How to engineer a better-skilled Britain

Joe Wright, 15 October 2014

The skills gap is becoming a consistent concern among businesses, especially for manufacturers desperate to make a global mark. Technology, and how enterprise uses it, is moving at a rate difficult for schools, universities and colleges to keep pace with. Adding to this, not enough Brits study STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) to replenish the labour market, let alone aid those industries to grow. Instead, many posts requiring these skills are filled by immigration.

Engineering is a £1 trillion industry. It accounts for half of all UK exports and 70 per cent of R&D. The UK produces 50,000 engineers a year; it needs 90,000. This is unsurprising given that only 7 per cent of the 2012 intake of graduates chose to study engineering, compared with 12 per cent who went into finance and business courses. And less than half of the 15 per cent who opted for law and social sciences.

In a past blog I considered the idea of offering lower tuition fees for STEM subjects (especially engineering) as an incentive for students to consider them. Another perhaps more politically palatable option is to partially forgive the loans of people who enter industries the government would like to see bolstered. This technique is applied by the US government. According to Investopedia, ‘student loans in the U.S. may be forgiven after a period of years if the graduate works in the public or non-profit sector.  ‘Perkins’ loans are awarded by the US Federal Student Aid Programme and are aimed at specific groups of people in need of greater support for funding. If they then enter the public sector after graduation, a significant proportion of the loan is written off if not paid back within a short period.

A similar programme could create a boon for engineering, especially if it too was aimed at people from less well-off backgrounds. Instead of lower tuition fees, this system has the added benefit of allowing the loan to be paid back the same as other subjects should the graduate earn enough to pay it back before the cut-off date. Given the high starting salaries of people who study engineering, a significant amount of the loan would likely be repaid.

There remains considerable opposition among universities to any attempt to bias the student market. There has always been a great deal of sensitivity toward suggestions that one subject deserves more attention than another. But this policy serves as a balancing act. Engineering has suffered as a subject over the past years because of the drive towards services and the historic image of the subject as related to lower class jobs in manufacturing. A degree in the arts and a job in the city became the goal of the aspirational, and that heavily misguided notion needs hefty treatment to be dispelled. The industry is also ludicrously male orientated. Polling by the ERA Foundation found that 50 per cent of boys in the UK (and Germany) would consider studying engineering; among girls it was less than 20 per cent. People remain free to study whatever subject they choose, this is a policy that simply asks them to consider engineering.