Funding for Masters courses secured

07 May 2008

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has not axed its funding for taught Masters courses, as feared, but placed new demands on the money.

The EPSRC has held the three-year funding pot for taught Masters courses at its previous level of ‘around £50M’, according to a spokesman, but has decided to invite bids for university ‘knowledge transfer’ activities.

Consequently, competition for the money will be ‘much stronger,’ he acknowledged, with ‘far more worthy cases bidding’. To stand a chance of winning the same funding as before, university transport departments would have to demonstrate ‘even greater employer involvement in course content, and even greater leverage – employer funding contributions,’ he told Surveyor.

The EPSRC funding only pays for around one-tenth of the ‘more than 300’ students graduating from transport Masters courses every year (Surveyor, 10 April). But Professor John Polak, University Transport Partnership chair, said this contribution was ‘crucial’, because it paid for a critical mass of UK full-time students. In 2007/08, 197 of the 342 full-time equivalent students were from the UK, with 145 from overseas.

Reducing funding could put international students in a majority – and the focus of courses would have to switch to overseas markets.

Martin Richards, chair of the UTP, said: ‘Can we demonstrate even larger employer contributions, and even greater employer involvement in syllabi? It’s been getting better for eight years, so perhaps we can, but it’s going to be a challenge.’ Employers in the transportation sector are currently financing the equivalent of 137 full-time students every year, and were ‘heavily involved’ in course content. As well as demonstrating industry involvement, transport departments would need hard evidence that courses were fulfilling a UK ‘strategic need’.

The Engineering Sector Advisory Panel has claimed that there is no evidence to justify including transportation and highways engineers on the list of occupations suffering shortages (Surveyor, 10 April).

Technical officers hope the Department for Transport/ Transport for London Project Brunel will next month provide this evidence. However, many are convinced that the shortage is pressing – the University of Wolverhampton’s Professor Chris Nwagboso, announcing two new transport Masters courses to start in September, asserted that there was ‘an increasing need’ for transport specialists.

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