@aliquot
Sorry, the ABET accreditation is irrelevant to the state licensure issue, it's a standard that people seek out, and for financial aide or decision making purposes for career and education trajectories. It was the ONLY program though at the time, and when it was mothballed along with the unveiling of the 4yr degree requirements in surveying or related ( or approved by the board etc) created a still hotly discussed topic within the people that were on that path. Albeit, my then soon to be exwife wasn't helping either so I was distracted from what I could have been doing potentially to end around the process in my favor. ABET isn't germane to this discussion, a pox upon me. carry on 😉
It is rather facetious for a state to have an ABET degree requirement and not have an ABET program within the state. A high percentage of states do have an acceptable program that meets at least one of their minimum requirements.
Paul in PA
I detest the ABET requirement but not becasue every state does not have one. After all, most states require a law school degree to be lawyer and all require?ÿ a medical school degree to be a doctor, but not every state has an appropriate school. It is even less of an issue now with the growth of distance education.?ÿ?ÿ
it is possible to get admitted to the Bar in California without a Law School degree.
16 years of experience and a high school diploma or equivalent and you can become a PLS in North Carolina.?ÿ There's also a path for those with an A.S..
With the cost and the high amount of fluff courses in college these days, I would recommend a two year degree to most newbies.?ÿ I found ABET to be more of a burden than an aid to a survey curriculum.?ÿ?ÿ
Many high schools today are linked with local community colleges such that a studious youngster can achieve 24 to 36 credits or more of college by the time they graduate high school.?ÿ That could help to shorten the overall time invested.
I offer this story every time it comes up: I entered the MSCD 4 year program even though I had been licensed for 5 years, took night classes for 10 years one at a time, included the required math minor classes. I had reasons for wanting a degree beyond the scope of RPLS. MSCD was threatening to cut the survey program entirely in the early 1990s and with help of PLSC and a lot of money, the program was saved. I was an original member of the PLSC advisory board. The adopted mission was "fundamentals" not "button pushing". I supported this mission. As I had been pushing buttons for years, but as an apprenticed surveyor, had no fundamentals. So this degree program went forward as 2 years of surveying, and 2 years of general with math minor. Shortly after we started after years of effort to save the damn program, the advisory committee started arguing about how much we need to change into a school of bells and whistles and get an exciting and entertaing instructor. This argument got more heated over the years even though there was a fine associates school available to put surveyors into the field with modern technology in 18 months if that's what you want and which I openly supported at Westwood tech. Our argument got so heated that the school stepped in hastening our demise. Soon, in roughly the same time period we lost BOTH schools, so I have 10 years of damn hard work with a lot of useful knowledge but no degree because surveyors argue about everything, to the point of cannibalism.
yes that's how my kids did it. It's insane and unnatural having teenagers working 20 hours per day, their young developing brains are too negatively impacted by it. My plan is to prevent my grandson from engaging in such overkill nonsense.
Apprenticeship is for trades. There are valid pathways other than accredited BS degrees, but the legal education must be there. The resistance to education has produced several generations who survey by old wives tale, imposing crap work on the unsuspecting public. I welcome the change..
Fully agree.
Education is important. Experience is important. It's not either/or.
Education that is vetted by an accrediting organization is not a bad thing. Accreditation can be tough. So what? Engineers and engineering schools have done it. Lawyers and law schools have done it. Having agreed-upon standards is a good thing, and requiring certain coursework, if not a full degree, ensures PLS candidates have a solid foundation upon which to build that experience.
My mentors did not have the time, and in some cases the background knowledge, to teach me full courses in geodesy, remote sensing, geopositioning, statistics, network design, boundary law, etc. Not to mention the peripheral things like professional ethics, business law or technical writing. (I have run across many, many, "professionals" who cannot put together a coherent email, let alone a reduction report or project proposal.)
The mentor's job is to show potential licensees the practical application of all those concepts.
I do not understand the hostility toward higher education. I was not taught button-pushing in school. Perhaps some schools teach that, but painting all formal education as worthless is flat-out wrong. If we want to be recognized as professionals, we need to hold ourselves to similar standards as other professionals. Full stop.
I was licensed by apprenticeship in 1989. What my mentors taught me, with few exceptions, was pure junk, and they all disagreed and argued about what kind of junk. They had many years experience. It took years to unlearn the junk.
Today, there is no apprenticeship, other than go push these buttons on the GPS and bring it back tonight for your first day.
Arguing for yesteryear when we started on rear chain is moot. We tried to teach "chaining" at MSCD and got tarred and feathered by the new breed of surveyors who want you to forget the past.?ÿ
The learning of a profession STARTS when you pass the test. Apprenticeship means pass the test and you're done.
?ÿ
In the final analysis it's just a job, a way to make a living. No need to get snobbish about education.
Maybe I am a tradesman with an occasional judgment call.
Some highly-educated good friends had a daughter in the same class as one of my daughters. They prevented her from taking any college credits even though about 12 of them required no more work than the high school class that doubled as the college class with the instructor being the college instructor. After six years at a four-year university they finally pulled the plug on paying for everything in her life. She did manage to get her degree to be a teacher after that seventh year. She taught for about two years, quit and has never worked at a job again. Meanwhile the classmate of hers who grew up in my house spent only three years at her four-year university, picked up her diploma and started graduate school.
What works for one may not work for another. One size does not fit all. Please allow your grandson to make that determination for himself when he is 16 or so.
But it is not in most states, including the one state without a law school. And every State requires a degree for a medical license and there are quite a few without medical schools.
I am all for education, and it needs to a least be a Bachelor's Degree. Accreditation certainly could be a good thing, but ABET isn't. ABET is accrediting programs for geodists and engineering technicians, not professional land surveyors.
Of course there are exceptions (like you), but most who are drawn to the surveying profession require four years of education to become professionals. We aren't attracting the cream of the crop.?ÿ
How can you be a professional if you can't write or speak like one? Or if when asked to explain a decision your best answer is, "I was always tought...".?ÿ
Do you have any ideas on how we could generally require a bachelor's degree, but make exceptions for the few who can achieve a satisfactory level of professionalism without one??ÿ
?ÿ
Working with a tool and understanding exactly what that tool does are two incredibly different things.?ÿ One requires only a working knowledge.?ÿ The other requires capability with highly complex and multi-tiered processes.?ÿ Our society has decided those people use different sides of their brains and sorts us all out into one camp or the other.?ÿ Crossing over is the exception, but that is where true surveying exists.
understanding exactly what that tool does?ÿ
also requires the vendor to tell you more about the firmware/software than most like to reveal
@holy-cow I agree. An unqualified assistant can go out into the field and press the buttons. They can even obtain sufficient accuracy if they "get a feel for what they are doing" over time. Only someone who has sat in a classroom can fix problems in the field when they arise. If you don't understand "why" the instrument does what it does then you cannot find a work-around for when the instrument stops doing what it should be doing.
We could argue about how much time people should spend in classrooms, but they should certainly spend some time there at some point.
NSW (Australia) says no. Period. You need a Bachelor of Surveying degree, which is 4 years at University. Collage degrees are not allowed at all, but can be used as credits towards your Uni degree. But the Uni degree is mandatory. Then you need to do a certain number of different physical projects for roughly two years, and these must be done under the supervision / mentorship of a Registered Surveyor. Then you do your final test. Only then can you apply for registration.
I can't vouch for the other states.
So it's a minimum 6 year process, with a minimum of 4 years of study. But if things have changed since Jesus was a boy then I will gladly stand corrected.
