2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Single Lecture on the Political Economy of the Total Cost Curve Measurably Influences Engineering Students' Views on the Balance of Human and Planetary Value

Presented at Engineering Economy Division (EED) Technical Session 2

Engineering decisions increasingly require balancing economic feasibility with societal expectations for environmental stewardship and human well-being. Yet traditional coursework often emphasizes capital and operational costs while giving limited attention to unpriced dimensions of value. This paper investigates whether a single lecture introducing engineers to economic concepts foundational to true cost accounting – including the Tragedy of the Commons, Opportunity Cost, and the Total Cost Curve – can shift students away from philosophical absolutes and toward quantification of public value.

The intervention (see Appendix A) employs the prompt “How much would you pay to watch a beautiful sunset?” to elicit conceptions of environmental value (“everything”, “nothing”, “something”) before and after instruction. Across eight matched course offerings (N = 479 from Spring 2017 through Spring 2025), responses before and after instruction shift markedly away from “everything” (from 25% to 11%, before and after, respectively) and “nothing” (from 47 to 22) toward “something” (27 to 68) following the lecture.

This highly reproducible pattern suggests that brief instructional interventions can advance student capacity to integrate environmental and social externalities into economic reasoning – skills aligned with ABET student outcomes and emerging expectations for engineers to participate in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) leadership. The findings of this study also connect to ongoing work describing the care penalty – the systematic under-compensation of work linked to caring for people and the planet – and the Nurse+Engineer framework, a convergence model that translates patient-centered valuation from nursing practice into engineering design.

Authors

Dr. Daniel B Oerther P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6724-3205 Missouri University of Science and Technology [biography]

Professor Daniel B. Oerther, PhD, PE joined the faculty of the Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2010 as the John A. and Susan Mathes Chair of Civil Engineering after serving for ten years on the faculty of the University of Cincinnati where he was head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Professor Oerther is internationally recognized for leadership of engineers, sanitarians, and nurses promoting the practice the sustainable development, local to global. Dan is a Past President of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists. He is a Diplomate Laureate of the American Academy of Sanitarians. Dan is a Fellow of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, the American Academy of Nursing, the National League for Nursing, and the National Academies of Practice. In the United Kingdom, he is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, the Royal Society for Public Health, and the Society of Operations Engineers. Professor Oerther's awards as an educator include the Excellence in Environmental Engineering Education Award from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists, the Gordon Maskew Fair Distinguished Engineering Educator Medal from the Water Environment Federation, the Engineering Education Excellence Award from the National Society of Professional Engineers, the Robert G. Quinn Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, and the Duncan Fraser Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education from the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies.

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