The hard sciences have been going through a bit of a hard time of late, departments have been closing in physics, chemistry and engineering up and down the country like nobodies buisness. Why you ask? Well science subjects are just plain expensive to teach (around £8000 per student) and added to that, demand from students just keeps dropping - a double whamy! Nevertheless, the underlying problem is that the hard sciences just aren’t sexy enough to get the right number of bums on seats.

In response, increasing numbers of universities have been saying they just can’t afford to keep departments open, and in what is now a market system, where money relentlessly follows the student, they seem to have a point.

It doesen’t take a genuis to work out that this trend has dire consequences for the intellectual landscape of the country, after all, we only need so many media and criminology students.

HESA to the rescue, with an extra £1000 per sicence student in 2007. Although this is welcomed by the universities it only addresses one element of the problem, you still need to attract people to hard science. My own university achieves this through a cunning deception, chemistry becomes ‘forensic science’ .. and the students follow in droves. Of course, its still mostly all chemistry, but with a makeover al la CSI .. well you gotta start where students are at right!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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