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We’ve got a government that says it wants to promote the value-adding parts of the economy while it makes drastic cuts in public spending. We’ve also got something of a national distaste for reverting back to the kind of financial shenanigans and casino capitalism that brought the economy down. Like a lot of journeys, we know where we want to end up, but we don’t seem to have much clue how to get there.
These pious thoughts are prompted by the results of our survey this issue into engineers’ attitudes towards education cuts. As often happens with these surveys, you start off asking straightforward questions but, while you get some straightforward answers, you also get an overall impression of a much broader and deeper level of concern.
Put simply, the concern that comes across in this issue’s Q&A is that engineering and technology education won’t be safeguarded against taking a share of the pain if, as expected, university and overall education budgets are cut. And that, for engineers, means a worry that the opportunity to put adding value at the top of the priority list for the skills we want to develop could be missed.
There are other indications that this concern may well be justified. Look at the starting salaries for new graduates, and the financial services companies are still pretty much top of the pile. The notion of added value as a measure of corporate worth is still far from universal. And measures of added value are by no means universal either – a few years back, a reputable survey across the UK economy had highly favourable things to say about the value added by banks and financial institutions, and less favourable ones to say about manufacturing and engineering.
Instinctively, one knows that is wrong and that, in simplistic terms, circulating money around a system doesn’t create wealth, it merely redistributes it. But that’s what the measures say – so maybe we need new measures. That’s a task that perhaps should be occupying engineering brains across the long summer evenings: how to quantify the benefits that the profession brings to the nation and its economy.
But there’s another task that perhaps ought also to receive some thought. Engineers always seem very self-effacing about pushing for special pleading for their subject, technologies and industries. Why? If we truly believe that engineering is a good thing and a prime source of added value, why should we be shy about asking for special treatment?
The students who took part in Formula Student this month know that theirs is a special talent with extraordinary potential. Don’t we owe it to them to back their judgment?