The perceived dysfunctionality of technical education and the changing conception of what engineering was about could not fail to affect the VDI. Discontent with its penchant for abstraction and theory, its predilection for arcane mathematics and obfuscating language – in short, its engineering scholasticism – soon expanded into a wholesale attack on the leadership. These attacks eventually resulted in major changes and in the adoption of policies much more congenial to shop culture and business interests. The new course, in turn, affected the shape and development of the profession as a whole, owing to the VDI's critical role in defining the educational requirements for engineers.

Even as it embarked on its new course, the VDI did not completely surrender its earlier ideology concerning the professional autonomy and group-formative powers of engineering activity as an act of national loyalty. At the ideological level, the VDI leadership was able to mute the extreme versions of the managerial vision of technology. It did so not because it remained unalterably opposed to the idea of specialization and cost-consciousness but because the new orientation patently served the material interests of managerial and entrepreneurial engineers. As such, the new outlook ran counter to the social aspirations of most ordinary engineers and professionalizes, and it might easily have destroyed the VDI.