Peter Brooks:

Regarding universities -they are big money making organizations...

Yep, in the western world we live in a free market economy where that's seen as a Good Thing, personally I'd disagree with it but millions wouldn't!

....that are selling prestige and the (usually unfulfilled) promise of setting up the student to earn lots of money for the rest of their life.

I'd say marketing rather than selling. And the problem from the Unis point of view is that this seems to be what the "customers" want - by "customers" I mean the (hugely influential) parents of prospective students. It's very interesting going to Univ open days (I did a lot of this with my offspring a few years ago), questions from parents tend to be either "how likely are your graduates to find work" or "are your applicants guaranteed en-suite accommodation if they request it". (Being a Bad Parent I didn't ask either of these questions! I did ask rather a lot of others though...) So, in a competitive market, Unis have to market what their customers are looking for, otherwise no-one applies and they go bankrupt. You're likely to find that individual lecturers have a different attitude.


None of which is relevant to this thread, but it is important (I'm not just being provocative!), we (Western society) are demanding certain behaviours from our Unis, which is fine, we just shouldn't criticise them - as the media often does - for delivering exactly what they've been asked to deliver, particularly when it's not necessarily what they really want to do in the first place. And coming back to our profession in particular, I am very concerned that we could drive our universities towards training "employment ready" engineers, who will be obsolete a few years later, and away from providing an education that will allow those graduates to ultimately change the face of engineering. Which is supposed to be the whole point of Uni education. And you don't get Huaueis without that.


Cheers,


Andy

Peter Brooks:

Regarding universities -they are big money making organizations...

Yep, in the western world we live in a free market economy where that's seen as a Good Thing, personally I'd disagree with it but millions wouldn't!

....that are selling prestige and the (usually unfulfilled) promise of setting up the student to earn lots of money for the rest of their life.

I'd say marketing rather than selling. And the problem from the Unis point of view is that this seems to be what the "customers" want - by "customers" I mean the (hugely influential) parents of prospective students. It's very interesting going to Univ open days (I did a lot of this with my offspring a few years ago), questions from parents tend to be either "how likely are your graduates to find work" or "are your applicants guaranteed en-suite accommodation if they request it". (Being a Bad Parent I didn't ask either of these questions! I did ask rather a lot of others though...) So, in a competitive market, Unis have to market what their customers are looking for, otherwise no-one applies and they go bankrupt. You're likely to find that individual lecturers have a different attitude.


None of which is relevant to this thread, but it is important (I'm not just being provocative!), we (Western society) are demanding certain behaviours from our Unis, which is fine, we just shouldn't criticise them - as the media often does - for delivering exactly what they've been asked to deliver, particularly when it's not necessarily what they really want to do in the first place. And coming back to our profession in particular, I am very concerned that we could drive our universities towards training "employment ready" engineers, who will be obsolete a few years later, and away from providing an education that will allow those graduates to ultimately change the face of engineering. Which is supposed to be the whole point of Uni education. And you don't get Huaueis without that.


Cheers,


Andy