The EPC was delighted to support the UK & Ireland EERN (Engineering Education Research Network) Annual Symposium for 2025 hosted by The University of Manchester.
The keynote presentation, by Stella Fowler, Director of Policy and Research at the EPC, offered a broad brush on higher education engineering emphasising its attractiveness and intake in the context of financial and other policy dynamics.
Presenting an evidence based umbrella view of the sector can help us project how the landscape might shift going forward A tour de force of the supply and demand journey from a policy/data perspective enabled an informed discussion on engineering education, exposing how various factors influence student choices and institutional performance in engineering. The presentation included exclusive insight from a recent EPC UCAS admissions data study commissioned by the Royal Academy of Engineering to demystify the exclusivity of admissions to undergraduate engineering.
Emerging trends included:
- Demand outstripping supply with a healthy pipeline of engineering undergraduates met with a provider-led ceiling on admissions.
- Changes in student choices signalling a fall in commitment to engineering study.
- Projected changes in intake trends indicate tiered provider system in HE engineering differentiated by qualification and attainment. This includes signs of a wholesale change in the scale and shape of provision where, because High tariff providers are fishing in deeper waters, admissions are increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of providers.
- A lack of financial resilience in relation to international student recruitment.
- Financial constraints.
- A potential curtailed appetite for risk which could work against the cross-provider type collaboration required to protect strategically important Engineering disciplines.
See the EPC keynote presentation below. You can read the full presentation here.
