Apologies, maybe I didn't express myself clearly, I think you may have misunderstood my post. I'm not concerned about Bachelor's / Master's degree differentiation. It's more that (your example above is a good one) we don't have the "+ clinical" part of the development to become employable. No-one expects a medical, legal etc graduate to be employable without further on-the-job training.
Personally I like the old role of Master's degrees as entries to academic research rather than the slightly strange role they have developed now - I can't really see the value of MEng degrees. But maybe I'm old fashioned.
Now, the "don’t have the depth of knowledge we really need" argument is interesting. Who knows if this is true or false. But a little story: until recently I used to sit on two University / Industry liaison panels for a particular university, which were intended precisely to help the University address these types of concerns, basically to make sure its courses covered the right area. However there were two problems:
Persuading anyone from industry to take part, and
Persuading many university staff to take part.
So we would end up with panels of the same faces every time, including perhaps five people from industry. They would (mostly) argue that they wanted graduates trained in the skills for their specific industries. Who knows how representative these views were, I suspect (and the university staff I worked with also suspected) they were not very representative at all.
This is hugely important, I think we discussed this at some length in the old thread, universities and industry need to work together en masse in each country to work out what knowledge is needed in engineers five years after graduation and then work out how to get them there. It's not easy. For example, some years ago there was a shortage of switch mode power supply designers. To get a good SMPS designer takes strong underpinning knowledge in electronic and electromagnetic principles - from a degree - followed by experience from previous SMPS designers. A university could spend three years teaching an graduate to be an SMPS designer and nothing else, which I'm sure some employers would like, what do they then do when that technology becomes obsolete?
But whether there's a fundamental point that graduates have overall less knowledge (rather than the wrong knowledge) - I personally think a bit of rose tinted glasses comes in here, old engineers forgetting how little they knew when they graduated. Regarding credit hours (classroom hours in a year), this is a much shouted about figure - parents in the UK (particularly, in my experience, those from a non-university background themselves) get very excited about "contact time" - or rather the lack of it. So let's look at Oxford and Cambridge degrees. My understanding - and please someone correct me if I'm wrong - is that traditionally the amount of "contact time" in these has been absolutely minimal. So why have they long been considered world class? Because the undergrad is thrown into an environment with some of the highest intellects in their field around, and it's up to them to develop from that intellect and knowledge. If they can do that, they are going to be really, really strong graduates. I'll be honest, I'd have failed in that environment at the age of 18 - although I'd love to do it now! It's not the credit hours / contact hours, it's what is available to the student and what they do with it.
Don't get me wrong, there is lots I could and do criticise universities for! But for me personally it tends to be mostly because they're trying to pander to short term financial needs too much rather than too little.
By the way, off topic really, but my personal perspective on 3 year vs 4 year degrees is my daughter has just finished a 4 year degree and my son is half way through one. For my daughter it was because it was clear early on that she wanted to go into academic (scientific) research, so an integrated Master's looked to give her the best chance for this - the final year was starting to learn the principles of academic research. My son, who is doing an arts / humanities degree, signed up for a 4 year so that he could get a year abroad, hopefully should be off to Prague University next year, which I'm sure will pay back hugely later in life in terms of life experience (certainly did for my wife how studied modern languages with a year abroad). Now, if either of them had decided to go into engineering I would equally have suggested they go for a 4 year course - but with year 3 being a year in industry. Anyway, I'm delighted that they've been really enjoying themselves - and getting fantastic experiences - while they can. And you can survive for four years without money as long as no-one around you has any either! 45 years of doing the 9-5 is quite enough.
Apologies, maybe I didn't express myself clearly, I think you may have misunderstood my post. I'm not concerned about Bachelor's / Master's degree differentiation. It's more that (your example above is a good one) we don't have the "+ clinical" part of the development to become employable. No-one expects a medical, legal etc graduate to be employable without further on-the-job training.
Personally I like the old role of Master's degrees as entries to academic research rather than the slightly strange role they have developed now - I can't really see the value of MEng degrees. But maybe I'm old fashioned.
Now, the "don’t have the depth of knowledge we really need" argument is interesting. Who knows if this is true or false. But a little story: until recently I used to sit on two University / Industry liaison panels for a particular university, which were intended precisely to help the University address these types of concerns, basically to make sure its courses covered the right area. However there were two problems:
Persuading anyone from industry to take part, and
Persuading many university staff to take part.
So we would end up with panels of the same faces every time, including perhaps five people from industry. They would (mostly) argue that they wanted graduates trained in the skills for their specific industries. Who knows how representative these views were, I suspect (and the university staff I worked with also suspected) they were not very representative at all.
This is hugely important, I think we discussed this at some length in the old thread, universities and industry need to work together en masse in each country to work out what knowledge is needed in engineers five years after graduation and then work out how to get them there. It's not easy. For example, some years ago there was a shortage of switch mode power supply designers. To get a good SMPS designer takes strong underpinning knowledge in electronic and electromagnetic principles - from a degree - followed by experience from previous SMPS designers. A university could spend three years teaching an graduate to be an SMPS designer and nothing else, which I'm sure some employers would like, what do they then do when that technology becomes obsolete?
But whether there's a fundamental point that graduates have overall less knowledge (rather than the wrong knowledge) - I personally think a bit of rose tinted glasses comes in here, old engineers forgetting how little they knew when they graduated. Regarding credit hours (classroom hours in a year), this is a much shouted about figure - parents in the UK (particularly, in my experience, those from a non-university background themselves) get very excited about "contact time" - or rather the lack of it. So let's look at Oxford and Cambridge degrees. My understanding - and please someone correct me if I'm wrong - is that traditionally the amount of "contact time" in these has been absolutely minimal. So why have they long been considered world class? Because the undergrad is thrown into an environment with some of the highest intellects in their field around, and it's up to them to develop from that intellect and knowledge. If they can do that, they are going to be really, really strong graduates. I'll be honest, I'd have failed in that environment at the age of 18 - although I'd love to do it now! It's not the credit hours / contact hours, it's what is available to the student and what they do with it.
Don't get me wrong, there is lots I could and do criticise universities for! But for me personally it tends to be mostly because they're trying to pander to short term financial needs too much rather than too little.
By the way, off topic really, but my personal perspective on 3 year vs 4 year degrees is my daughter has just finished a 4 year degree and my son is half way through one. For my daughter it was because it was clear early on that she wanted to go into academic (scientific) research, so an integrated Master's looked to give her the best chance for this - the final year was starting to learn the principles of academic research. My son, who is doing an arts / humanities degree, signed up for a 4 year so that he could get a year abroad, hopefully should be off to Prague University next year, which I'm sure will pay back hugely later in life in terms of life experience (certainly did for my wife how studied modern languages with a year abroad). Now, if either of them had decided to go into engineering I would equally have suggested they go for a 4 year course - but with year 3 being a year in industry. Anyway, I'm delighted that they've been really enjoying themselves - and getting fantastic experiences - while they can. And you can survive for four years without money as long as no-one around you has any either! 45 years of doing the 9-5 is quite enough.
