An article which was published in the Daily Telegraph on 1st June, 1994 in the “In My View” column.

S F Bush

There are about 250,000 chartered professional engineers in Britain, deployed to design, build and maintain the manufacturing, energy and transport systems which sustain our lives.  No society requires an unlimited number of engineers, but it is vital that those it has should be among the most able of their generation and educated to the highest international standards.

In the second half of the 19th century the engineer’s central role was highly visible, not only through the construction of bridges, canals, roads and, above all, railways, but also through popular writings typified by Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers.  In the second half of the 20th century engineering has expanded to touch everone’s life, yet curiously the role of professional engineers is less distinct in the public mind than it was 100 years ago.

The huge aircraft which transport millions of people a year, the chemical or polymer plants which run continuously under automatic control for thousands of hours, and the computers which perform upwards of a million operations a second, are largely taken for granted, yet are triumphs of engineering.

And it is to engineering brains that society will turn to solve tomorrow’s problems – combining scientific discovery and engineering method to reconcile the demands for more and better products with the need to enhance our environment and optimise the use of our natural resources.

When Brunel built the Great Western Railway in the 1830s he not only designed the track, tunnels and junctions, but he surveyed the route personally, negotiated with landowners and was closely involved in the enactment of the relevant Bill.

Today, every professional engineer recognises that the range of factors beyond the purely technical for which he must allow – financial, health and safety, environmental, product liability – has expanded substantially.

A modern engineer must thus be a more universal man and, naturally, this development has been reflected in changes to the university engineering degree course.  One of the major changes of the past 10 years is the inclusion of a much larger element of management and commercial subjects.  Such changes have also made an engineering degree an open road to a range of jobs outside engineering.

Engineers are now found not only in indusrial research, manufacture and construction, but also in public administration, the environment, patent law, commerce and, increasingly, finance, where their numeracy and computer literacy are greatly appreciated.

Internationally, no other qualification is as widely marketable as a good British engineering degree, as evidenced by the £35,000 many thousands of overseas students pay to acquire one.

British engineers are found all over the world, not least in Silicon Valley, in civil engineering contracting and in petrochemical plant of all kinds.  Engineering can truly be seen as the enabling discipline of the age.

Besides the established three-year courses leading to bachelour degrees, there are a number of four-year master degrees for high fliers.  Allowing as they do more time to develop personal skills and management subjects, these degrees should answer more effectively the crying need for a higher proportion of technologically literate managers at the top of British industry.  There is nothing more exciting on offer anywhere.

Stephen Bush was professor of polymer engineering at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) at the time.

See also papers and articles in the Industry and Economics section.