Despite an improvement in the 2011 matric results, the Engineering Council of South Africa (Ecsa) has again warned that the country was not producing enough matriculants with the desired results in subjects required for admission to engineering programmes.

Furthermore, Ecsa VP professor Thokozani Majozi said that good individual high school results also did not necessarily dovetail with university performance and expressed concern about the inability of the majority of engineering students to graduate.

“Although tertiary engineering study programmes are oversubscribed every year, only a quarter of the candidates manage to graduate within the prescribed four years, while a small number more manage to graduate in five years,” he said in a interview on Tuesday.

Research undertaken by the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Higher Education Development, in 2007, pointed to roughly 54% of students completing a four-year BSc Eng degree after five years. This meant that after five years, there was a potential attrition of 46% of students who enrolled for engineering degrees.

The percentage of students graduating from higher education institutions remained a cause for significant concern – more so because the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHE&T) had set an aggressive target of 15 000 engineering graduates from the South African higher education system by 2014.

Higher education institutions offering engineering programmes report that the school system (primary and high schools) did not adequately prepare matriculants for successful studies at universities.

Majozi agreed with Ecsa CEO Dr Oswald Franks in saying that the deficiencies in the school system must be addressed in order to both produce the larger numbers of matriculants with mathematics, physical science and English, as well as to better prepare these matriculants to cope with the demands of university studies.

Majozi pointed out that there is also increased competition among the management, engineering, law, finance, accounting and medicine faculties to attract candidates from the same limited pool of well-performing matriculants.

His comments come as the latest Adcorp Employment Index showed that the country’s universities were not producing the right kind of graduates, with nearly 600 000 unemployed university graduates, mostly in the arts, humanities and social sciences, whereas the private sector has more than 800 000 vacancies in management, engineering, law, finance, accounting and medicine.

Further, Ecsa said that the universities that offer engineering programmes were operating at full capacity, adding that increased graduate output from the national university system would not be affected through the increased intake of students.

“Support for all engineering students should be a national initiative which would facilitate the sharing of best practices and increase both academic success and engineering graduate output,” Majozi said.

To this end, Ecsa is undertaking a project to lobby tertiary institutions to implement a uniform engineering curriculum of best practice, in order to improve graduate output.

The council had embarked on a research campaign, the results of which would aid in understanding the challenges regarding tertiary institutions achieving higher pass rates in Engineering Bachelor’s degrees.

Further, Ecsa called on government and the DHE&T to consider establishing engineering faculties at universities that currently do not offer such programmes.

The council pointed to the universities of the Free State, as well as Venda or Limpopo as being ideally located to serve communities that are underrepresented in the engineering profession.

“This research is significant as currently there are substantial costs incurred and resources wasted as the majority of students enrolling do not complete their degree. And this is from an increasingly shrinking number of students that actually qualify to study engineering, based on their grade 12 results. We simply cannot afford to be losing these students,” Franks said.