In recent years the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have been leading an effort to require a bachelor's degree plus a Master's degree or at least 30 additional acceptable credit hours in order to fulfill the educational requirements for a P.E. degree. The BS + 30 proposal, also known as the Raise the Bar Initiative, has been met with staunch opposition by other professional societies, such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), which want to retain the BS degree as the first professional degree. In many of the debates on this issue it seems that the parties are talking past each other using specialized definitions and not really engaging each other in meaningful debate. As a result, the Raise the Bar Initiative is stalled and the planned implementation date has been slipped from 2015 to 2020. This paper sets forth a comprehensive five-step plan to reconcile the competing interests in the Raise the Bar debate, proposing a politically feasible way to close the industry exemption, retain the BS degree as the first professional degree, and simultaneously restore 30 hours of engineering content subsequent to the BS degree and prior to registration as a PE. The key to the proposal is to focus first on Raising the Bar for Engineering Interns, after which changing the requirements for Professional Engineers will be more politically feasible. The five steps are: 1) retain the BS as the educational requirement for Engineering Interns, 2) eliminate the industry exemption for Engineering Interns, 3) require continuing professional development (CPD) courses for Engineering Interns, 4) increase the CPD requirements for both Engineering Interns and Professional Engineers to 45 hours per year, the equivalent of one 3-credit hour college course per year, and 5) after ten years have passed, require the equivalent of 30 credit hours after the BS degree prior to registration as a PE. Once the first four steps have been in place for ten years, the first batch of EI's to become registered under the new system would have 450 PDH's (or the equivalent of 30 additional credit hours), at which point they would meet the educational requirements of the Raise the Bar Initiative to qualify for the PE exam. By focusing first on Engineering Interns, a politically feasible method is proposed to both close the industry exemption and phase in the adoption of the Raise the Bar initiative.
