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Engineers are professionally obligated to protect the safety and well‐being of the public impacted by the technologies they design and maintain. In an increasingly complex sociotechnical world, engineering educators and professional institutions have a duty to train engineers in these responsibilities.

This article asks, where are engineers trained in their public welfare responsibilities, and how effective is this training? We argue that engineers trained in public welfare responsibilities, especially within engineering education, will demonstrate greater understanding of their duty to recognize and respond to public welfare concerns. We expect training in formal engineering classes to be more broadly impactful than training in contexts like work or professional societies.

We analyze unique survey data from a representative sample of US practicing engineers using descriptive and regression techniques.

Consistent with expectations, engineers who received public welfare responsibility training in engineering classes are more likely than other engineers to understand their responsibilities to protect public health and safety and problem‐solve collectively, to recognize the importance of social consequences and ethical responsibilities in their own jobs, to have noticed ethical issues in their workplace, and to have taken action about an issue that concerned them. Training through other parts of college, workplaces, or professional societies has comparatively little impact. Concerningly, nearly a third of engineers reported never being trained in public welfare responsibilities.

These results suggest that training in engineering education can shape engineers' long‐term understanding of their public welfare responsibilities. They underscore the need for these responsibilities to be taught as a core, non‐negotiable part of engineering education.

The experiences of students and professionals with disabilities are routinely excluded from scholarly and policy debates about equity in engineering. Emergent research suggests that engineering is particularly ableist, yet systematic accounts of the possible exclusion and devaluation faced by engineers with disabilities are largely missing.

This paper asks, do engineers with disabilities have more negative interpersonal experiences in engineering classrooms and workplaces than those without disabilities? Utilizing a social relational model of disability, I hypothesize that engineers with physical disabilities and chronic and mental illness are more likely to experience exclusion and professional devaluation than their peers and, partly as a result, have lower persistence intentions.

The paper uses survey data from 1729 students enrolled in eight US engineering programs (American Society for Engineering Education Diversity and Inclusion Survey) and 8321 US‐employed engineers (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Inclusion Study Survey). Analyses use regression, mediation, and intersectional approaches.

Consistent with expectations, engineering students and professionals with disabilities are less likely than their peers to experiencesocial inclusionandprofessional respectat school and work. Students with disabilities are more likely tointend to leave their engineering programsand professionals with disabilities are more likely to havethought about leaving their engineering jobscompared to peers, and their greater risks of encountering interpersonal bias help account for these differences. Analyses also reveal intersectional variation by gender and race/ethnicity.

These results suggest that engineering harbors widespread ableism across education and work. The findings demand more scholarly attention to the social, cultural, and physical barriers that block people with disabilities from full and equal participation in engineering.