Slash tuition fees for STEM students, biz boss body begs UK.gov The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) is demanding that the government take action on the skills shortage in tech and engineering, proposing lower tuition fees for courses and new training for existing workers. The CBI said that a survey it conducted with survey haus Pearson last year showed that 42 per cent of companies …
There is no skills shortage: there is a skills shortage *at low wages*. What companies want is to pay a top-class STEM graduate £16k/year, and until we have enough STEM graduates for that to be the wage they will moan about skills shortages. A skills shortage is where there aren't enough skilled employees to fill the vacancies at any wage. If you cannot fill your vacancies at a low wage, it isn't a skills shortage, it's that you are paying shit wages.
While I agree with the main thrust of your argument, it isn't that simple. Of course, the CBI wants to be able to employ Elbonians at a pittance to do the job and will argue with the skills shortage in order to get this. Wonder what solution UKIP will come up with?
Nevertheless, it is also true that labour markets are not entirely elastic: you can't just move people around with higher/lower wages (families, assets, etc. add inertia) or train them to do XYZ. If there is an aggregate demand that exceeds easily available resources then raising the price will not help much. The net result might be to force companies in the sector out of business - this might be because they are uncompetitive (for various reasons) in the area - not wanting to get into a debate about that simply to highlight that it's not always that straightforward.
Business is perfectly right to lobby for its interest but also able to dust off some of the old style cooperations with colleges that used to work well and still appears* to work reasonably well in places like Germany.
* apprenticeships routinely go in and out of fashion depending upon other macroeconomic factors. 10 years ago school leavers couldn't get an apprenticeship for love nor money, now even though competition at university is higher than it used to be, companies can't find enough apprentices. In 1990s it became fashionable to farm off older employers for early retirement…
Surely it's better to have a load of STEM graduates at 16k a year, than a load of <insert personal bete-noire qualification>?
Surely the current issue is that if any degree is going to land you in £27k+ of debt and whatever job you may get at the end of it is going to be £16k a year, then you're just going to pick something fun.
If there's every any hope of this f'in mess being sorted out, then at least having a work-base with some tangible skills is more beneficial.
Tuition fees should be based on their value to the economy and to society.. i.e. if Engineers are in high demand, engineering degrees should be lower cost and/or subsidised. Those that elect to study far less useful subjects like "David Beckham Studies" should be charged more to pay for those subsidies. Agreed this might not cover all the costs, but the gains in productivity and ultimately tax revenue for having more STEM workers available would easily outweigh the additional costs.
I keep seeing articles about Uni-grads working in jobs that have no relation to their degree.. what's the point of that? OK, i can understand that some industries can be difficult to get into, but if a significant proportion of students never get into their subjects then they have wasted their time and money as well as the taxpayers.
So where does that put the environmental scientist daughter of a friend of ours who does research into improved methods of ensuring water quality (paid for by a water company)? And why, given the size of our business with mainland Europe, do you want to discriminate against languages graduates? And why do you want to make it harder for software companies to employ psychology graduates to fix the user-unfriendly interfaces engineers come up with (I am a retired software engineer, my user interfaces sucked, I needed someone to tell me how to fix them.)
It is not as easy as you think to identify "useful" degrees.
It is not as easy as you think to identify "useful" degrees
Proved by the fact that many people always pick "media degrees" as useless without looking at either how much those graduates can earn (useful to student); how big the UK media sector is (useful to UK) or how hard it is to offshore that kind of work (UK media graduates therefore useful to UK Business).
As somebody old enough to have benefited from having all tuition fees paid, and a student grant, all at a time when GDP was far lower, it pains me to say it, but the CBI are barking up the wrong tree. Successive governments have buggered up the lower and higher education system, such that it is now always very expensive, half of it is crap, and too little is focused on what employers (including the public sector) need. There is no political understanding, no will, no vision to change this situation.
If the CBI want a solution, they need to devise it themselves, and "government should do it" is not a solution, looking at the track record. And part of that solution could involve closing the classics, economics and politics departments at Oxford and Cambridge - too many of their alumnii have contributed directly to this mess.
Or rather there were no companies willing to pay a decent wage for a recent graduate, so I left the country.
The real problem is the complete lack of respect for scientists and engineers from politicians and society at large.
In other societies the title Engineer commands respect. Not in the UK.
As Ledswinger said, the quality of STEM education seems to have been declining in the UK. In Electronics Engineering, new graduates are often pretty useless when it comes to design work. But the degree at least gives them the basics, so after a couple of years of mentoring and practise they can become useful members of the team. I suspect that's part of the reason graduate wages aren't great.
The other part of it is that too many people can call themselves engineers these days, so yes the respect for engineers has declined. However its definitely possible to get decent wages, particularly in fields that are more difficult and in demand. RF Engineering and DSP are a couple of good examples.
I think the final part of the problem is Engineers themselves.. we're next to useless at negotiation compared to other parts of the company (e.g. sales, marketing etc), so on average our wages are lower, despite the fact engineers can make or break a company just as easily. If you believe the psychiatric studies its probably because most of us are Autistic to varying degrees! in fact if you believe an old 'el reg article, we're cold and dead inside, with no empathy for others.. sounds like most engineers that I know :-)
youngsters with about three years full-time experience behind them, so they've actually learnt enough to be useful, but they're still young enough to be cheap and unencumbered by things like children that need picking up from nursery / school, spouses that expect them to be home at a reasonable time, etc.
Maybe the industry could stop treating everybody over the age of 35 as over the hill or only to be considered for management roles (which, of course, you can only get if you have management experience).
I know an engineer who decided to retrain as a lawyer - one of the reasons was this one. In law, age and experience are actually seen as valuable!
Experience is often misunderstood, particularly by the people who think programming is a young person's game.
In the early 1980s, when went to university and entered the industry, the amount of experience needed to be a valuable contributor was pretty low.
At the time, many of the programmers - especially COBOL programmers - had a 3 month training course before they entered industry. Many organisations took their brighter filing clerks, sent them to training for 3 months, and now had a staff of programmers.
Our university courses managed to cover a large % of the known universe of computing. It was a big step up from the 3-month programmer. A graduate was a pretty valuable and useful thing.
These days this no longer holds true. Each field in computing has got vastly more complex and you need years of experience to be really productive.. All a degree says is that you seem to have the capability to hold your head above water and might turn into something useful in a while.
This should skew the industry towards older workers. Not all of them though. Our industry is one of constant change and people need to constantly update and refresh their skills. If I look back at the stuff I learned at university, none of it is really relevant now. I've kept up reading/experimenting at an average rate of approx 5-10 hours per week. If you're one of those people who thinks you can just sit back now you have a degree then you don't belong in this industry.
Unfortunately there are enough of the old slackers to build the "can't teach an old dog new tricks" myth whereby you need to refresh the staff to get a handle on new tech.
Companies that operate like that do themselves a disservice by removing the experience and guidance that is needed to train up entry level staff. They also shed staff that are just entering their prime.
I think there are several reasons for the perceived lack of STEM students.
Firstly, the death of the old Polytechnic. The old Polys used to do more practical based courses, rather than the more theoretical courses the Unis did. Now, the old Polys hit the headlines for what many people feel are their worthless vanity degree courses.
Secondly, industry needs to work with Unis to provide more placement courses. Friends at Uni who did sandwich/placement courses had no problems getting jobs afterwards - sometimes on a good wage too!
Finally, industry needs to make the effort to train people. Education doesn't stop when you leave school/college/uni. It's a life long process, and expecting people to walk out of Uni/College/etc with all the skills they'll ever need is insane.
Ultimately, it has to be a joint effort between industry and education.
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) is demanding that the government take action on the skills shortage in tech and engineering, proposing lower tuition fees for courses and new training for existing workers.
Yes, we can fund training from government spending, if you like, boys. (And I bet they are boys.) But in that case, you and your corporations will have to pay higher taxes. Deal?
I thought I'd take up with the open university to brush up some of my skills maybe grab some more points towards another qualification.
The last course I signed up for 10 yrs ago was about £550 for a 60 point course(1 yrs worth of part time study), so I browsed through the website looking for a suitable computer/techie/engie course... found a decent 60 pointer... then thought "whats the price?" thinking it would be in the region of 1200-1500 quid
FIVE thousand quid!!!!!!!!!!
Oh well ... best i remain just a plane ol' unedukated injerneer.
PS if the CBI was serious about lack of skills, why do most of they members play "Poach the decent staff" with each other instead of training up new ones?
You're falling in the trap of thinking that education only comes through universities. That's nuts.
Universities are primarily academic institutions. That some education might happen there is almost accidental - particularly in post graduate work. The web provides so many accessible ways to learn stuff that don't involve university.
30 years ago, attending university made sense. They have libraries with all the literature, they had a computer and they had smart people. Now access to those resources has changed: the literature is online, you have a computer and the smart people are online too. What does the university really provide?
A couple of months back I decided to learn a lot more than I knew about FPGAs. Instead of taking the digital design course at the university (of which at least 50% was a bunch of number theory I was not interested in), I bought an FPGA board (sub $100) and hit the vendor's online training. Total cost: sub $100, and I got to do it when I wanted, so no loss of earnings.
Most "STEM" graduates are viewed from a business sense as potentially good material that needs several years of real-world application before they become recognised as a valuable engineering resource that can command good pay and conditions.
No-one has yet mentioned the role of the engineering institutions that provide the backbone for the recognition of chartered engineers as those who have the necessary academic qualifications plus a period of recognized engineering achievement(s). They have the post nominals C.Eng etc., which can, for many, command good pay.
If you seriously believe most of what's being said in the comments, the solution is for Companies to bypass the Universities AND the Government:
For example, a group of companies get together to set up their own Training Center. (Can't call it a University because then the government can regulate what must be taught, etc.) Students may apply to a company and, if accepted, will be sent to the Training Center tuition free. In return for that, the student must sign a contract to work at the company for some minimum length of time after they "graduate." If they are not good enough to graduate, they are dismissed with no job and no debt. During the training, part of their work may be as interns at the sponsoring company to get practical experience. If they do a poor job as interns, they are dismissed with no job and no debt. To avoid people gaming the system, part of the contract is a non-compete clause so the students can't take a free education and use it to work for a competing company. The classes at the training center may be taught by existing workers from the "owning" companies, not professors with tenure and the simple goal of publishing papers.
This solves the problems listed above such as: Universities spend too much time teaching things not relevant to the job. Graduates have no experience so are not usable right out of school. Graduates don't earn enough to pay off loans, Companies can't get enough new employees. Tuition costs too much. Professors earn too much. This takes the place of an Apprenticeship.
The only downside is the "graduate" does not have an actual diploma. However, I think most other tech workers will agree that, if you know enough to do a good job, the degree is not relevant.
1. Businesses don't want to pay for training.
2. You make it sound as if a STEM graduate can be taught in a few months. It takes 2 years of A levels followed by 3 years as an undergraduate.
3. Business doesn't think 5 years ahead. They want someone now, whom they'd like to sack in 18 months.
4. Graduates want degrees. A degree allows one job mobility and some negotiating rights.
"Professors earn too much."
Rubbish. The average lecturer in the UK earns about £45k/year. This is after eight years of university education, a postdoc or two publishing in internationally leading journals, followed by a job and another five years experience or so. Find me another job requiring a PhD, eight years' experience and an international reputation that pays £45k/year.
Why would someone do a difficult, mentally tiring job all day for the same wage as a person who can stare vacantly out of a shop window and pretend to know something about phones. The wage differentials these days are ridiculous; I have seen software jobs being offered at the same rate as admin staff or labourers. Maybe the job shortage is due to so many people leaving the technically arduous engineering world to become plasterers or plumbers, where they can earn much more and worry less.
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