Tim Worstall

An Horrendous Surprise

Really, who would have thought it?

Degree subjects most likely to lead to employment are
recording the highest increase in applicants from students facing
tuition fees of £3,000 a year, say universities.

Figures
for the number of applications for undergraduate courses today will
show sixth formers have not been deterred by the extra cost of
studying. Surrey University says it has seen the highest increase in
England, with admission tutors handling 40 per cent more application
forms for courses beginning inSeptember.

Some of
the biggest rises are in science subjects, with physics up 48 per cent,
maths 44 per cent, civil engineering by 41 per cent and mechanical
engineering by 36 per cent.

When spending their own money people look at the likely return on that spending. One hell of a surprise, isn’t it, to find that incentives matter?

In

9 responses

  1. john b Avatar
    john b

    Careful Tim – the numbers in the piece are only for Surrey, which has seen an average rise in applications of 40% (so mechanical engineering is *down* in relative terms).
    It seems there’s a correlation between the rise in applications to a particular institution and that institution’s ability to get puff pieces written about it in the Telegraph. Of course, whether there’s a *causation*, and the direction of that causation, are worthy subjects for future study…

    Reply
  2. Nigel Sedgwick Avatar
    Nigel Sedgwick

    Interesting; so the three grand tips the balance, whereas what each student choses to do with a year of their lives does not.
    Or maybe its the owners of most of those three grands that have finally seen the light.
    Best regards

    Reply
  3. The Remittance Man Avatar
    The Remittance Man

    Sadly there seem to be no figures for what “elitist engineers” like me would call Noddy Degrees. It would be quite interesting to see how the customers view those courses as well.

    Reply
  4. HJHJ Avatar
    HJHJ

    Some universities, such as Surrey, are seeing large increases in these areas because courses are closing in other universities due to lack of demand.
    However, this does illustrate response to employment prospects. With the exception of civil engineering, where employment prospects have improved due to greater UK investment and the fact that you generally need to be employed reasonably locally, engineering employment prospects have been declining for years. Mechanical and electronic engineering have relatively poor graduate employment prospects.
    Rolls Royce recently indicated that they have few problems recruiting graduate engineers, but they have very great difficulty in recruiting experienced ones – most of them have been made redundant and left engineering as engineering companies have closed or downsized.

    Reply
  5. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    Careful! The teaching of science is increasingly the preserve of the private schools, so a Uni that admits lots of science and engineering undergraduates may get it in the neck from the PC commissars.

    Reply
  6. Mark Wadsworth Avatar
    Mark Wadsworth

    Well, hurray for that. Assuming that people are economically rational, this is what you want to happen and what you expect to happen from imposing tuition fees. They can grumble as much as they like, but tuition fees would thus appear to benefit society as a whole.

    Reply
  7. paul ilc Avatar
    paul ilc

    I look forward to the weeping and gnashing of teeth as swathes of lecturers in cultural studies and media studies are made redundant, such as…
    Sally Munt, Professor of Media and Film at the University of Sussex, has written on the cultural politics of emotion, particularly shame, and how shame comes to mark out certain groups such as queers, the Irish Catholics in Britain, and the underclass within a paradigm of ‘the sodomitical’…. Sally is interested in how shame can be reworked into transformational narratives according to perspectives informed by Foucault, Cavarero, and Irigaray.
    She has been a member of several editorial boards for international refereed journals including… Queeries: A Journal of Queer Studies, Sage Publications, and Lesbian Histories and Cultures Routledge/ Taylor & Francis, New York.
    http://bloodyscott.blogspot.com/2007/01/groves-of-academe-8.html

    Reply
  8. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    Mechanical and electronic engineering have relatively poor graduate employment prospects.
    Nonsense. Out of the sixty something people who graduate with me, I don’t know one who didn’t have an offer before leaving. True, most didn’t go into engineering, but anybody with a 2:2 or higher in Mech Eng from a decent university will get a job.
    Rolls Royce recently indicated that they have few problems recruiting graduate engineers, but they have very great difficulty in recruiting experienced ones – most of them have been made redundant and left engineering as engineering companies have closed or downsized.
    I’d say it’s more to do with the fact that many graduate engineers join a company as an engineer – especially ones like Rolls Royce – then sack it off to go into something which pays better after a year. The career prospects in the large British engineering companies are woeful.

    Reply
  9. HJHJ Avatar
    HJHJ

    Tim,
    The figures support my case. Apart from civil engineering, other engineering graduates have below average rates of employment. The number of engineers employed in Britain has been declining for many years.
    By the way, I have twenty years of experience in the electronics industry and have seen how employment has shrunk, especially since 2000. Talk to any recruitment company in the sector – they will tell you how hard times have been.
    The reason I gave for RR having trouble recruiting experienced engineers is exactly the explanation RR gave. Perhaps you know more than RR or me?

    Reply

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