Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

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yet stimulated further discussion linking student contributions with economic and wider
social benefits. Iyer (2009) provided similar data, in terms of staff hours in an Indian
context. Taking a similar perspective Mansmann and Scholl (2007) reported a detailed
interfaculty resourcing model for a German university using a simple model of staff
contact hour availability, strongly shaped by German state legislation requirements. Each
teaching academic was expected to provide a certain number of "semester teaching
periods per week" in a strongly government supported system. In this system, student
contributions were reported to be small in terms of tuition fees and the state provided
most of their living expenses. These studies in engineering schools reflect a similar
economic framework used in earlier studies on economies of scale in higher education
(e.g. Nelson & Hevert, 1992) and bypass the related issue of education quality.
Some business researchers have examined economic issues in considerably more detail, at
least from the faculty perspective. For example, Polonsky, Juric and Mankelow (2003)
reported a detailed quantitative study on how marketing academics spent their time,
comparing their results with several others in business-related disciplines. However, their
economic focus was restricted to faculty members alone and did not consider interactions
with students or education quality, other than as a demand on staff time.
Economic changes in universities
The rapid increases in demand for higher education, particularly in industrialised
countries but reflected across the world, has focused higher education policy debates on
student and family contributions as governments have found it increasingly difficult to
underwrite the full cost (Johnston, 2004). Research-led universities in particular have
recently experienced acute financial constraints (Johnston, 2008).
Like several other contributors whose work frames this paper, this author’s interest in
education economics was initially circumstantial. After many years immersed in teaching
engineering andresearching engineering practice, the author assumed responsibility for
managing a education programme delivered by 37 colleagues and rearranging it so it
could be delivered by 28 colleagues a year later. As in many other research-led
universities in the world, economic resources had moved from funding recurrent teaching
expenses into discretionary research initiatives in order to help the institution to compete
more effectively for fee-paying students and industrial research funding that tend to
follow research-based rankings such as the Shanghai Jiao-Tong University index
(Johnston, 2008). Colleagues who had basked for many years in the apparent security of
academic tenure were suddenly offered attractive ‘separation’ options. (Separation, either
voluntary or involuntary, has become the preferred institutional euphemism for
redundancy in Australia.) Others, who had lived on contracts that had always been
renewed, seemingly automatically, suddenly realised that their contracts would not be
renewed. With little time to respond, simple crude measures of performance were invoked
to decide which of the ‘tenured’ faculty remained. The number of research publications,
weighted by a government-imposed publication quality ranking index (since abandoned)
was the primary determinant. The number of lectures delivered over the previous five
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011