Labour leader Ed Miliband has said his party will introduce German-style ‘technical degrees’ if elected, drawing on advice from employers to provide a route to degree-level qualification for the less academically-inclined. What would be the effect of this for engineering?
Of the 633 respondents to last week’s poll. more than a quarter – 28 per cent – thought that Ed Miliband’s plan for German-style ‘technical degrees’ would be no different from current apprenticships with a university element. However, another large group, 23 per cent, thought they had the potential to improve the practical skills of engineering graduates. Another 21 per cent worried that they could devalue engineering education, while 13 per cent thought technical degrees could be confused for academic engineering degrees ad 12 per cent thought they could boost the status of engineering.
Please continue to let us know what you think of this subject.
Isn’t this what the Polytechnics used to provide before Labour encouraged them all to become Universities?
It will lead to a different role in engineering than those with traditional degrees. Not a bad thing. It gives good diversity and when it comes to raw engineering skill this route could be better. There is space for both, but I feel the technical degree will be seen as inferior. Graduate roles are already easily filled and I would worry that those with technical degrees may not get employment as easily in engineering or other sectors.
The German higher education system appears to work well and the Technical high schools and universities produce well qualified engineers.
The over-expansion of the UK universities has produced over 300,000 graduates / year with devalued and in many cases practically-useless degrees that cause them continuing frustration, and force them to enter low-quality employment in the service sector.
The closing of the excellent technical colleges was a bad error and a move to improve vocational education for most young people must be a move in the right direction. The UK needs good quality, well-paid, technicians more than it needs Ph.D.s and much more than it needs the plethora of unemployable degrees that are now being produced.
To Bill,
Polytechnics became universities in 1992 under the Tory government Labour didn’t return to power until 1997.
I am a Senior lecturer at a teaching/new university i.e. former polytechnic.
Regards,
Bill watson’s point is well made. We have seen an erosion of vocational education under both Labour and the Conservatives. The obsession with academic education and degrees has gone to far and we need to get more balance with vocational. My Polytech engineering education did me proud.
As the Polytechnics became Universities around 14 years into an 18 year Conservative administration I fail to see the connection.
In terms of commenting on the actual poll, I think more meat would need to be put on the bones to see how different it is from an apprenticeship – would it just be adding the word “degree” to an existing system, and adding fees into the equation?
Why for less academically inclined people? Starting with that pre-requisite already devalues the Technical Degree. It’s not the way the Germans work. We should have Technical Colleges at 6th form level that prepare people who want to enter technical trades or do engineering degrees.
Have people entering work that have a basic working knowledge of mechanical, and electrical engineering, solidly backed up with maths and English, with the ability to generate simple models on spreadsheets, can safely use machine and hand tools, been introduced to design tools and automation can only benefit the engineering sector.
The Germans do this by introducing their students to commercial packages and systems such as Siemens PLCs. This helps their companies because their graduates already have a knowledge of those devices right from the start.
Practical skills are different to the ‘science’ of engineering and should be celebrated as such.
Let’s clarify that a career as a technician is hugely valuable but is different to harnessing physics to the benefit of mankind aka Engineering.
The continuing confusion that a man with a spanner is an engineer (wrong!) serves no one…
You need to take some care not to devalue a true engineer. If the courses are less academic, then maybe you should become a technician, not an engineer.
Maybe it’s just the use of words that’s confusing in England.
In Germany there is the apprenticeship from which you graduate as a skilled worker.
Then there is the master (Meister) with which you can open your own business.
And there is the graduated engineer. A few years back it was the Dipl.-Ing. with at least 9 semester study. Now it is the Bachelor and the Master.
In England you have the engineer as a train driver, a mechanic and a graduated engineer.
If you visit a “doctor” in England you will never see one.
The receptionist will decide whether you need to see a nurse or a GP, and then maybe the GP will send you off to a consultant.
For me the whole English education system is a bit confusing.
Kids start primary school at age 4 (that’s Kindergarten in Germany)
Then after Primary School grades 1-X there is Form 1-7, NVQ 1-Y, HNC, HND, Diplomas and certificate levels, Undergraduates and Graduates.
Where does the engineer fit in?
And then there is a chartered engineer who becomes chartered when joining a club and paying annual fee.
Hey, I’ve got an idea.
Take some of the less successful universities and get them to offer these ‘technical degrees for the less academically inclined’.
They could be given a special name, something like POLYTECHNIC.
Oh hang on….
I run an engineering business in High Wycombe. Our local ‘university’ does not offer a single useful degree course for my business. If they started decent technical courses, I would bite their arm off!!
Why not just give everyone a degree certificate with their birth certificate and save the bother later?!?
OK, so that isn’t a serious comment before anyone replies, but where is the end of current fixation with the ‘degree thing’?
It would seem that the purpose of education and especially higher education has been lost-It is not to provide ‘useful’ employment fodder for business. Hopefully of course more educated people are ultimately more useful for society as a whole (including the engineering and business sectors) – but there is too much conflation of ‘skills’ with education. To me education at its best is about learning about the best that mankind has done – from art and philosophy through to maths and onto physics and thermodynamics – ie the hard stuff. If any skills are learned at degree level they should be those for learning independent thought, questioning and how to make a judgement. This is an education for life.
Skills ‘education’ are often beneficial over a relatively short term (eg how to use a CAD system or spreadsheet) and are often supplanted by newer techniques and technologies (eg drawing boards->CAD) and are far better learned on the job and paid for by those who will profit most out of them (i.e. employers). Older employees will have to have a way of learning new skills at work anyway or perhaps employers hope to just have a pool of younger free ‘pre trained’ employees – whilst letting the older employees ‘go’.
An Education is for life – skills just help get you a job at a given place and time.
All for it, I wasnt academically minded but I was running production plants in Germany and Ireland. I did my apprentiship with British Steel corporation. I learnt all there was to know about the process a process they couldn’t teach you in higher education! In fact I trained and tutored engineers on a degree course who were so nieve.
What an overdue suggestion. As we all know – due to the collapse in training of engineering graduates (presumably because there is more attention to the immediate bottom line of the company); they are generally unemployable when graduating.
Using ‘technical degrees’ to produce graduates (perhaps who were electricians or fitters in a previous life) and giving them the additional skills to practise as engineers is well overdue. Especially if this can be done seamlessly by building in their experience and existing qualifications to the package. This is exactly what we are now doing as a college.
And we will undoubtedly benchmark the results against that of the traditional route for engineering graduates.
If this dichotomy is in the name,then we can come up with a new one for University graduates i.e engineering scientists,cos it is proper to refer to anyone who works on engines as an engineer rather than the academics who do research.
By all means re-think the place for technical education; but as a country we need to address the problem of ‘unwanted’ degrees.
If you have a limited pot of cash, then direct it at the type of studies for which the country has a shortage. That would go some way in encouraging students to tackle the ‘hard’ subjects – like maths, physics and engineering.
Can we please just follow the German system. We need Technical colleges for our craftsmen and technicians to study for underpinning knowledge. As many have said we are going in circles mainly due to our Engineering Institutions doing nothing as they are only really concerned with the upper status (Charter). The doers are vital to a buoyent engineering industry. That is where HND’s and HNC’s came in. Not NVQ’s please. Introduced as a workplace qualification and then pushed as a full replacement for City and Guilds Craft qualifications, Which it is not.
I suggest we revert to the use of a prefix to the word ‘Engineer’ to determine what type of engineer. e.g Process, drainage, design, theoretical, etc. I’m sure a list could be devised to cover most Engineering roles. As some have said, engineering is such an all-encompassing subject we need ways to determine what a particular engineer actually does. The use of ‘Chartered’ should be reserved for time served, provably effective in their roles, engineers and are only then allowed to add Chartered to their name and title. It should not be just an exam pass. Most graduates are useless for 2 or 3 years until they have hands on experience and the word ‘degree’ should not automatically mean ‘better’.
Companies could commit to certain hiring plans and even provide funds. University funding could favour the subjects that had the largest guaranteed hiring.
This way, trivial subjects with no economic benefit would be more costly to the student and ones with high demand would be cheaper.
The last figure I saw had graduate engineer rectruitment into the engineering sector in 2011 at less than 50%. Engineering courses have since becme heavily over-subscribed which means that this figure will drop further.
It raises many questions, including:
1. Will captains of industry value people with the German-style ‘technical degrees’ or will they continue to demand traditional degrees? There is no point in having a certain qualification if industry and employers do not value it or know it exists. Does anybody remember the CPVE back in the 1980s? My own experience is that employers do not really understand qualifications or know that certain qualifications exist which has the end result of them demanding that applicants hold qualifications that they are familiar with inevitably excluding the rest. Some engineering managers are unaware (or even surprised when I tell them) that an electronics GCSE and A Level exists despite them being available for over 25 years.
2. Will the German-style ‘technical degrees’ become a true alternative to traditional degrees or will they end up becoming more of an A Level substitute where most holders of them use them as a springboard into traditional university degrees because employers don’t value them or almost every job demands a traditional degree?
3. How is less academically-inclined defined? At what point in a student’s education will they be determined to be less academically-inclined? Will certain youngsters be prevented from taking a German-style ‘technical degrees’ because they are deemed to be too clever?
4. Who will teach the German-style ‘technical degrees’? Will they be drawn from the ranks of academia or from industry? Will it be hard to become a lecturer without a PhD?
5. Where will the German-style ‘technical degrees’ be taught? Many former polytechnics have closed their engineering departments because they wanted to focus on teaching popular subjects like media studies, IT, and business rather than trying to compete with the redbricks in STEM subjects.
This could be a very good idea.
The step necessary to make it into a “very good idea” is to make a technical degree academically superior to a conventional degree. This means, probably, a five year course. I suggest two years of practical followed by three years academic culminating in a graduation project that requires both academic and practical skills.
This is actually very like a graduate apprenticeship scheme. It tends to result in very useful people and is superior to a traditional degree in almost every respect.
If you do an MEng degree and couple this with a placement year (as many do already) then you are already at 5 years; 4 academic and 1 industrial.
Engineer
The German-style ‘technical degrees’ are totally different from the MEng with a year in industry. They are much more practical than traditional degrees are with a stronger focus on real world engineering rather than dry and abstract theory. The style of teaching and assessment is very different. Their primary objective is for students to acquire useful knowledge for a career as an engineer. Traditional degrees are actually of a test of endurance with a purpose to show (employers) that a student can learn and find information for themselves in order to pass an exam even if the information is obsolescent or complete drivel. Experience working in SME engineering industries have led me to conclude that the style of traditional degrees is neither appropriate nor desirable for engineering. More practical courses run by people with experience in industry are what is required.
People like Paul Reeves can bang on about the merits of traditional education but he probably doesn’t realise the deficiencies and shortcomings of traditional degrees from the perspective of SMEs, or the fact that a sizeable number of engineers working in SMEs have no degree at all. My experience is that high end hobbyists are almost always better than graduates who were not hobbyists but went down the academic route. He also fails to realise that education (as opposed to training) does not have to come from an institution and self education and casual education are often just as good as institutionalised education as well as usually being cheaper.
@Riaz
I think there is perhaps a misunderstanding of the MEng in that case. This is a typical MEng academic, industrial, practical layout. One that I did.
Year 1.
– First half of the year spent in a technical college using machinery including lathes, mills, gear cutters etc.
– Second half spent on a group project developing and manufacturing a product to fit a customer requirement.
– This was coupled with academic content throughout the year.
– Ratio of practical to academic ~50:50
Year 2.
– Spent in academic courses and laboratories.
Year 3.
– Placement year in industry.
Year 4.
-Spent on academic courses.
Year 5.
-First half of the year spent on group design/engineering project.
-Second half of year spent on Formula Student project. (Some spent the entire year on this project.)
-A couple of academic courses.
– Ratio of practical to academic ~10:90 (practical).
Overall the degree is almost 50% practical and applied engineering. I also work voluntarily in an aircraft museum rebuilding aircraft for most of the degree.
Engineering a bit more than turning a lathe, reading books or designing to meet customer requirements. It is all of this and more. I think it is a generalisation that we do not do practical or applied engineering in UK universities. We do a lot of it.