Within a faculty of engineering at a public university in Mexico, a tension grows increasingly difficult to ignore. On one side stands the legitimate need to train engineers capable of responding to the demands of the labour market, industry, and businesses across the country’s diverse industrial corridors and regions. On the other side lies a considerable risk: that we transform universities into a kind of production line. Students arrive, accumulate credits, complete their social service, fulfil professional placements almost as a mere formality, and graduate without ever having truly developed a mind of their own. This reduction impoverishes everything that studying engineering ought to signify. For training engineers is not merely about teaching people to solve problems with technical efficiency; it is also about cultivating logical thinking, professional responsibility, and a genuine understanding of technology’s impact on society. When the university loses sight of that, it ceases to be a university.

Some time ago, during a conversation with a member of the faculty administration, I expressed a concern that sprang from genuine unease, though my tone was perhaps more direct than it should have been. What I tried to convey was my impression that, within our faculty, people no longer spoke of new ideas or different proposals, and much less of development in the broader sense that engineering now demands. We were also failing to pay sufficient attention to the trends reshaping our disciplines: artificial intelligence, data analysis, automation, digitalisation of processes, the energy transition, sustainability, new centred design approaches, and engineering oriented toward concrete social problems. My impression, stated somewhat bluntly, was that conversation in the faculty revolved more around maintaining graduation rates, reducing academic backlog, and ensuring graduates found employment—well paid or not—so that institutional indicators would not suffer. This worried me deeply. I felt we were running the risk of training students to meet requirements, but not necessarily to think, to propose, or to innovate. I ended that observation with a phrase I still stand by, although I recognise it sounds severe: we cannot reach the point of condoning mediocrity. Beyond the bluntness, what lay behind it was a genuine concern. When an institution becomes obsessed with maintaining metrics, meeting terminal efficiency percentages, and producing graduates in series, it risks hollowing itself out. And in engineering, this hollowing out is especially delicate, because innovation does not arise from complacency, but from curiosity, doubt, and the ability to imagine solutions that do not yet exist.

In that context, speaking of competency-based education without also addressing the human horizon of formation seems insufficient to me. Competencies matter, of course they do; no one could practise engineering without mastering technical tools, specialised software, laboratory procedures, analytical methods, and applicable regulations. But a university education cannot be reduced to that alone. An engineer must also know how to read the context in which they will work, interpret data rigorously, collaborate in interdisciplinary teams, communicate results clearly, and make decisions that do not harm people or the environment. The productive logic demands speed, adaptability, and immediate performance, and I understand that. Yet the university ought to offer something more valuable and more difficult: time to understand, to make mistakes, to discuss, and to build one’s own thinking. No express online course provides that, nor does a curriculum that piles up learning units without a coherent thread.

This defence of time strikes me as central. Students today are surrounded by stimuli, notifications, and a culture of immediacy that seriously erodes attention and depth. In university classrooms, this erosion is clearly visible: it is increasingly difficult to sustain concentration during a long mathematical derivation, while reading a technical paper, or in a project discussion that requires patience and reasoning. And yet genuine university learning does not occur in haste, but in perseverance. A laboratory session, a tutorial, an integrative project, or even the professional placement itself should not be merely a space for ticking off curriculum requirements; they should be genuine opportunities for the student to discover that understanding takes time, and that serious thinking is also a form of work—perhaps the most demanding kind.

That is why I insist that the university cannot be limited to reproducing functional human resources. Here in central Mexico, very marked contrasts coexist: there are industrial zones housing companies of high technological sophistication, alongside areas lacking basic infrastructure. Our students come from vastly different backgrounds. Some arrive from outlying municipalities facing genuine economic hardship; others come from the metropolitan area with greater access to technology and different cultural references. Many arrive with the very clear idea that studying engineering is, above all, a way to secure a stable income and help their families. That motivation is entirely understandable and legitimate, and I respect it deeply. But if education is reduced to that alone, the horizon becomes far too narrow. A public university has the responsibility to show students that knowledge is not only a means to obtain employment, but also a way to intervene intelligently, creatively, and responsibly in the reality around them.

In that sense, it is also necessary to recover the value of knowledge as a public good—and I say this with engineering specifically in mind. Not everything should be translated into immediate utility or short-term profitability. There are forms of knowledge that broaden one’s outlook, strengthen intellectual autonomy, and allow us to understand the world better. This means that it is not enough simply to know how to use a tool or run software; one must understand why it works, what its limits are, what assumptions underpin it, and what consequences its application may have in a specific context. Technology without reflection can become blind. Efficiency without judgment can turn into mere mechanical obedience. And an institution that pursues only measurable outcomes ends up losing its deepest function, which is precisely the formation of conscience and professional judgment.

The conversation I mentioned at the beginning is significant for exactly that reason. When an institution normalises the idea that the only thing that matters is maintaining pass rates, fulfilling integrative projects as a formality, and graduating quickly to feed the faculty’s indicators, it sends out a very dangerous message: that thinking too much complicates things, that proposing something different gets in the way, and that questioning the curriculum or the way teaching is conducted is unnecessary. That logic, however practical and efficient it may seem, ultimately breeds complacency. Engineering, by contrast, needs students who dare to ask how to improve a process, how to design more sustainable solutions for specific contexts, and how to connect technical knowledge with real community problems. It also needs lecturers who do not limit themselves to covering syllabi, but who sustain spaces where questions still matter, where making mistakes is part of the process and not a reason for punishment.

I am aware that this is not easy under the real conditions in which we work. We have large groups, infrastructure that does not always support us, curricula that can sometimes feel detached from contemporary industrial and academic reality, and links with the productive sector that remain limited and often depend more on individual initiatives by lecturers than on robust institutional policy. All of that is real, and I will not deny it. But precisely for that reason, reflection on the meaning of what we do is more urgent, not less.

Perhaps that is one of the most important tasks of higher education today: resisting the temptation to turn all education into mere procedure. Teaching engineering at a Mexican public university should not mean only transmitting formulas, procedures, or calculation methods; it should also mean building a more honest relationship with knowledge, a freer relationship with thought, and a more responsible one with society. In the end, a university is valued not only by how many graduates it produces each year or by its graduation rates; it is valued by the human and intellectual quality of the people it helps to form. And that quality is not measured solely in figures; it is recognised in something far harder to quantify: the ability to create, to understand in depth, to question what is established, and not to be content with doing things merely because they have always been done that way.