. GitHub Copilot became free for verified faculty through GitHub Education. The net effect is a restructuring of the faculty workload rather than displacement: routine prep-and-grade tasks are compressible by AI; laboratory supervision, doctoral mentorship, and ABET governance are not.

  Effect on the work

  BLS projects 8.1% employment growth for 25-1032 through 2034, suggesting AI tool adoption has not reversed the growth trajectory. The Federal Reserve's 2026 analysis of educational AI exposure found engineering and technology majors face above-average occupational AI exposure, but the faculty role's physical-lab and governance core remains structurally resistant.