A public policy and management masters &ndash the first course signed up by Britain’s much-heralded e-university &ndash will

A public policy and management masters – the first course signed up by Britain’s much-heralded e-university – will be the first offering, and David Pilsbury is fizzing with enthusiasm for it. “It will be unique in two ways: each module will have a UK and a US author; and we will be working with the BBC, which will be pulling out of its archives significant moments of public policy history for students to download.”So far, so good. But surely a worldwide universities network should have partners outside the US and the UK? “We’re committed to being a truly global alliance,” David Pilsbury says. Two Chinese institutions, Nanjing and Zhejiang Universities, have been signed up, and European members will follow in the next 12 months.. There is, seemingly, no end to the problems that beset engineering.

With a national shortage of 21,000 engineering graduates, the difficulties for the profession of shaking off its out-moded “oily rag” image and attracting students to engineering degrees are already well documented. Several reported that they recruit well over half their PhD students from overseas, and many of those return home after their studies.”This is a huge problem for our economy as a whole,” says Sir Alec Broers, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. “Without new researchers today, there will be no new knowledge tomorrow.”Doctoral research students are also crucial to replenish the research and teaching staff of university departments, particularly those with large numbers of engineering staff nearing retirement. But many universities are already struggling to fill staff vacancies, and unless the present decline in PhD students is reversed, tomorrow’s would-be engineers could find themselves with no one to teach them.”Universities desperately need engineers of about 30, with a good academic track record,” says Michael Kelly, director of solid-state electronics at Surrey University. “And we don’t just want to take the first people who walk in off the street.”Money, all agree, is one of the principal factors that dissuades engineering graduates from undertaking research.

Why, after all, should a graduate who finishes a degree with, say, £10,000 of debt, opt for three or four further years of penury, when they could walk into a job in industry with a starting salary of at least £20,000? Many of the brightest engineers are being creamed off to work in the City, where their skills in technical analysis and assessment attract even greater financial rewards.One solution is to pay postgraduates more money while they do their research. A newly published Government report by Sir Gareth Roberts, president of the Science Council, points out that the postgraduate stipend currently hovers around the level of the minimum wage. The report recommends that the average stipend should be increased, over the next few years, to around £12,000 – the tax-free equivalent of the average graduate starting salary.The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council also hopes to extend its doctorate centres, which with an enhanced stipend and a strong focus on industrial problems, have in recent years proved more successful in recruiting postgraduates.”The problem is not just about money,” says Professor David Nethercot, head of the civil engineering department at Imperial College, London University. “Doing a PhD is not as attractive as it used to be, partly because of the image of becoming a specialist boffin.