8: Shaping Higher Education: Driving Economic Prosperity and Sustainability Through Engineering and Technology

A demand driven education system is nice in principle, but how can we ensure that essential workforce needs are met? In this Chapter, I make the case that the government and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) themselves have a responsibility to more actively shape uptake across courses to ensure that the nation has the graduates needed to address areas of great societal importance. The imperative to grow graduate numbers in engineering and technology is presented as a test case, inequalities in opportunity that have limited access are described, and actions are offered to improve the situation.

The approach of recent governments to workforce planning has had little connection to subject numbers across university courses. The government will need to intervene if it is to ensure the education and training of critical workforces and it has already recognised the need to develop workforce and training plans in shortage sectors, such as engineering, technology and construction.