2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering professionals have a societal and moral obligation to protect the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Although public welfare concerns are touted by engineering leaders and educational institutions as important in the abstract, engineering students are often inadequately prepared to recognize their public welfare responsibilities, let alone to act when issues arise. To address this gap, we designed and piloted a one-credit course for Master’s and upper-division undergraduate engineering students. The course had three learning goals: (1) teach students to recognize their public welfare responsibilities, (2) motivate students to act on public welfare issues, and (3) equip students with intervention strategies (e.g., understanding whistleblowing protections, writing an op-ed) to confront issues they may encounter in their future professional work. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of the course and present data from pre- and post-class surveys and open-ended reflections to illustrate how the class produced notable changes in students’ (a) recognition of their public welfare responsibilities, (b) motivation to take action, and (c) familiarity with intervention strategies. These results suggest the viability of engineering education courses to not only increase students’ knowledge of their public welfare responsibilities (the typical approach of ethics and professionalism courses), but to better equip them to uphold their responsibilities as public welfare watchdogs.