I have written many times about the massive oversupply of chemical engineering graduates. As the graphic below shows, making lots more chemical engineering graduates does not make lots more chemical engineers. This is sort of obvious to anyone outside academia. Chemical engineering jobs are created by demand for chemical engineering. Making more graduates just makes the qualification less valuable.
Worldwide, in all disciplines, somehow academia has persuaded politicians that making more graduates will make more graduate positions. All it has made is a generation of underemployed, overeducated, pissed off graduates. They have jobs, as employment is high, but they are not graduate jobs, and they don’t pay enough to buy the middle-class dream.
What we have produced as a society is an oversupply of people who thought they had bought a ticket to society’s elite. That so many of them have mickey mouse degrees may well be less significant than the fact that they can’t get a mortgage, and are going to spend decades with debt they can’t pay off. If they could get the kind of job which a degree used to get you before the oversupply started, their student radicalism would wear right off. I know mine did.
There is nothing new going on here. Peter Turchin and others have identified historical instances of elite oversupply as the cause of instability in the Roman Empire, and religious civil war in France. He predicted more than a decade ago it would lead to the culture war in the US which is driving ours here.
I recognise some of the ideas which the media tell us are commonplace in millennials from my time in 1980’s left-wing student politics, but some of the ideas which are now mainstream in millennials would have been considered pretty extreme even in those circles.
Many millennials feel they have been denied what they deserve, but they have been sold a lie. Half of society cannot ever constitute an elite, but half of society can think itself to have earned elite status which it has been denied.
Such people will be envious of those which have the privileges which they think are rightfully theirs. They will suspect that “gatekeepers” within the elite are responsible for the lack of well-paid jobs which they rightly deserve. I recently saw an obnoxious discussion amongst millennials about me on the internet in which I was described as a gatekeeper of the engineering profession.
This was in the context of my pointing out that chemical engineering graduates are not chemical engineers yet, and most never will be. I’m not in charge of any gate to the profession, but in any case, the gate is open. It’s just that the space on the other side of the gate cannot accommodate the flood of graduates being produced.
If we continue producing useless, underemployed, disaffected graduates, society will continue to fracture, and it’s not as though it’s free to produce them. In the UK, higher education is nominally no longer grant funded as it was when I went to university.
Students have to take out loans, but if you don’t earn a graduate wage you’ll never pay it back. The state will. We are paying enormous amounts of money to universities to give half of our young people qualifications which are at best worthless for most of them. Universities are the only beneficiaries here.
We all know that we need more plumbers, electricians, and nurses way more than we need more resentful Deliveroo riders with PhDs. Who is going to have the nerve to cut state funding of university places back to something like the demand for graduates, and spend the money saved on training more of what we need? But of course, apprenticeships are a great idea. For other people’s children.
Read Sean's follow up to this “Supply Does Not Create Demand II‘
I might have said it differently to Sean, but the point is well made.
30+ years on, I only wish that I’d chosen to be a plumber and not a chemical engineer! …. or completed my time as a welding apprentice back in the late 80s/early 90s. Trades were undervalued back in the 80s/90s as is mainstream engineering is now. Bottom line is we still need people who can do useful things. Sadly, a University degree doesn’t always mean people coming out of Uni can do so….
Cheers, Gavin. I’m afraid that at best the only useful thing a university degree directly prepares you for is to be an academic, rather than an engineer. This should be no surprise, as so few of today’s “engineering academics” have ever worked as an engineer. A potential employer of graduates has to be willing to teach them the basics of practice, and to unteach them the mistakes inculcated by university.
Interesting that it is reported in the BBC article “First-class degrees more than double in a decade” by Hazel Shearing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-61422305
From what I see of graduates coming into the workplace, I very much doubt those graduating in the 2020s are twice as smart as us graduates from the 1990/1980s were. So what’s going on? I was absolutely thrilled to even pass my Uni Melbourne Degree – it wasn’t easy, and honours degrees weren’t awarded commonly. When at Uni Melb, I met some seriously clever people who didn’t get 1st Class Honours from Uni Melb.
What does it say about modern degrees that an honours degree AND a masters is seen as the minimum one requires to get onto the treadmill to chartership? What does a Masters give an undergrad additional to a base undergraduate? Say, I did a masters in interfacial mass transfer coefficient modelling…. so what? Can’t see any use to that in my 30+ working career thus far. Perhaps if I has such a masters then things would have developed differently? I doubt that.
Yes, I commented on this very point previously, Gavin: https://scitechconnect.elsevier.com/whats-wrong-with-academia-part-2/
Engineering apprenticeships and university degrees do not need to be mutually exclusive. My step-son managed to do both and is a better engineer for it.
To some extent the problem is cause at 16 when students are being pushed to do A-Levels rather vocational subjects.
I agree that there needs to be a serious review of the contents of university courses and who is doing the teaching.
Also agree about the stupid numbers game. I think some of this came because of competition with far eastern countries.