How bad is it in the UK? 16

[BitTwiddler]

From here:

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9f931654-d16f-11d9-9c1d-00000e2511c8.html

"A top engineering scholarship is struggling to attract applicants in the latest example of the severe difficulties faced by industry in its attempts to reduce skill shortages.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has extended until the end of next month the deadline to apply for 10 Whitworth Scholar awards, worth £3,500 a year, to cover the cost of studying for a degree-level engineering course.

Applications for the scholarships had been due to close today but this was extended after only 10 people applied. This compares with about 120 applicants in the mid 1990s."

Are things really this bad in the UK, or is this just an obscure set of scholarships which nobody knew about?

What caused the huge drop in applicants over the past decade?

Is it lack of jobs, low pay, low prestige, competition from cheaper foreign workers, or something else?

Britain was the workshop of the world in the 19th century. America held that title for most of the 20th century.

I'm an American and I'm wondering if the US is next in line for deindustrialization.

 

[QCE]

The engineering profession in the UK from what I saw when living in the UK is terrible. The person that changes the oil in your car is called a mechanical engineer. There are no rules on who is an engineer. The public has no idea what an engineer is. The wages are terribly low.

Lack of jobs - I would say no because it is easy to find a job with the title of engineer although it is most likely not an ENGINEERING job.

Low Pay - YES - I was told at more than one job interview that the starting wage for new grad engineers is less then 20,000 pounds. The starting wage in Canada is usually over $50,000. Even with the conversion that is terribly low. Never mind the crazy cost of living difference.

Low Prestige - If you tell someone you are a mechanical engineer they would laugh at you and call you a grease monkey and ask you to fix their car.

Foreign Workers - UK is full of foreign workers and I can't see it getting better with the EU including more and more poorer countries. I was a foreign worker working an engineering job there.

Something else - Everyone in the UK is going into business schools and if they want to do something technical it is IT. IT is also a joke in the UK it means data entry or working the phones.

Is America next: I think it a bit controversial but I would partially agree with many that would suggest that the American empire has peaked and is on its way down.

 

[GregLocock]

There's a whole bunch of things - but I had never heard of the IMechE when I applied for uni, and if those scholarships were available then, I did not know of them.




Cheers

Greg Locock

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[ScottyUK]

QCE,

You have saved me recording my thoughts. A star for you.


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If we learn from our mistakes,
I'm getting a great education!

 

[DrillerNic]

Yeah, some of the low prestige stuff about being an engineer that QCE mentions is true.

But ~£20,000 as a graduate starting salary for an engineer is more than most other graduate starting salaries. Unemployment for engineering graduates is much lower than for say, history graduates. While manufacturing may be down (but not out- the UK is making more cars now than at any time over the last 30 years), there are large multinational engineering firms doing work globally out of the UK: Bechtel, KBR, Kvearner... High technology sports cars are still made in the UK (TVR, Noble, etc) and global motor racing continue to be based along the M4 corridor... The North Sea oil industry is begging for people to move to Aberdeen and earn very good salaries(so that everyone can buy an Audi TT it seems). Who knows, there might be a new round of building nuclear power stations soon!

I reckon the real reason for the low take up of these scolarships is what Greg has suggested: lack of publicity. Very few people in the street know that the Engineering Institutes exist, let alone what the IMechE is. Let face it 120 applicants in the 90s is derisory. If they'd sent a flyer to every secondary school in the UK, they'd have been deluged with applicants....or given a pile of forms to each University Mech Eng department in the UK to be sent out with every prospectus...

 

[MikeyP]

***** WARNING, INCOHERENT RANT FOLLOWS *****

I agree. Lack of communication is probably the dominant issue here. However, it is a symptom of a much wider problem.

The UK government has a "target" of "Enabling half of all young people to attend university."

[

http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php?id=3275

- Interestingly, it took me a while to find a reference to this policy. I searched the Department for Education and Skills website and the The Office of the Prime Minister website without turning anything up. I eventually found the reference on The Labour Party website about 4 levels down from the homepage at the bottom of the list (!) and in the "Young People" section, not the "Education" section. As Douglas Adams wrote, "It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.".]

You cannot deny that the government is well on the way to achieving this aim. The number of university graduates is indeed rising steadily.

Two obvious consequences

1) More graduates means lower graduate salaries (simple supply and demand).

2) Either education standards must rise to maintain the quality of graduates, or the quality of graduates must fall.

Engineering in the UK is still struggling to come to terms with the long decline of the manufacturing base (Of course we are not alone in this and I have no argument with industries which out-source manufacturing beacuase it is cheaper) so there is little money available for either innovation or graduate salaries which compounds the problem of over-supply.

The standards issue is slightly more complex. The answer to point 2 is of course that education standards are falling. This is (understandably) denied by the government despite what "everone else" (i.e. employers and anyone who stops to think about it for a few seconds) thinks. This implies that standards must be "recalibrated" from the bottom upwards.

The chain goes something like this:

1) The current educational trend (a faint legacy of the "all must have prizes" anti-meritocratic thinking of the 1970's) is to move away from fact-based learning of traditional subjects to a much broader curriculum which is spread more thinly with the emphasis placed on qualitative study. This first shows itself at the secondary education stage: Year 7 (~11 years of age)

2) There are of course some subjects where even the most zealous educational reformer cannot remove all traces of fact-based learning, such as maths and sciences. This means that after 3 years of this form of study, pupils can readily divide the curriculum into "easy" and "hard" subjects.

3) In years 9 and 10 (Age 14-16) pupils chose which subjects to study to GCSE level. However, there are core subjects which they MUST study (including maths and sciences). Now beacuse these are "hard" subjects where fact-based learning is still essential, the scope of the curriculum in these areas must be reduced. If this was not the case, then the exam results would not be seen to be improving and that is not what the government wants. Every August, when the results are published, we see a plethora of media articles announcing an increased GCSE pass rate and (usually) an equal number of editorials explaining why this is not necessarily a good thing. The following day, the media reports are always the same with the govenment saying "Your silly comments are putting-down the achievements of pupils".

4) For those who continue their full-time education into years 12 and 13 (16 to 19 years old) and study for AS and A2 examinations, the GCSE pattern is repeated. This time however, the number of subjects studied by individual pupils is again reduced but this time maths and sciences are not mandatory and therefore unsurprisingly not popular choices. The media arguments about pass rates are repeated again (in fact the AS and A2 results are published 1 week before the GCSEs but the media stories are identical, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V!).

5) [optional - don't read this if you have more fun things to do, like emptying the sceptic tank for example] The pass rate issue is actually getting rather comically out of hand. So many students are achieving A grades either through better educational performance (the government's view) or downturn in standards (everyone else's view) that a new top grade of A* has been introduced to differentiate between the highest performing pupils! BUT THIS IS STILL NOT ENOUGH TO DISTINGUISH THEM! The next wave of summer media stories always concerns student x who studied at state-funded school y in regional town z who's application to study (sorry, "read") law at Toffnose College, Oxbridge has been turned down despite the fact that he or she achieved 5 A2 passes at grade A* (the "normal" number of A2 subjects taken is 3). The university responds to the media article by saying "Yes, but we only have 80 places available for people to study law and we had 800 applicants, 150 of which got 5 A* A2 grades [these numbers are not hyperbole despite my sarcastic tone!]. We gave each one a personal interview to select the best 80. Pupil x did not perform as well, in our opinion, as other applicants.". The media go away and think about this for a while and come back with "Ah, of those 80 you chose, 70% came from a privately funded education background. Surely this is just another example of the establishment old boys network?". The university responds "But 60% of the original applicants came from a privately funded education and they performed better at interview too.". Then the government chimes in "But what about the other 10%? The media are right. You are discriminating against state educated pupils. If you don't sort this out we will cut your funding. We've got our eye on you.". Lo and behold, this year we have the first reports appearing that now students from privately funded education are now apparently being "discriminated against" by univerity admissions policies.

6) [back to the real point] The practical upshot of all this is that there are fewer people studying maths, physics and chemistry at age 16-19 and (due to falling standards) those that do are not as well educated in these areas as they would have been in previous years. Therefore, fewer of them go on to study engineering at university. University education and admissions standards have not dropped (with some exceptions and at least not to the same degree as those in secondary education).

***** RANT WARNING ALL CLEAR *****

M

--
Dr Michael F Platten

 

[ScottyUK]

Mike,

'sceptic tank' - a vessel for containing sceptics? An armoured vehicle driven by a unconvinced person??

DrillerNic,

The oil industry isn't crying out that hard. It rarely advertises anywhere but in its own niche press, and the few jobs that are advertised in the wider job market require many years of specific O&G experience. There are many talented and well-qualified people in the allied industries such as powergen and petrochemicals with directly transferrable skills who never get to interview because they are screened out by the HR departments of these companies who are 'crying out'. Either the need ain't there, or the HR staff aren't doing their job very well.


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If we learn from our mistakes,
I'm getting a great education!

 

[MikeyP]

FYI a "sceptic tank" is defined as "That part of a seafood restaurant where Richard Dawkins carries out his own particular form of 'natural selection' when deciding what to have for dinner."

M

--
Dr Michael F Platten

 

[zdas04]

I've seen ads in U.S. newspapers for technicion-level petroleum jobs in Aberdeen so the industry isn't keeping the secret very well.

David

 

[DrillerNic]

MikeyP- the Scotsman yesterday spoke about reasearch that shows that a degree in the UK is no longer route to riches. It suggested that the advantage in lifetime earnings for a hisory degree was about £22,000! Still Engineers & Technologists fared much better- a lifetime earnig advantage of about £180,000, beaten only by Computer & Maths degrees with a lifetime advantage of £220,000 (I guess that's all that risk modelling and designing complex finacial instruments in the City!). if there was more of that kind of thing, I'm sure more people would consider the "hard" subjects! And you are correct-some "Graduate" type jobs are becoming the things that good school leavers used to do: Advertising sales for example, and a postgraduate level degree is becoming the norm for many Engineering, Science & Technology type jobs.

I'd have applauded the government's 50% target, if it had been 50% in full time tertiary education rather than university....ie we want people to go to FE College and become a joiner just as much as we want people to go to Oxbridge and do Sanscrit. So we have lots of people, not really suited for acdemic study doing strange degrees that don't really go anywhere. (By this I don't mean the usual 'micky mouse' degrees like Golf Course Design that are usually mentioned, but all those Media Studies, Film Studies, Manufacturing Design type courses.

Sadly, the UK is still very class (or snob if you prefer) driven, and everybody wants their little darling to go to university rather than an FE College. Look at the outrage in the middle brow papers at the amounts a tradesman is supposed to be able to earn- outrage generated largely because "It's not right that he, a plumber, should be earning more than me!" Look at the scramble of the Polytechnics to rename themselves universities a decade ago!

 

[DrillerNic]

Scotty- I'd suggest eh HR departments aren't up to scratch. i experienced that when I was trying to get into teh industry as a graduate, as I wasn't a 'usual' 21 year old graduate fresh from an MSc, and unless I could get to the technical staff, I was often screened out before an interview. Like all jobs, it's simply a matter of knowing where to look for O&G vacancies- I wouldn't look in the Guardian's jobs section for any engineering jobs for example, and most O&G jobs are advertised in the regional paper, the Press & Journal, which isn't really a niche paper! There were supposed to be some roadshows to Birmingham after the Rover closure by Grampian Enterprise, UKOOA and Subsea UK.

 

[corus]

Setting aside the interesting fact that a history degree is pretty much worthless, in the Guardian today

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,9830,1497368,00.html

it did say that the value of a degree has eroded over the past decade, and you would be better studying maths and computing (math and IT to american readers). Surprisingly those who study maths don't all do financial models in the city but actually work in engineering helping those who have problems with long division and other hard subjects.

As far as polytechnics are concerned, I believe it was Thatcher who decided to alter their names to Universities, thereby instantly increasing the number of people who attended Universities. Undoubtedly a master stroke.

corus

 

[MikeyP]

Interesting reading:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3506905.stm

During the Curriculum 2000 reorganisation of A-levels into AS and A2, the maths community had warned that this would not work for their subject because it did not fit into two equal parts - perhaps a third of the ground was covered in the first year then people accelerated through the rest.

"And lo and behold that's exactly what happened," Prof Smith said.

The AS pass rate was just over 70%.

Not surprisingly this was noticed by schools being externally audited and by young people with an eye on the points they needed for university entrance, and they "voted with their feet".

There was a 20% drop in the numbers taking the full A-level - and that did not "bounce back" in the following year either.

"So in a system where there was already concern ... we shot ourselves in both feet by knocking another 20% out of the system."

--
Dr Michael F Platten

 

[QCE]

"But ~£20,000 as a graduate starting salary for an engineer is more than most other graduate starting salaries."

You see this is the type of thing I'm talking about. Engineers should be making more then most other graduate starting salaries! In Canada engineers are considered a professional degree along with doctors and lawyers. A math or history degree is not considered in the same league. In the UK apparently they are and worse. Apparently a math or computer degree gets you farther ahead then an engineering degree. To me that is a disgrace.

I disagree with you guys that are banging on about all this math stuff. If high school students thought they would be respected and well paid they would go into engineering.

Right now in Canada if you do well in math and physics you will be told to go into engineering because it is a well respected (of course it could be better) and well paying career choice.

In the UK if a student does well in math and physics they should not be told to go into engineering because the profession is not well respected or well paying and the employment rate doesn't seem to be that great. The student would be better off with a math or plumbing degree.

The main problem is the image of the profession and the way the profession is organised.

 

[BitTwiddler]

The replies about lack of prestige are interesting. The amount of prestige engineers have in the US seems to be about midway between the low-prestige UK and high-prestige Canada. A poll showed that about 29% of Americans thought that engineers had "great prestige".
[tt]
Doctor 52
Scientist 52
Fireman 48
Teacher 48
Military Officer 47
Nurse 44
Police Officer 40
Priest/Minister/Clergyman 32
Member of Congress 31
Engineer 29
Athlete 21
Architect 20
Business Executive 19
Lawyer 17
Entertainer 16
Union Leader 16
Actor 16
Banker 15
Journalist 14
Accountant 10
Stockbroker 10
Real estate broker/agent 5
[/tt]

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=494

Engineering was picked by 6% of teenage boys as their top career choice in a recent poll:

"Girls' favorites: Teacher, 11%, lawyer, 9%, doctor, 8%, nurse, 6%, fashion designer, 5%, science/biology, 5%, writer, 4%, veterinarian, 4%, artist, 4%, medical field, 4%.

Boys' choices: Sports field, 8%, doctor, 7%, architecture, 6%, engineer, 6%, teacher, 6%, business, 5%, lawyer, 5%, military, 5%, science/biology, 5%, and computers, 4%."

http://www.jsonline.com/lifestyle/jump/jun05/329767.asp

 

[GregLocock]

Hey, 45% more prestigious than an Architect - that can't be all bad!




Cheers

Greg Locock

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[corus]

Prestige may relate to respect but obviously not to salary and career choice given that poll.

To compare engineering to a lawyer or doctor is ridiculous given the length of time required to study for the latter qualifications. Equally engineering does not rate academically against maths or any of the other sciences. Perhaps those mathematicians/physicists who are being advised to go into engineering aren't quite making the grade, and are thus being advised to take the second, and lower, option of engineering. The salary may not be very good in engineering but at least you don't get rotten eggs thrown at you in the street, like estate agents.

corus

 

[ScottyUK]

"...like easte agents." Or John Prescott. Hard to decide who deserves it most, although I did laugh when John Prescott turned around and punched the kid who threw the egg. For those who don't follow British politics, John Prescott is a senior member of the British government, and a horrible individual too.



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If we learn from our mistakes,
I'm getting a great education!

 

[ewh]

It's a sad state of affairs when engineers get less respect than congress.

 

[QCE]

"Equally engineering does not rate academically against maths or any of the other sciences. Perhaps those mathematicians/physicists who are being advised to go into engineering aren't quite making the grade, and are thus being advised to take the second, and lower, option of engineering."

Wow what the heck engineering school did you go to. In Canada an Engineering degree is a lot more academically involved then a math or physics degree. It is actually the other way around. People that can't hack engineering take a useless math degree. With a math degree you are pretty much screwed. No job and low wage. Engineers are actually well paid and lots of job oppurtunities. Now I can say for certain that the UK system is crazy.

"To compare engineering to a lawyer or doctor is ridiculous given the length of time required to study for the latter qualifications."

Please enlighten me. I took 5 years of university and four more years of work experience to become a well paid professional engineer. I'm also going back to school at the moment to do my master's degree. Two more years min. I guess I'm just ridiculous to compare myself to doctors and lawyers.

From your response Corus I'm guessing you consider one of those 2 year tech school degree "Engineers" that draws pictures for a living for a low wage an Engineer.

I guess I have a different view then you.