Chris Blythe: Lessons from the real world

The recruitment numbers onto construction-related courses this year makes for grim reading. Some universities are reporting students down by as much as 50%. With the overall intake down across the board, 2012/3 is going to be tough for the universities.

The removal of the cap on ABB-graded students announced last year — which meant universities could recruit as many students as they wanted — seemed to offer a great opportunity then, but has turned into a bit of a curse as grades were not achieved and places not taken up.

The state of the industry is put down as the main reason for a downturn in recruitment. That’s disappointing as it will be just as this intake are graduating that the industry’s prospects will be the best for a number of years, according to all the latest forecasts.

The other trend in higher education is the requirement that all teaching staff have PhDs. When I was at poly, I think most of my teachers had a job in the real world and came into college to share their knowledge and experience. Cost accounting was taught by the chief cost accountant from a local manufacturing company, financial accounting was taught by a partner in a local firm of accountants, and so on.

I think it was only in mathematics where our teacher came from the maths department. The advantage, of course, is that many of us upon graduation got jobs in firms we seemed to know and who knew us. In the recession of the mid-70s this worked extremely well for both us and the employers. There was a reason why firms would allow their staff to get involved as teachers.

Different lecturers approached their tasks in different ways. We had a co-student who was a pocket hooligan. He had taken exception to another who had a handsome mullet of blond hair. I remember a class when we were doing the law of tort. We were struggling with the concept until the hooligan put his lighter to the blond mullet. There was a flash of flame, a pall of smoke and a stink of burnt hair. The lecturer, a local solicitor, sniffed the air before hammering home his lesson and throwing the hooligan out of class.

The point is that all our teachers had something to offer because they were practitioners working in the world we were about to join. We had some great insights into the many professions we came across and set us all up for varied careers. I hope that construction faculties retain the belief that the best teachers are often practitioners.