Trends and Problems in Mining Engineering Education

Mining engineering in Turkey has the lowest rank among the other engineering fields. Unemployment, instability in mining industry, lack of investments, difficult working conditions, terrible mining disasters and negative impression of environmentalists are some of the reasons for this fact. On the other hand, mining education has been changing worldwide in the last decade. Many famous mining schools have terminated their programs or established regional collaborations. Therefore, the universities started to rethink and restructure their mining education programs to meet the requirements of the industry and public. In this article, the mining engineering education in the past and present was reviewed including the number of academic staff and graduates. The developments of the engineering curriculum was examined in the world and Europe as well as in Turkey, in particular METU (Middle East Technical University) program was investigated, in detail. In Turkey, two mining engineering departments and three programs have been accreditated by ABET(Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) and MüDEK (Association for Evaluation and Accreditation of Engineering Programs), respectively.