The Critical Need for Software Engineering Education

Software affects almost every aspect of our daily lives (manufacturing, banking, travel, communications, defense, medicine, research, government, education, entertainment, law, etc.). It is an essential part of our military systems, and it is used throughout the civilian sector, including safety-critical and mission-critical systems. In addition, the complexity of many of these systems has been growing exponentially. Unfortunately, the U.S. higher education system has not kept pace with these needs. Existing undergraduate and graduate science and engineering programs need to incorporate more material on software engineering. This is especially true for aerospace engineering, since those systems rely heavily on computation, information, communications, and software. In addition, the United States needs more dedicated software engineering educational programs and professional software engineering certification programs.