I do believe that my education is a proper investment even though people say that we need a larger percent of interpersonal skills. I have heard from people that were not very comfortable speaking in front of others or presenting ideas but it was something that they acquired after they left school and entered the work force. Although I wish I was able to become more comfortable with that side while in school I think it is more important to learn the technical skills while in school. I think that because when I do leave school and start to work I would like to have the ability to make a great product rather than a not so great product and then I can learn to present and sell it. As long as I am able to continue to grow I will be grateful for the technical knowledge I acquired at school.

I believe education is always a proper investment. In order to succeed at anything, you need to know what is going on. How often do you go to a store or a restaurant and immediately notice when someone who works there is new or needs improvement at their job? Having interpersonal skills is fantastic, however eventually you will have to perform. If you are not able to, people will notice and things will start going downhill from there.

I think that the BME curriculum does not reflect the author's perspective because there are virtually no courses that teach interpersonal skills. However, I think that the investment is still justified because it's important for future engineers to know the material and have high-skill in their area. Interpersonal skills are something that should be no taught in the classroom because such skills require practice and people learn at different rates. It's better for people to learn such skills on their own because the learning is not as strict and they may not even require all of the essential skills (e.g. empathy, motivation) to succeed or move forward. However, it's important for the curriculum to emphasize technical skills because those are required for all engineers to masters. You cannot be a successful engineer without having a profound understanding of technical skills and the BME field overall. Moreover, interpersonal skills may be more important than technical skills, but that doesn't make it an excuse to not focus on technical skills because those are the basis for a job. The technical skills serve as your base that you rely on to do your job, but the interpersonal skills are what allow you to advance even further in life so it's kind of like the "icing on the cake." Overall, I agree that the curriculum should still emphasize technical skills even though interpersonal skills are more important.

Interpersonal skills are as important as technical knowledge .Interpersonal skills are the way to how someone relate and communicate with other. Interpersonal skills are attributes that are used to motivates employees and how to make them use their knowledge to achieve the best results.Without interpersonal skill everyday business would be very difficult .Interpersonal skills are necessary for the establishment of relationships between workmates, which leads to a mutual exchange of ideas, information and skills. Furthermore, to establish mutual respect and consideration for one another’s opinions and input. For various reasons interpersonal skills are crucial . Technical knowledge helps to use specific knowledge to perform tasks and helps to raise self confidence. It is important because every job relies on different tools, programs and processes. It can be obtained through work experience, various types of training, self-learning, informal education, internships, observing, and listening.

As a biomedical engineering graduate student, I would say one in this field would need both skills (interpersonal skills and technical skills) in a ratio of 50:50. Although I agreed in an earlier reply that "interpersonal skills are more essential to the work environment especially to teamwork oriented place than technical skills". I still emphasize that one cannot think about having either skill as an option and expect to be a successful engineer in the future. Ignoring one part of these required skills or not paying the attention to it would lead to difficulties later on as it would affect the engineer performance as well as the career. When it comes to finding a job, this is what HR employer mostly would focus on when interviewing any engineer either for an internship or for a job. It is not only a matter of having the technical skills in a particular discipline, but it is also about the capability to manage responsibilities and perform well in all situations with any kind of people by employing the right interpersonal skills.
However, one can learn and practice technical skills, but it is hard to learn interpersonal skills.

I do agree that interpersonal and technical skills do go and in hand or as a ratio of 50:50. Lacking in one of these can have drawbacks. Having really good technical skills and not being able to get it to your team when working as a team project would have a bad impact on the outcomes of the project. On the other hand lacking the necessary technical knowledge in your field of work would cause a lot of trouble to you and the people working with you. So having a both these skills within oneself is what would be expected of an individual in an industry.

In my opinion, this is a proper investment to some extension. The things that can differentiate between two engineers are their interpersonal skills. The technical knowledge, which is %30, is very important because this is the factor that could make an engineer have %70 of interpersonal skills. Students at NJIT can easily get all the technical knowledge they might need to build their own interpersonal skills on their own. However, there should be more classes that can help the students to work on their interpersonal skills because some students do not realize that they never work on their interpersonal skills. Most students focus on their technical skills more to graduate with high GPA.

I believe that technical knowledge in many cases is useless without interpersonal skills. For example, we have a saying at work that says, "A well performed analysis poorly communicated is a failure." This means that no matter how much knowledge one knows about a certain subject or study, if they don't communicate it well to others, it's useless. Technical knowledge is very important when it comes to completing a certain task within a company but interpersonal skill gives you the edge to achieve much more.

I do think that interpersonal skills are a tremendous asset in the workplace, I do not think that people can just fake their way through without a good basis of technical understanding. Going so far to say they you only need 15% of technical expertise to succeed is a bit preposterous. This will also vary from department to department though and across job function. The interpersonal skills come in handy when needing to obtain approvals or input from other people and expressing your ideas. You will not be able to climb the organizational ladder and gain favor if you are not friendly, respectful, and communicative to your coworkers and customers. However, you can only go so far on that and will not be able to bring anything substantial to the table eventually if you do not understanding the basic principles behind your product. All in all, I would say its close to the 70/30 split suggested by Daniel Goleman, if not closer to 60/40.

I think the "system" is designed to prepare incoming engineers to effectively contribute to the industry early on. By emphasizing on technical skills, young engineers can somewhat integrate in a rather technically-intense environment that will be forgiving to those who have more interpersonal skills than technical. The way I see it, positions in the engineering industry that require strong interpersonal skills, such as project managers and sales engineers, still require that strong technical background in order to be effective in their roles. With this, it makes sense to engineers should have more technical skills when entering the industry, and improve on their interpersonal skills further down the line if they wish to seek less technical positions later on.

Interpersonal Skills is any competence facilitating interaction and communication with others where social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways. Interpersonal skills are the interpersonal acts a person uses to interact with others, Interpersonal skills are traits you rely on when you interact and communicate with others. They cover a variety of scenarios where communication and cooperation are essential. Interpersonal skills include: Active listening  - Teamwork  - Responsibility  - Dependability  - Leadership   - Motivation   - Flexibility  - Patience  - Empathy .

For sure, technical skills matter less than interpersonal skills. I'll give you an example from my life. I wanted to start a company that sells VR programs to k-12 public and private schools. These programs would teach kids like physics or biology by putting them in an interactive environment.  I have some game engine experience in developing for PC, mobile, and in augmented reality, but I am for sure not the best developer in any room and I never did anything with VR technology. My fraternity brother actually does a lot of this stuff though so through him we were able to get a working prototype only to get shot down further along the road. Regardless, without the connection, I wouldn't have even had the guts to start reaching out to schools or other businesses to get this venture going. You're only one person, so there is only so many things you can be good at. In reality, you don't have to be good at much, but really just able to harness the abilities of others around you, and maybe that's how we can build businesses like empires.

Wow. There have been some really great and informative answers to this question.
For myself I agree with others on the point that technical education is necessary but not sufficient for success.  However, I think this is a proper investment in light of the 85:15 ratio requirement of interpersonal skill to technical skill required for success. If the ratio were actually set to 85:15 then the technical content of a graduate degree would be really low or the degrees would have to be lengthened in order to provide minimum requirement of technical learning.  There does seem to be a trend in project based learning which does facilitate interpersonal skills.

In the Forbes article there is mention of EQ, MQ, and BQ as measures comprising interpersonal skill.
An attempt to integrate skills training in these areas would be of great value but I think it would require much more demands on the professors, a real shift in emphasis and it may very well open up the hard sciences to  much political advancement over merit base advancement. The reason for this is as much as these interpersonal skills are good they really are very difficult to quantify. 

If there were better ways to quantify them in the midst of learning scenario then maybe the integrity of the  feedback could really help engineers at an early stage in career.

In summary, i think the indirect opportunities for interpersonal skill is present in the training.
And there is a increasing trend of recognizing the skill for interpersonal skills in engineering.
As this course is an example of this. With the foregoing said my conclusion is the investment is worth it

I agree with the previously mentioned posts that recent efforts have been made in the classroom to incorporate more team-building and project-based assignments, which is great for developing interpersonal skills and technical skills simultaneously. However, I also want to point out that during my undergraduate career in BME, the BME curriculum included liberal arts electives that we were required to take. I believe that having class-based discussions in topics other than technical BME topics, with non-BME majors, greatly facilitated the development of interpersonal skills. Therefore, I don't believe that the greater emphasis on technical skills and smaller emphasis on interpersonal skills is a backwards investment, but rather can be improved upon. We should not minimize the amount of technical skills being taught, but increase the opportunities for learning interpersonal skills, such as taking non-technical classes with students who don't speak "technical engineering language", because a great number of people in society do not speak or understand the technical language of engineers. Yet to minimize the amount of technical skills being taught is also a mistake, since this may lead to the spread of false information to the public, which does not do good for society as a whole. For example, someone with great interpersonal skills selling a cheaply/terribly-made product to a consumer may succeed more in selling the products, than let's say, someone lacking in interpersonal skills but is trying to sell a high-quality/durable product. The person with great interpersonal skills is not doing the society good with the terribly-made product, even though that person is probably succeeding in terms of career. On the other hand, the person not selling any of the highly well-made product is neither harming society nor improving it, being in a more neutral area. Now ultimately, you want someone with great interpersonal skills developing great high-quality products (technical skills). 

Given that humans are not necessarily all alike, don't act or perform the same way, don't communicate at the same level of accuracy, the success of any project relies on how to integrate all of those differences for a better cohesion and effective accomplishment among the team. I believe interpersonal skills are more important than technical knowledge when it comes to project management. For a  simplistic project that involves a single person, interpersonal skills might not be as relevant since the project leader will dealing himself/herself for the duration of the project. However, in most circumstances , projects usually require the input of more than one person, which in this case can be difficult to manage if those individual don't know how to corporate together. No matter how much of a technical expert you are in a topic, you lack the interpersonal skills to present your ideas in an effective manner to the rest of the team, your expertise will be vain for that project. Each member of the team should be proficiency in  communication in addition to having technical knowledge.