education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Education for Chemical Engineers

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ece

Statistical analysis of undergraduate chemical

engineering curricula of United States of America
universities: Trends and observations

Roman S. Voronov ∗ , Sagnik Basuray, Gordana Obuskovic, Laurent Simon,

Robert B. Barat, Ecevit Bilgili
Otto H. York Department of Chemical, Biological, and Pharmaceutical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of
Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Chemical engineering (ChE) is a historically-relevant degree that is experiencing an emer-
Received 11 December 2016 gence of diverse research and industrial trends. However, adapting to them is a challenge,
Received in revised form 14 April because the overloaded nature of the ChE curriculum makes adding new courses, without
2017 removing older ones, difficult. The problem is further exacerbated by the need to justify any
Accepted 21 April 2017 modifications to various university committees while satisfying accreditation organizations’
Available online 27 April 2017 criteria. With the ultimate goal of guiding and/or justifying potential curricular changes, this
manuscript presents a thorough statistical analysis of the current state of the ChE curric-
Keywords: ula in the United States of America (USA). Specifically, publically-available undergraduate
Chemical engineering degree sheets are aggregated from the majority of established ChE departments in the USA,
Curriculum and subject-specific descriptive statistics are reported for core ChE courses. Among the sig-
Degree nificant findings are two different approaches to teaching Transport Phenomena, the rise of Bio,
Trends and the scarcity of traditional Statics and Strength of Materials and Process Safety courses. Ulti-
United States of America mately, the results of this study are intended to be used by the other departments interested
Survey in improving their curriculum.
© 2017 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction shift in ChE from commodities in the 1970s to products in

Chemical engineering (ChE) education is becoming increas-
ingly relevant among the other engineering disciplines in the
United States of America (USA), according to Fig. 1. As the
world around us continues to evolve more rapidly than ever,
the ChE profession gets exposed to an emergence of ever-
more diverse and vibrant sub-specialization trends (Varma
and Grossmann, 2014): several examples include the growing
demands for energy (including biomass-based fuels), envi-
ronment, sustainability, entrepreneurship and the integration
of the traditional chemical processes with biotechnology
(Gavrilescu and Chisti, 2005; Erickson et al., 2012; Kiss et al.,
2015). While some of these trends are driven by industry, the
the 1990s being a prominent example (Cussler, 1999); the oth-
ers may originate within academia, as is the case with the
emergence of biologically-oriented ChE that began roughly in
the second half of the 20th century, and was inspired by the
pioneering works in the fields of pharmaceuticals and bio-
engineering (Varma and Grossmann, 2014).
Yet, despite the numerous proposed curriculum renova-
tions (Armstrong, 2006; McCarthy et al., 2006, 2005), most of
the core ChE course-sequence has remained static (Armstrong,
2006) since its initial inception and consequent development
between 1905 and 1965. Likewise, the industrial employment
of the ChE professionals has remained largely traditional
also. For instance, the USA biotech sector revenue is esti-

∗
Corresponding author. Fax: +1 973 596 8436.
E-mail address: rvoronov@njit.edu (R.S. Voronov).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ece.2017.04.002
1749-7728/© 2017 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
2 education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10
Fig. 1 – Chemical engineering as percent of USA total undergraduate engineering enrollment (circles) and of total
undergraduate engineering degrees awarded (triangles). Data from Ref.# Yoder (2014).
mated to have grown on average >10% each year over the
past decade—much faster than the rest of the economy
(Carlson, 2016). Yet, the relative number of ChEs working in
this sector, versus those in the traditional industries, has
remained steadily below 10% over the past decade (Bryner and
McCreight, 2015). So, the stagnation of the curriculum may be
limiting the options of ChE graduates arriving into the work-
field.
Therefore, it is apparent that maintaining the degree up-
to-date with the current industrial and research trends is
critical to providing its students with the necessary tech-
nical skills for being competitive in the future work-force.
However, as history has shown, proposing a complete over-
haul is not effective. This is likely because justifying such
major changes to Accreditation Board for Engineering and
Technology (ABET—a non-governmental organization, which
accredits post-secondary education programs in “applied sci-
ence, computing, engineering, and engineering technology”
in the USA and 30 countries worldwide; similar to IChemE
accreditation for non-USA countries) reviewers, and various
university committees, is unrealistic. The curriculum refine-
ment is further complicated by the fact that even a task as
simple as adding new courses is challenging due to the over-
loaded nature (i.e., very little room for additional courses) of
the degree.
Alternatively, a better strategy is to “surgically” swap some
outdated courses for more modern topics, like biology and
energy. However, even removing the formers also requires sub-
stantial justification, because maintaining consistency with
the rest of the universities is considered imperative. Yet, there
is a lack of data sources available for guiding the curricu-
lum committees’ decisions and facilitating their justifications.
After an extensive literature search, only a guide for a core
curriculum content based on surveys of 21 European chemi-
cal engineering schools has been found (Gillett, 2001); while
for the USA, only a survey over half a century old was found
(Committee AICEEP, 1962), as well as a survey of ChE electives
(Vigeant, 2014) based on responses from 96 departments, and
a survey of safety courses from 26 departments was found
(Dee et al., 2015). Unfortunately, none of these studies per-
formed a comprehensive and robust comparison of the core
chemical engineering with the objective of identifying general
trends. Thus, without easily accessible reference sources, it is
not apparent which courses can be convincingly classified as
“outdated”.
To that end, this manuscript attempts to provide a snap-
shot of the current state of the ChE curriculum in the USA by
answering the following questions: “What does a representa-
tive curriculum look like currently? Are there general trends,
similarities, or differences among the USA ChE curricula?” In
order to address these questions, the daunting task of aggre-
gating and reviewing the majority of the publicly-available
curricula of established undergraduate programs in the USA
was undertaken. Subsequently, a comprehensive analysis was
performed, and subject-specific descriptive statistics were cal-
culated for core ChE courses. In addition to the core courses,
data concerning biology- and computation/modeling-related
courses was also incorporated into the analysis due to the
growing popularity of these subjects. Thus, the manuscript
highlights the main findings of the performed survey, as well
as observed trends/differences for various ChE courses in 148
curricula across the U.S.
2. Methods
The following is a brief introduction for the international
readers to the USA college credit system, and to the related
terminology used in this section:
In the USA, a “credits” system is used as an administrative
indicator of a student’s progress toward their degree comple-
tion: in order to graduate a student must satisfy a specified
number of total credits. Each course that the students take
is worth a certain number of credits, which is based on the
amount of contact and preparation hours spent per week in
 education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10
class during a single term. The “term” can be either a quar-
ter, a trimester or a semester; with the latter being the most
common. To this end, a semester credit-hour is defined as the
amount of credit that a student earns for successful comple-
tion of one contact hour and two preparation hours per week
for the semester.
In addition to the credit requirements, also imposed are
specifications regarding the types of courses that the student
must take. Namely, the courses within an engineering degree
cluster into the following broad categories:
General education (Gen Ed) requirements—these are typi-
cally non-engineering courses intended to help the students
become well-rounded professionals who can better interact
with their coworkers, business clients, and society. These
courses help the students develop strong analytical and writ-
ing skills, besides a basic understanding of modern society.
Some examples of these are: History, Humanities, Seminars, Basic
Math, etc. Most of the Gen Ed courses are specified, but some
can be chosen from an approved list of electives. All university
students must abide by the Gen Ed requirements. For some
universities, these requirements are mostly satisfied during
the 1st “freshman” and the 2nd “sophomore” years, while for
others, the requirements are evenly distributed and satisfied
throughout the whole four year of study.
Basic program requirements—these are typically courses
that all engineering students must take. They mostly serve
as pre-requisites for the “core” discipline courses (e.g., Cal-
culus, Chemistry, Computer Programming, Physics, etc.), but can
also introduce the students to engineering (e.g., Fundamentals
of Engineering) or serve to enhance their technical writing and
presentation skills. All engineering students must take these
courses, typically by the end of 2nd “sophomore” year.
Core program requirements—these are a sequence of
courses that lay down the foundation of the technical knowl-
edge acquired by the student within the engineering major
such as ChE. The core courses typically begin during the 2nd
year of the engineering degree, and ultimately culminate in
a “capstone” course that ties all the different ChE subjects
(transport phenomena, thermodynamics, kinetics, etc.) into a
single design project during the final “senior” year. It is these
courses that are the main subject of the statistical analysis
performed in manuscript.
Technical electives—technical electives are courses that
allow for more in-depth study within a specialty area of
the student’s choice. All of the technical electives must be
selected from a pre-approved list specific to the ChE degree.
The courses themselves do not have to be limited to ChE, how-
ever, in general, they should at least belong to a closely related
field. Often these courses allow the student to customize their
degree towards an area of focus (aka, minor/concentration).
Some examples of focus areas for ChE can be biotechnology,
material science, energy, environment, and so on.
Free electives—these are courses are chosen by the stu-
dent from the university’s course catalogue in order to satisfy
the total credit requirement of the degree. They can be either
technical or non-technical.
2.1. Raw data collection for the curricula survey
Some 158 USA ChE departments, listed in University of Texas’
(UTexas) directory http://www.che.utexas.edu/che-faculty/,
were analyzed using the following data collection guidelines
established for this manuscript. The UTexas database was
chosen for several reasons: 1) it contains established ChE pro-
3
grams, which is what the study aimed to concentrate on; 2)
it is publically available; 3) it is well-known in USA ChE com-
munity; 4) it offers an easy and convenient access to all of the
reviewed programs by simply following a link. In contrast, the
ABET database—which could be a potential alternative source
to the UTexas database, is searchable only.
Although there are minor differences between the ABET
and the UTexas databases (e.g., ABET contains a few new
programs that are accredited, while UTexas contains a few
established programs that are not accredited), the databases
overlap by more than 90% of their content. Therefore, given the
large number of the programs reviewed, it is not expected that
theses minor differences would significantly affect the general
trends identified in this manuscript. Moreover, the University
of Texas database is open to all of the international readers
of the Education for Chemical Engineers journal, and unlike
the ABET database, it does not contain non-standard ChE pro-
grams (e.g., Chemical Engineering and Nuclear Engineering,
Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering).
The following procedures were followed for gathering and
analyzing the curricula sheets:
1. The official/most recent curricula were downloaded during
the Summer/Fall of 2015 for the standard BS ChE pro-
gram; if the program followed the quarter or trimester
system, it was excluded from the analysis. Likewise,
accelerated programs, dual majors, majors with concen-
trations/minors/clusters were not considered.
2. Since most undergraduate committees typically have no
control over general education course requirements, non-
engineering courses in the examined curriculum were not
considered. Likewise, non-engineering courses, such as the
basic program requirements, were also excluded from con-
sideration, since the goal of the study was to concentrate
on core courses only. The only exception is that due to the
special interest in biology-related courses, data on such
courses were collected (e.g., Biology/Biological Principles/Intro
to Biology, etc.).
3. In order to limit the search space, only the required core
courses were analyzed. In other words, elective courses,
both technical and free, were not considered.
4. Since course titles used by different departments do not
always correspond to each other exactly, the categories
described in Table 1 were defined in order to map the credits
into a unified database according to content. These cat-
egories are intended to be representative of core courses
that are expected to possibly appear in the ChE curriculum
based on our collective experiences (with the exceptions of
the Biology/BioXEng, as mentioned in #2 above).
The following rules were adopted in transferring credits
from degree sheets to our database:
a) Due to various courses by which transport phenomena is
taught to students, multiple categories were created for this
topic while avoiding the duplication of credits across these
categories;
b) If no courses fitting a category were found in the down-
loaded curricula, even with the possible name differences
discussed in Table 1, a “0” was entered for the number of
credits for that category;
4 education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10

Table 1 – Course categories defined for mapping between departments, and the location of each in the unified database.
Category Synonymous names/description

Chem. Proc. Calc. Chemical Process Calculations, Chemical Process Principles, Material and Energy Balances, Stoichiometry and Process
Calculations
Thermo. I & II Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics/Two separate courses. If there was only one course, credit was entered
under Thermo I.
Fluid Flow Fluid Mechanics, Transport Processes I, Momentum Transport, etc./courses were checked for fluids content.
Stand-alone course.
Heat & Mass Transfer Heat-Mass Transfer Operations, Transport Processes I or II, etc./single joint course
Fluid & Heat Transfer Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer, or Transport Processes I or II, etc./single joint course
Heat Transfer Heat Transfer/stand-alone course.
Mass Transfer Mass Transfer, Diffusion, Diffusional Operations, etc./stand-alone course
Transp. Phen. Transport Phenomena/stand-alone course that teaches all transport phenomena at once in a combined
fashion.
Sepn. Proc. Separation Processes
Kintx. & React. Kinetics and Reactor Design, Chemical Reaction Engineering, etc.
Model/Numer. Mathematical Modeling, Computational Methods, Numerical Methods, Numerical and Data Analysis, Process
Simulation
Control. Process Dynamics and Control, Process Control or Process Simulation and Control
ChE Lab I & II Any ChE Lab Courses: Chemical Engineering Laboratory I and II, Unit Operations Labs, Transport
Labs/Separations/Kinetics and Reactor Design/Chemical Reaction Engineering/etc. Two separate courses. If there
was only one lab, credit was entered under Lab I.
Processes Design Process and Plant Design, Process Design, Process Design and Economics, Process and Product Design/includes credits
for both, if taught as two separate courses; also includes Capstone Design Project credits.
Statics Statics and Strength of Materials, Statics and Dynamics/not to be confused with the Materials category.
Materials Structure, Properties, and Processing of Materials, Engineering Materials, Materials Engineering, Materials Science and
Engineering./these courses were included in the analysis, even if they were offered by other departments.
Proc. Safety Process Safety
Biology Biological Systems, Fundamentals of Biology, Biology for Engineers, Cell and Molecular Biology./non-engineering
courses in biology, typically taken in year 1 of the degree, and offered by Biology departments.
BioXEng Bioprocess Engineering, Biochemical Engineering, Biomaterials, Bio-transport, etc./courses with biological emphasis
offered by Engineering departments, and taken as a part of the standard ChE curriculum. Bio-electives, and
courses under a Bio track/concentration, were excluded.
Total Credits As is specified by the curricula (includes all required and elective courses). If a range of numbers was
presented, the minimum number of credits was entered, for consistency.
TCFSEC Total credits for the core courses, excluding any non-standard engineering courses and Biology category.

c) Combined credits were entered for engineering courses
split into parts (e.g., I and II) in the database, unless course
splitting is explicitly considered in Table 1.
For the rest of this manuscript we adopt the following con-
vention for clarity: course topics are in lower case; course titles
are in sentence case with italics; and course categories, as
defined in Table 1, are in sentence case without italics.
2.2. Statistical analysis and normalization of
processed data
Programs without data, such as those for which we were
unable to obtain the curriculum description, or those on a
nonstandard schedule, such as trimester/quarter instead of
semester, were removed from the analysis (N = 10). The lat-
ter were rejected, because the definition of a credit-hour may
significantly differ from the semester programs. The total
number of the degrees rejected translates to approximately
6%, it is not expected to significantly affect the data analy-
sis. Of the remaining ones, the data from those departments
whose total curriculum credits fell outside of 120–140 range
was normalized to the expected average of 130 total credits
(N = 20). This was done because significantly different credit
systems could skew the data. To that end, any data discussed
subsequently to this section is in the normalized form.
Statistical analysis was performed with and without zero
credit courses (see rule ‘b’ above) in order to illustrate vari-
ations among all departments vs. just those that offer a
particular course. Course % frequency was calculated by
dividing the number of departments offering a particular
course by the total number of departments. Finally, correla-
tion coefficients were calculated in order to identify whether
relationships exist between the courses in the curriculum.
2.3. Data visualization
We used the Google Geomap API to create regional
course offering maps, such as the ones in Fig. 2:
https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/
gallery/geomap (Accessed on December 8, 2016).
®
And Matlab ’s circularGraph toolbox was used to create
connectivity graphs for course correlations shown in Fig. 3:
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/
48576-circulargraph/ (Accessed on December 8, 2016).
3. Results & discussion
A total of 148 curricula were kept for analysis out of the 158
total departments listed in University of Texas’ directory. The
resulting national average of Total Credits per ChE degree is
130 ± 4, and all of the degrees analyzed were found to be 4
years long. Only a small number of them (<10) offered a 5 year
option where the students could do a “co-op”—an internship
with a company during the school year. However, both the
total credits and the course work were identical for the two
versions. The only difference between them was that extra
time was allocated to complete the co-op program in the 5 year
degree version. Therefore, the calculated national credit aver-
age translates to ∼16 credits per semester, assuming a 4 year
 education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10 5

Fig. 2 – Geomaps of ChE course credits as % of Total Credits: LEFT: chemical process calculations, and RIGHT: statics. Each
marker represents an individual department, and the marker’s size and color are proportional to the percentage shown.

Fig. 3 – Course connectivity graphs: LEFT—most correlated pairs; RIGHT—most anti-correlated Pairs. Legends show
correlation/anticorrelation coefficients.

degree duration. In order to assess how many courses per
semester this roughly translates to, we calculated the credit
mean for all course categories listed in Table 1. The mean
value obtained was 4.1 credits. Therefore, the typical number
of courses taken per semester should be ∼4, assuming that the
mean credit worth of the courses in Table 1 is representative
of the rest of the curriculum.
Approximately 30.4% (or 39.4 credits) of the Total Cred-
its accounted for the core ChE courses (i.e., TCFSEC). The
category-specific breakdown of the statistical analysis of the
normalized data is presented in Table 2. This analysis is
also accompanied by Probability Density Functions (PDF) for
each course category in Supplemental material Fig. S1. In
this supplement, S = skewness and K = kurtosis. Additionally,
a representative geographic distribution of the departments
offering ChE degrees is shown in Fig. 2-LEFT. This figure plots
the number of credits, expressed as % of Total Credits, for
Chemical Process Calculations—a course category that almost
every department offers. Such “geo-maps” can be used for
regional analysis of course offerings, and their complete set
is provided in Supplemental materials. Two sets of maps are
included there: every course category defined in Table 1 is plot-
ted as either % of Total Credits (Supplemental material Fig. S2),
or as % of TCFSEC (Supplemental material Fig. S3).
3.1. Chemical process calculations
Nearly all departments (145, 98%) offer at least one Chemical
Process Calculations—equivalent course. A great majority of
(112, 76%) of the departments offer 3–4 credits, with a national
average of 3.6 credits when all departments are considered.
This implies that most departments offer either a single joint
Mass & Energy Balances course, or two stand-alone courses with
no more than 4 credits total. The few departments (20, 13.5%)
that warrant offering 5 credits or more tend to enhance the
course by incorporating ASPEN (Rockstraw, 2005), or similar
process flowsheet modeling software.
3.2. ChE thermodynamics
There are a total of (141, 95%) departments that offer a Thermo
I, and (88, 59%) that offer a Thermo II. About (145, 98%) of the
departments offer at least 3 or more credits for Total Thermo,
and (76, 51%) of the departments offer at least 5 or more
 6
Table 2 – Summary of normalized credit statistics for each category defined in Table 1.
Avg. Avg. w/o Std. Dev. Std. Dev. %RSD %RSD w/o Min Min w/o Max Max w/o Median Median %Freq.
Zeros w/o Zeros Zeros Zeros Zeros w/o Zeros

Chem. Proc. Calc. 3.6 3.6 1.2 1.1 35 31 0 1 9 9 3 3 98

Thermo I 3 3.1 0.9 0.5 28 17 0 1.9 6 6 3 3 95
Thermo II 1.8 3 1.5 0.4 85 14 0 1 4 4 3 3 59

education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10

Tot. Thermo 4.8 4.8 1.4 1.4 30 30 2.7 2.7 8 8 5 5 100
Fluid Flow 2.1 3.1 1.5 0.4 70 12 0 2 4 4 3 3 68
Heat & Mass Trans. 1 3.5 1.6 0.6 158 18 0 2.8 5.4 5.4 0 3 30
Fluid & Heat Trans. 0.4 3.2 1.1 0.4 264 13 0 2.9 4 4 0 3 13
Heat Trans. 1 2.8 1.4 0.4 140 13 0 2 3.6 3.6 0 3 34
Mass Trans. 1.2 3.1 1.6 0.6 131 20 0 2 6.2 6.2 0 3 39
Transp. Phen. 1.8 4.3 2.4 1.7 132 39 0 2.8 8 8 0 3.9 42
Tot. Transport 7.5 7.5 2 2 26 26 3 3 13.4 13.4 7 7 100
Sepn. Proc. 2.3 3.3 1.6 0.7 72 21 0 2 6 6 3 3 69
Transp + Sepn. 9.8 9.8 2.1 2.1 21 21 3 3 16 16 9 9 100
Kintx & React. 3.2 3.2 0.7 0.7 23 23 2.5 2.5 9.1 9.1 3 3 100
Model/Numer. 2.6 3.4 1.7 1.1 67 34 0 1 7 7 3 3 77
Control 3.1 3.2 0.8 0.7 25 21 0 2 6 6 3 3 98
ChE Lab I 2.5 2.7 1.2 1 48 39 0 0.7 6 6 2.8 3 94
ChE Lab II 2 2.6 1.4 1 68 40 0 0.7 7 7 2 2 79
Total Labs 4.5 4.6 1.9 1.8 42 38 0 1 11 11 4 4 97
Proc. Design 5.2 5.3 1.8 1.7 35 32 0 3 10 10 6 6 98
Statics 0.5 2.8 1.1 0.5 222 19 0 1 3.7 3.7 0 3 18
Materials 1.5 3.1 1.6 0.8 105 26 0 2 8 8 2 3 51
Proc. Safety 0.5 2.4 1.1 0.8 197 34 0 1 3 3 0 3 23
Biology 1.1 3.5 1.7 0.9 158 25 0 1 6 6 0 3 30
BioXEng 0.8 3.1 1.4 0.6 169 19 0 1.9 6 6 0 3 27
Total Bio. 1.9 3.8 2.2 1.6 116 41 0 1 9 9 0.5 3 50
Total Credits 129.6 129.6 3.6 3.6 3 3 114 114 138 138 130 130 100
TCFSEC 39.4 39.4 5 5 13 13 24 24 51 51 39 39 100
 education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10
credits. The credits average for Total Thermo is 4.8 if all depart-
ments are considered, or 5.9 if only those departments that
offer both Thermo I and II are considered. It is, therefore, obvi-
ous that at least half of departments are teaching a sequence
of two thermodynamics courses, worth about 3 credits each.
3.3. Transport phenomena and its variations
Transport operations courses and separation courses are the
most difficult to compare among departments due to differ-
ent approaches to teaching them. This is evident from the
high % Relative Standard Deviation (RSD) in Table 2, indicat-
ing a lot of disagreement in the number of credits allocated
to these courses by the different departments. For example,
some departments implement combinations of courses that
each covers just one transport phenomena at a time, while
others use courses that teach two phenomena at a time. Some
examples of these sequences are Fluid Flow followed by Heat
Transfer followed by Mass Transfer, or Fluid & Heat Transfer fol-
lowed by Mass Transfer, or Fluid Flow followed by Heat & Mass
Transfer, to name a few. Moreover yet, all three of the phe-
nomena are taught simultaneously in a single course, or as
sequence of such courses: Transport Phenomena I, Transport Phe-
nomena 2 and so on. Therefore, for clarity, we define three
different categories of transport courses:
- “Stand-alone” are courses that cover just one transport phe-
nomena at a time, for example Heat Transfer.
- “Joint” are courses that cover two phenomena at a time, for
example Heat & Mass Transfer.
- “Combined” are courses that cover all transport phenomena
at the same time, for example Transport Phenomena I.
An additional complication is that Mass Transfer appears
to be taught in a variety of ways: as a stand-alone course, as
part of the joint Heat & Mass Transfer and/or as part of Sepa-
rations Processes (addressed in the next section). However, one
thing that is immediately obvious is that stand-alone Fluid
Flow is the most common transport category, with (101, 68%)
of the departments offering an average of 2.1 credits nation-
ally (or 3.1 credits when only the departments offering the
course are considered). And since the national average of Total
Transport credits is 7.5 when all departments are considered,
this implies that in the most common scenario the Fluid Flow
course is typically followed by some variation of heat and mass
transfers. Thus, for the rest of this section, only the most likely
scenario will be considered.
In order to understand how the heat and mass transfers
are likely to be taught under this scenario, it is advantageous
to examine which courses appear together in the curriculum
and which do not. To perform this analysis, only the data con-
tained in the transport phenomena categories of Table 1 was
considered. That subset was further filtered to exclude depart-
ments that do not offer Fluid Flow. Then, for the remaining
departments, a linear interdependence between the transport
courses offered subsequently to Fluid Flow was determined
by calculating a matrix of pairwise Pearson correlation coeffi-
cients. To that end, Table 3 shows the correlation coefficients
for the transport categories in departments that do offer Fluid
Flow. Here, positive coefficients indicate correlation, and neg-
ative anti-correlation. The data from this table shows that the
stand-alone Heat Transfer and Mass Transfer are often taught
together, as is determined by the high correlation between
them. On the other hand, the stand-alone courses are unlikely
7
Fig. 4 – Transport course frequency for departments that
offer Fluid Flow.
to appear in the same curriculum with the joint Heat & Mass
Transfer, as is gauged by the anti-correlation between them.
Finally, the combined Transport Phenomena is anti-correlated
with everything else. In fact, a great majority of the depart-
ments that offer Transport Phenomena (46/62, 74% of those
with Transport Phenomena) offer neither the combined Heat
& Mass Transfer nor any one of the stand-alone Heat Transfer
and Mass Transfer. Overall this means that departments typi-
cally choose one of the three approaches to teaching transport
phenomena without intermingling between them.
Fig. 4 helps to visualize the frequency of these approaches
relative to each other. It plots the % frequency of the transport
categories among those departments that offer Fluid Flow. The
conclusion that can be drawn from this figure is that the stand-
alone approach is about as common (accounts for 33% of the
departments) as either of the joint/combined approaches (Heat
& Mass is 37% of the departments or Transport Phenomena is
24% of the departments). However, when taken together, the
combined/joint approaches, which also include the rare Fluid &
Heat transfer, are nearly twice as common as the stand-alone
approach. So the stand-alone approach is less common overall,
and Fluid Flow is followed by either the joint or the combined
approach in the most likely scenario.
3.4. Separation processes
Separations is offered by (102, 69%) of the U.S. departments
with an average 3.3 credits (and 2.3 credits when all depart-
ments are considered). Interestingly, the choice of whether or
not to offer it appears to be coupled to the approach taken
to teaching transport phenomena; and in particular, to mass
transfer. A Separations Processes course is much more likely
to be a part of the curriculum when mass transfer is taught
through a joint Heat & Mass Transfer course than when a
stand-alone Mass Transfer course is offered: about 77% of the
departments that offer Heat & Mass Transfer also offer Sep-
arations (34/44), whereas only 42% of those that offer the
stand-alone Mass Transfer (24/57) also offer Separations. A
likely explanation for this occurrence is that Heat & Mass Trans-
fer courses typically concentrate on the heat transfer portion
of the material, while the mass transfer is only briefly vis-
ited at the end of the semester while taking advantage of the
heat–mass transfer analogies. Consequently, mass transfer
8 education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10
Table 3 – Correlation coefficients for transport courses in departments that offer Fluid Flow: values close to 1 indicate that
there a strong correlation between the courses; values close to −1 indicate a strong anti-correlation between them;
values close to or equal to 0 suggest there is no linear relationship between the courses. Bolded values shows strongest
correlations/anti-correlation pairs. Analysis does not consider non-transport credits, unlike Fig. 3, which does.
Heat & mass trans Fluid & heat trans
Heat & Mass Trans 1.00 0.02
Fluid & Heat Trans 0.02 1.00
Heat Trans −0.62 −0.24
Mass Trans −0.50 −0.05
Transp Phen −0.22 0.04
requires some supplementation, which is typically accom-
plished through Separation Processes.
Conversely, if mass transfer is taught through a dedicated
course, it is likely that no supplementation is needed, and the
separations course appears to be less necessary. This suggests
that Mass Transfer and Separations Processes courses overlap
in content and, as a result, compete for credits. The anti-
correlation between Separations and the stand-alone Mass
Transfer is also evident from Fig. 3-RIGHT. In fact, Separations
and the stand-alone Mass Transfer have the strongest anti-
correlation coefficient relative to those between Separations
and the other transport categories. On the other hand, since
the joint/combined approaches to teaching transport are more
popular overall (see the Transport Phenomena section), Sepa-
ration Processes is likely to be a part of the core ChE curriculum.
3.5. Kinetics & reactor design and process dynamics &
control
Both of these courses have a nearly 100% frequency, and an
average of ∼3 credits for each. Therefore, it appears that both
of these courses are an integral part of the ChE curriculum,
and are not commonly joined with any other course.
3.6. Mathematical modeling and computational
methods for chemical engineers
A great majority of the departments (114, 77%) offer one or
more courses in the Modeling/Computational Methods cat-
egory with an average number of credits of 2.6 across all
departments (and 3.4 when only departments that do offer
these courses are considered). Considering the growing ten-
dencies of relying more on software calculations rather than
by-hand solution, we examined the nature of these courses
in more detail for our own internal purposes. However, since
this was beyond the scope of the main study, the following
observations are offered with admission that they are small
sample of the larger whole. Nonetheless, it is the hope of the
authors that the data can still be useful to the readers. To
that end based on the ∼20 departments we randomly chose
and examined, these courses tend to have a strong “numer-
ical methods” accent, and are mostly taught in the junior
and senior years through the ChE departments (not by the
Math department). Common topics covered are: Approxima-
tions and Round-Off/Truncation errors, Solving systems of
Linear and Non-linear Algebraic and Differential equations,
Curve-fitting/Regression, Interpolation, Numerical Integration
and Differentiation. To our surprise, process simulation soft-
® ®
ware (e.g., AspenTech Process Tools or SimSci PRO/II ) is
not commonly covered in these courses. Instead, it tends
to be introduced through the core ChE courses during the
Heat trans Mass trans Transp phen
−0.62 −0.50 −0.22
−0.24 −0.05 0.04
1.00 0.52 −0.19
0.52 1.00 −0.22
−0.19 −0.22 1.00
junior (i.e., Thermodynamics, Separation Processes, etc.) and
senior years (Capstone/Design). Finally, a smaller number of
departments offer an additional freshman/sophomore level
®
numeric course, where Excel (Math Functions, Goal Seek
®
and Solver, VBA, Cell-Addressing, I/O, etc.) and Matlab (Data
types, Matrix-Vector Arithmetic, Programming Control and
Nested Loops, Graphing and Formatting, Symbolic Operations,
etc.) basics are taught.
3.7. Unit operations laboratory
The credits average for Total Labs is 4.5 when all departments
are considered, with nearly every department offering ChE
Lab I (139, 94%), and (117, 79%) offering ChE Lab II. The aver-
age number of credits for ChE Lab I and ChE Lab II is 2.2 and
1.9, respectively, when excluding the departments with 5 or
more Total Labs credits. This indicates that the most common
approach appears to consist of a sequence of ChE Lab I followed
by ChE Lab II, worth ∼2 credits each.
It is worthy of noting here that Fig. 3-RIGHT shows an anti-
correlation between Total Labs/ChE Lab II and Kinetics and
Reactor Design. The most likely explanation of the trend is
that in some departments Kinetics and Reactor Design could
be taught with its own laboratory component, which is not
explicitly mentioned as a separate entry in their curriculum.
In other words, the Kinetics and Reactor Design for some
departments could be composed of both lecture and labora-
tory components, but listed as a single lecture course on the
books.
3.8. Capstone: process/plant design
Capstone is a combination of engineering design and eco-
nomics, which serves as the culmination of the ChE degree.
The credits average for the Process Design category is 5.2, and
nearly every department offers it (145, 98%). Thus, this course
is an integral part of the national curriculum.
3.9. Statics and strength of materials
A great majority of (122, 82%) of departments do not offer a
Statics and Strength of Materials-type course. The credits aver-
age for the Statics category is 0.5 across all departments, and
2.8 if only the N = 26 departments that do offer this course are
considered. Therefore, this course does not appear to be a part
of the national ChE curriculum. Interestingly, the departments
that do offer this course appear to follow a geographical pat-
tern (see Fig. 2-RIGHT). So, the choice of whether or not to drop
this course may depend on the nature of the job market local
to each department.
 education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10
3.10. Structure, properties, and processing of materials
About half (73, 49%) of departments do not offer a Materials-
type course. The credits average for the Materials category is
1.5 across all departments, and 3.1 if only the N = 75 depart-
ments that do offer it are considered. Given the lack of
historical data it is not obvious whether this course is becom-
ing more or less popular. However, since “materials” is a major
research area, it is likely that these courses are simply taught
through electives, which would not be captured by our analy-
sis.
3.11. Process safety
In 2011, ABET introduced a new safety requirement for accred-
ited ChE departments, which went in effect the following year.
Currently it reads: “The curriculum must include the engineer-
ing application of these basic sciences to the design, analysis, and
control of chemical, physical, and/or biological processes, includ-
ing the hazards associated with these processes.” Therefore, all
ABET-accredited departments should now be placing a greater
emphasis on the inclusion of safety into their curriculum.
However, the requirement does not specify whether it should
be done through a stand-alone course, or otherwise. And if it
should be a course, it is not obvious how many credits it should
be worth.
Interestingly, since the ABET regulation went into effect,
the state of process safety in the USA ChE programs has been
reviewed (although not as exhaustively as here) (Dee et al.,
2015). And as a result of that study, it was found that several
departments offer stand-alone courses ranging range from 1
to 3 credits; while other departments incorporate safety into
the curriculum through non-ChE electives or brief workshops.
Our findings show that only (34, 23%) departments require
Process Safety, with a credit average of 0.5 if all the depart-
ments are considered, and of 2.4 if only the N = 34 departments
that offer it are considered. However, despite the discourag-
ing numbers, it is likely that this course will play a larger role
in the future of the ChE curriculum as the ABET requirement
becomes adopted by more and more departments.
3.12. Biology and bioengineering
Due to the rise of bio, we examined two types of biological
course categories required as the standard ChE curriculum:
Biology—non-engineering courses in biology, typically
taken in year 1 of the degree, and offered by Biology depart-
ments; and,
BioXEng—courses with biological emphasis offered by
engineering departments, and taken as a part of the standard
ChE curriculum.
According to our findings about one third of the depart-
ments require Biology (45, 30%), one fourth require BioXEng
(40, 27%), and only a minority (11, 7%) require both. The credit
averages for Biology and BioXEng are 3.5, and 3.1, respec-
tively, if only the departments that require these courses are
considered. The courses are mostly introductory in nature,
typically appear in the first two years of the curriculum (or the
beginning of the third year), and require few technical pre-
requisites/co-requisites. However, some of the departments
do co-require a junior/senior level course in BioXEng, dealing
mostly with manufacturing products based on biochemical
reactions.
9
Fig. 5 – Distribution of introductory bio-courses by type for
the departments requiring such courses.
The credits average for Total Bio, that is the sum of Biology
and BioXEng, is 3.8 when only the (74, 50%) of the departments
that require it are considered. This reinforces the notion that
most departments which offer bio-type courses only offer one
lecture course at a time (not two). Given that half of the depart-
ments offer at least one bio-type course, this puts Total Bio
on par with Materials. Except, while it is not obvious whether
Materials is on its way up or down, the bio- trend is a recent
one and is, therefore, likely to be upward.
Lastly, during our analysis of the departments that offer
Total Bio credits, we noticed that roughly 15% of them also
required a Bio-Chemistry course. To that end, the relative fre-
quency of the three bio course types is shown in Fig. 5. Another
similar observation is that ∼9% of the departments that offer
Total Bio credits also require a molecular biology lab com-
ponent to go along with these courses. However, since these
course types were outside the scope of the study, we did not
collect statistics on them.
4. Conclusions
A comprehensive statistical analysis of the USA ChE curric-
ula was carried out by aggregating data from established ChE
departments in the USA. A total of 148 departments were con-
sidered. One of the most significant findings is the different
approaches to teaching transport phenomena. Namely, it was
found that most departments begin the transport sequence
with a stand-alone Fluid Flow course. Subsequently, 2/3 of
them follow it with a joint Mass & Heat Transfer or with a
combined Transport Phenomena course, while the remaining
1/3 follow it with a sequence of stand-alone Heat Transfer
and Mass Transfer courses. Tied to the decision of whether
to teach transport via a sequence of stand-alone courses or
through joint/combined courses is the Separation Processes
course. Apparently, this course is more common when the
joint/combined approaches are implemented, and less com-
mon when the stand-alone Mass Transfer course is offered.
Other major findings are that a Computational/Numerical
Methods course is taught by the majority of the departments,
while Statics and Strength of Materials is not. Additionally, it
was found that Biology/Bio-Engineering-type courses are just
10 education for chemical engineers 2 0 ( 2 0 1 7 ) 1–10
as warranted as the Materials course by numbers, and prob-
ably even more so according to latest bio-inclined research
trends. In fact, the “marriage” of biology and ChE seems so nat-
ural that further integration of bio topics such as bio-transport,
bio-separations, bio-materials into the ChE core courses does
not seem far-fetched. Finally, despite the latest ABET safety
requirements, a stand-alone Process Safety course was not
found to be common currently. However, it is expected that
this will change as more and more departments adjust to the
requirement.
Ultimately, the results of this work are meant to become a
useful tool for the other departments interested in improving
their curriculum. It is important to note, however, that the
identification of commonalities between what departments
are teaching is only intended to be used as just a first step
toward making any changes; while a host of other factors, such
as regional considerations and student feedback, should be
included in the final decision.
Disclosures and acknowledgements
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding
agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
The authors declare that they have no actual or poten-
tial conflict of interest including any financial, personal or
other relationships with other people or organizations within
three years of beginning the submitted work that could
inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their
work.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data associated with this arti-
cle can be found, in the online version, at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ece.2017.04.002.
References
Armstrong, R.C., 2006. A vision of the chemical engineering
curriculum of the future. Chem. Eng. Educ. 40, 104–109.
Bryner, M., McCreight, T., 2002–2015. AICHE salary survey. Chem.
Eng. Prog.
Carlson, R., 2016. Estimating the biotech sector’s contribution to
the US economy. Nat. Biotechnol. 34, 247–255.
Committee AICEEP, 1962. A survey of chemical engineering
curricula in 1961–1962. Chem. Eng. Educ., 3–6
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00000383/00009.
Cussler, E., 1999. Do changes in the chemical industry imply
changes in curriculum? Chem. Eng. Educ. 33, 12–17.
Dee, S.J., Cox, B.L., Ogle, R.A., 2015. Process safety in the
classroom: the current state of chemical engineering
programs at US universities. Process Saf. Prog. 34, 316–319.
Erickson, B., Nelson, J.E., Winters, P., 2012. Perspective on
opportunities in industrial biotechnology in renewable
chemicals. Biotechnol. J. 7, 176–185.
Gavrilescu, M., Chisti, Y., 2005. Biotechnology—a sustainable
alternative for chemical industry. Biotechnol. Adv. 23, 471–499.
Gillett, J.E., 2001. Chemical engineering education in the next
century. Chem. Eng. Technol. 24, 561–570.
Kiss, A.A., Grievink, J., Rito-Palomares, M., 2015. A systems
engineering perspective on process integration in industrial
biotechnology. J. Chem. Technol. Biotechnol. 90, 349–355.
McCarthy, J.J., Abatan, A.A., Parker, R.S., Besterfield-Sacre, M.,
2005. Work in progress: pillars of chemical engineering. In:
Frontiers in Education Conference. STIPES, pp. F3F.
McCarthy, J.J., Parker, R.S., Besterfield-Sacre, M., 2006. Pillars of
chemical engineering: a block-scheduled curriculum. The
2006 Annual Meeting.
Rockstraw, D., 2005. Aspen plus in the curriculum-suitable course
content and teaching methodology. Chem. Eng. Educ. 39,
68–75.
Varma, A., Grossmann, I.E., 2014. Evolving trends in chemical
engineering education. AIChE J. 60, 3692–3700.
Vigeant, M.A., 2014. Results from the AIChE Education Annual
Survey: Chemical Engineering Electives. ASEE Annual
Conference & Exposition Paper ID #9976
https://www.engr.uky.edu/∼aseeched/papers/2014/9976.pdf.
Yoder, B., 2014. Engineering by the Numbers. American Society
for Engineering Education (ASEE).