Developing Multi-Disciplinary Engineers in Technical Colleges

Engineering education in Japanese universities usually consists of piling up knowledge in the same technical field from the undergraduate to the graduate level. However, with the recent drastic change in the industrial structure, a need for a combination of different fields of technology or expertise in multiple disciplines has become important. A technical college provides a very convenient and important means of educating such a multi-disciplinary engineer. To achieve this purpose, the traditional 5 years course can be combined with a 2 years advanced course wherein the student successfully masters another technological discipline. Through this new bi-professional engineering course, many problems which inherent to the conventional technical college course will also be solved.