Closing time

The investigation, commissioned from Northumbria University, confirms that Construction Management degrees are in crisis. According to researchers Robert Wilkie and Robert Giddings, only one of the 58 courses accredited by or at candidate status with the CIOB has sufficient students to be freestanding financially. And since 2000, 11 courses have closed to new applicants, nine of which have not yet produced graduates.

Death seems certain for some. Larger players are coping by providing common core courses with other degree subjects, but this survival tactic is threatened, says the report, when other common core programmes are wound up as a result of other institutions raising entry thresholds. Small providers are shutting up shop. Only a small number of universities can subsidise the teaching bills with research.

The researchers looked at the number of graduates who came out of courses between 2000 and 2002, and the number that will graduate this year and next.

Although the number graduating over this period is relatively static (800 per year), the trend is decline and the report predicts that after 2004 numbers will decline further.

And we don't know how many of those 800 made it into construction. Were the best students creamed off by the consultants and accountants during a super-slick milk round? Even if all 800 made it though, this would not be enough to satisfy the needs of the big guns.

Universities are simply not producing enough graduates to meet demand, concludes the report. And this is a major problem for the short-to-medium term.

The message of this report, entitled 'Constructing our Future', recalls the message of the Lighthill report, published by the CIOB in 1986. There just aren't enough graduates, said Lighthill: 19 institutions were producing 400 Building Management graduates.

But Lighthill's solution of setting up more courses is clearly not what the industry needs now. It needs a radical rethink.

Things were going well until the recession. Most degree courses were sandwiches, there were hardly any part-time students.

Then construction industry output started falling in 1990/1991, hitting rock bottom in 1993. Afterwards, there were no placements for the sandwich students and courses went full-time.

The problem is that with the steady growth of construction output from 1993 until the present day, the oversupply of construction management graduates quickly became an undersupply. The contractors' answer to this has not been to coax more young people onto full-time degree courses, with sponsorship and the promise of a job. The answer has been to encourage part-time study, the best of both worlds: someone working for you four days a week, and a graduate at the end of it. Some 30% of all graduates, says the report, will have taken at least their final year part-time.

This is all well and good for the contractors. But it's not so good for the universities because government funding for these students is half that of funding for full-time courses.

Part time courses are good for the students, argues CIOB's deputy chief executive Michael Brown. "It's tough, it's certainly not an easy route, but at the same time it does help the student through the debt issue," he says. "They are earning money while they are studying."

If contractors want practical people, doing part-time degrees while getting the job done, then part-time study is the answer. But they will have to support universities financially or teaching staff will have to find work elsewhere.

part-time is certainly not an easy route for students, but it does help the debt issue

Michael Brown, CIOB

Young people just are not interested in a vocational degree. And the lure of sponsorship and/or a sandwich course with the promise of a job at the end it is not attracting them either, according to Northumbria's research. It reports that the two fully-sponsored courses at Loughborough and Salford are struggling to attract people. This seems crazy; they are both universities with excellent track records and the course comes with guaranteed paid industrial placements and other perks.

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But then you read that the average annual bursary on these two courses is £1,200 per year. You could make more than that working one eight-hour shift a week in a bar. If you are a potential high-flier, would you tie yourself to a sponsor company for so little?

Most sponsorship deals are awarded to final year students to try and hang onto them for when they finish. The researchers found that 87 final year students have been awarded bursaries averaging less than £1,000. Even stingier.

Some students are not even making it back for the final year, or perhaps only coming back on a part-time basis, lured by the thought of swapping wage packet for student loan.

This does smack of short-termism and selfishness on the part of the employers. Brown makes the point that a better way to 'sponsor' students would be to spend that money in attracting them to the degree in the first place.

The message from the report is that industry needs to decide what it wants and communicate that to both the universities and the schools and colleges which supply the universities. CIOB president Stuart Henderson has pledged to set up a Presidential Commission on Higher Education in Construction as a matter of urgency.

Its two roles will to be advise CIOB on strategy and to be CIOB's voice of education among other industry bodies such as the Strategic Forum, CITB and Rethinking Construction.

For now, the industry is in big trouble, because there really aren't enough construction management graduates to go round.

The report suggests that non-cognates is the way ahead and that this route could be a chance to redress the lack of female graduates. There are only 6% to 7% female students; 26 courses have none at all. This is a proposition already flagged up in CIOB's pledge to define its requirements for converting non-cognates by July.

Quite how contractors are going to attract non-cognates is another matter. The report points out that any conversion course will have to measure up to those for accountancy or law. Starting salaries will also have to match. But Brown believes that non-cognates, including women, will be interested. "People are more mature. They are thinking about their careers."

Henderson, himself a non-cognate (philosophy, politics and economics) who started out with Laing in 1969, agrees that remuneration is an issue. "You pay a good rate to bring in good minds." Henderson spent two years circulating in different parts of the company with four eight-week intensive periods at college on a specially designed course followed up by the IOB exam.

Last month Salford University's Martin Betts suggested that construction needed two types of people: doers and thinkers. Perhaps the highly vocational construction degrees should be for young people who are already in the industry, taken on a part-time basis with practical experience growing alongside the theory. This route will provide the doers - the managers who can run successful construction sites.

But to ensure company strategists come on board, perhaps we need to look outside traditional courses.

In the meantime, who are the construction managers out there? Many bailed out of construction in the '90s, and there has been an ongoing lack of supply of fresh graduates.