Engineers at colleges and universities have not been spared the downsizing that has impacted the industrial world. Where once Ph.D.-holders were given tenure-track positions, the new trend in academia is to hire many of them as post-doctoral fellows or non-faculty members, such as adjunct faculty, lecturers, research and teaching associates.

Moreover, the number of doctoral scientists and engineers working in academia is shrinking, since long-term growth of these positions has been much slower than in business and government. Between 1973 and 1999, the percent of doctoral scientists and engineers in academia dropped from 55 percent to 45 percent. Within academia, growth was slowest for major research universities.

Multidisciplinary thinking is having an impact on engineering education and the opportunities it offers. Perhaps the most significant shift is a trend toward the broadening of the ME curriculum, with an increasing number of subdisciplines and concentrations offered at a variety of schools, and an increased number of electives to allow students greater flexibility in augmenting the core mechanical engineering courses. Additionally, most colleges and universities are seeking to make their engineering academic workforce more diverse. The number of women and underrepresented minority engineering faculty is very small.

The teaching faculty is perhaps the most valuable asset of a university's program. The academic expertise and intellectual interests of the faculty define the focus and culture of a school's mechanical engineering program. By studying under faculty with a variety of backgrounds and interests, students are able to develop conceptual links between different disciplines. Many institutions, recognizing that as the role of the mechanical engineer expands, so must the knowledge base of the faculty, are hiring new faculty with a diversity of academic backgrounds, including electrical engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, materials science and biophysics.