Brexit, Universities and the Future of Engineering
I’ve had a number of interesting conversations — on Brexit, universities, and the future of engineering — over the past few weeks and felt a need to share a few thoughts. The connection might be apparent to some but I hope to share an different perspective.
First Brexit that, if you believe the reports, was strongly driven by a desire to better control (read reduce) immigration to the UK. How does this relate to engineering or universities you ask? Take the UK’s chemical engineers — 75% of whom supported remaining — they’d be expected to be dismayed by the increased anti-migration sentiment? It depends. Chemical engineers (and a majority of engineering professions) are on the UK’s shortage occupation list — a prioritised list job classes that the UK supports continued inward immigration of to meet perceived shortages. To summarise, even with ‘controlled’ immigration, chemical engineers can continue to emigrate to the UK and fill gaps, or depress wages — depending on your perspective. I suspect there may be more engineers in support of reducing immigration than the headline statistics indicate.
As for universities, engineering (chemical engineering in particular) has witnessed a sustained increase in recruitment, nearly doubling in the past 5 years.
This due in no small part to the very successful whynotchemeng campaign that aims to inspire more young people to study chemical engineering. One of the key selling points, as you may have guessed, is money - the campaign goes as far as to state that the profession is recession proof, with median incomes rising while others have fallen since 2008.
You start to see the picture — great starting salary, shortage of engineers, targeted campaign to increase university enrollment and record numbers attending university. Looks rosy, doesn’t it?
The oil effect
One caveat to this attractive picture is the significant dependence of chemical engineering (in the UK at least) on the oil industry. Those attractive starting salaries are heavily skewed by the offers to grads starting jobs in oil and gas, thanks to the riches of the North Sea. As with Brexit, unless you’ve been living in a solar-powered utopia in the middle of nowhere, you’ll be aware that the price of crude has dropped from its heady $100+days in 2014 to barely half that now. This has, as you’d expect, led to significant job losses in the industry and the knock on effect on graduate recruitment has been quite severe with some companies cutting graduate intakes by over 50%.
The Future of Engineering
With undergraduate numbers at a record high and job opportunities in one of the key destinations curtailed, new graduates and current undergraduates are beginning to question the veracity of the attractive, ‘recession proof’ degree (with increased tuition fees) they’ve been encouraged to embark upon. There is increasing evidence of engineering grads not getting engineering jobs (might be familiar to my Nigerian readers) and a major employing industry is now in a prolonged crisis, or near its end. Add to this with a sense from some long-in-the-tooth engineers questioning the quality of chemical engineering education on offer (new ‘providers’ have joined to take advantage of and the increased demand for places) there is a growing feeling that a future in engineering is not all it’s been talked up to be.
This is just a cyclical downturn, I hear you say. We need more STEM graduates — that’s what all the research tells us. There will always be great jobs for (chemical) engineers, but I sense there is a mismatch in the numbers of students/graduates and available jobs — both now and into the future — which should lead to a rethink. Coupled with the continued ease of recruiting engineers from abroad (of which I was a beneficiary) with its potential to depress wages or reduce attractiveness of new graduates I do not see this imbalance being corrected soon without some change of tack.
What does the future hold? I’ll be watching intently and I hope to share more thoughts in the future.
I promised to write more this year but haven’t been successful. It’s never too late to start — end of October and my first post is complete. Let me know what you think.
