"Realism" here at the University of Glamorgan has seen the reduction in student numbers on built environment courses on such a scale that, in the past seven years, 29 academic staff and nine technical staff have either taken early retirement or been made redundant. This reduction has been caused partly by a lack of student demand but also by the educational policies of chartered institutions in the built environment professions. And now we find that officials of the Institute have woken up to the problem by allowing our own journal to engage in sensationalist journalism. I suggest it is not the universities or the employers who "may not yet have cottoned on to the fact that construction higher education is extremely fragile," but Chris Blythe and his colleagues at the Institute.
What would happen if our building degrees disappeared? Those of us old enough to remember the difficult process whereby the Institute attained its chartered status also remember the crucial requirement that our qualifications were of degree standard. Death of a degree – death of chartered status – death of the Institute?
Source
Construction Manager
Postscript
Prof Richard Neale, Head of the School of Technology, University of Glamorgan
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