Engineering futures
I attended a press conference the week before writing this column. The main topic of the conference related to the presence of an Indian delegation, spearheaded by the Indian Engineering Export Promotion Council, at Indee (Indian Engineering Exhibition), running in conjunction with this year's Manufacturing Technology International Exhibition.
In the conference journalists were told of the impressive numbers of engineering students that graduate each year in India - some 200 000 graduates from more than 1000 universities and colleges. That works out to approximately 166 Indian engineering graduates per million citizens from a technical education infrastructure that has close to one facility per million citizens.
A study produced in late 2005 by Duke University claims that the United States is producing roughly 750 technology specialists per million citizens.
How do we compare? South Africa is producing about 1400 engineering graduates per year, or around 28 per million citizens. If we were to have an equivalent educational infrastructure to that of India we would have some 42 universities and technical institutions.
If we aspire to emulate these achievements in terms of the production of competent engineers and technicians in the next quarter of a century then we need to encourage learners to consider engineering as a desirable profession, make it financially rewarding to do so and at the same time invest in the tertiary educational infrastructure necessary to cope with these higher numbers of students.
But first we need to overcome significant problems in secondary education.
The status quo
Will there be a next generation of South African engineers? Mathematics and science form the fundamental bedrock of engineering. We hear ad nauseum about the technical skills shortages that are almost global in extent, so you would think that by now we would have the infrastructure plans in place to raise the next generation of engineers and scientists. That makes the October report from the South African Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) all the more disturbing.
In its second major privately funded research report on this topic, the CDE concludes that profound changes are required as a matter of urgency if we are to see significant results. The Centre called for a priority national public-private project to turbo-boost maths and science education.
CDE executive director, Ann Bernstein, says the facts of poor performance are staggering:
* In 2004, 467 985 learners wrote senior certificate with 39 939 writing HG maths. Of these only 5% (24 143) passed HG maths, of those, only 1,5% (7236) of passes were obtained by African students and a mere 0,5% (2406) achieved a 'C' or better.
* More than half our secondary schools failed to achieve a single HG maths pass; 81% of schools achieve one pass each on average.
The CDE concludes that overcoming such chilling statistics will require bold political leadership and a strategic partnership with private companies.
In the USA many companies take it on themselves to offer language literacy classes. Perhaps this country needs a determined effort by all employers to offer classes in mathematical literacy. Without a concerted effort it is hard to see from where the next generation of engineers will come.
Andrew Ashton
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