Engineering in crisis
Related Articles
Monday August 18 2008
SOMETHING has gone badly wrong on Ireland's road to the "knowledge economy". It shows itself in the figures for students graduating in engineering and computer science. It shows itself with equal if not greater starkness in the labour market.
In Dublin City University in 2005, 224 students graduated with a BSc in computer applications. In 2006, only 92 qualified. Last year, the figure was 78. This year, it has gone down to 70.
There are about 5,000 job vacancies in engineering and an estimated 10,000 in computing. In some Dublin computer firms, 55pc of recently hired employees come from outside Ireland. These occupations are open only to those who have achieved high Leaving Certificate points and succeeded in a tough course of study at higher level, but they do not carry the same attraction as other high-points careers like law and medicine.
Yet no modern society can live without them, and ours cannot progress to its much-heralded next phase without making them a priority. John Power, director general of the Engineers Ireland, puts it in a nutshell: "It takes engineering and engineers to create the pitch for other professions such as lawyers and accountants to play on."
As with so much else in the Irish education system, it is almost as hard to formulate the right questions as to find the right answers.
Evidently the faults do not lie in the relevant industries. The engineering societies are active in promoting their profession as a career. In DCU, 140 potential employers attended a champagne breakfast. Two for each student!
Some fault must lie in the administration of higher education. In computing, engineering and electronics, there are more than 200 courses, including 116 leading to honours degrees. There must be a case for urgent and radical rationalisation. It is almost too facile to say that we must look again at the teaching of mathematics at second level, and at the grounding of children in information technology. Here, if anywhere, is an area in which false economy would be disastrous.
Only a small proportion of Leaving Cert students take higher-level maths or physics. Nothing surprising there; and nothing surprising in the relative lack of attraction these subjects, like the relevant professions, hold for girls. But that does not explain why our society simply does not value them as it should. As Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe says, we need a national debate on education -- but not about red herrings. It should be about culture change.
