"We went away from a prescription of exactly what the curriculum had to look like and went more to the outcomes approach," Aldridge said. "It made the engineering (field) more attractive to liberal art schools where communication skills ... are much more a part of the standard curricula."

The revisions were spurred in part by discussions with companies like Boeing and Texas Instruments, which were seeing engineering job applicants with too much book knowledge and not a lot of practical experience or perspective, Aldridge said.

Also, the engineering community in general realized it had to diversify.

"There's been an ongoing recognition of the inadequacy of the number of females and minorities in engineering," Aldridge said. "I think that's one of the reasons schools like Smith get involved."

At Bucknell, applications to its decades-old College of Engineering have increased 87 percent since 2000, said the dean, Jim Orbison. Approximately 26 percent of the students are women, compared with 17.5 percent nationally, he said.

Smaller liberal arts schools also present an alternative to a perceived "macho culture" or predominantly white male makeup of more famous engineering schools like MIT or Caltech, said Swarthmore engineering professor E. Carr Everbach.

"That's a turnoff to people. We try to avoid that," he said. Rio Akasaka, 20, a Swarthmore junior studying linguistics and engineering, agreed the school has a collegial atmosphere much more conducive to success than the sometimes adversarial environment he hears about at engineering powerhouses.

"There isn't that harsh competition that excludes some people," Akasaka said.

Engineering is a growing field, with more than 76,000 bachelor's degrees in the subject conferred last year nationwide, compared with just over 65,000 a decade ago, according to the American Association of Engineering Societies.

About a dozen students have expressed an interest in the Wellesley engineering class for this coming spring, Ducas said. Six students enrolled last year — the first time the class was offered — and 13 took an abbreviated version of the course during winter session.

"It's an opportunity to generate some kinds of engineers with a wider viewpoint," said Ducas. "It's critical to have the engineers of the future connected to society. ... The world is not getting less technological."