Prakash Per­sad

The dropout rates in en­gi­neer­ing dis­ci­plines, at the uni­ver­si­ty lev­el, tend to be high. Two ma­jor fac­tors con­tribute to this. The first is the lack of ad­e­quate aca­d­e­m­ic prepa­ra­tion in math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence. The sec­ond in­volves a lack of a full ap­pre­ci­a­tion of what en­gi­neer­ing en­tails.To tack­le this prob­lem, which has trou­bling im­pli­ca­tions for sus­tain­able growth, the STEM (Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy, En­gi­neer­ing and Math­e­mat­ics) move­ment came in­to be­ing.

STEM pro­grammes are be­ing of­fered through both core cur­ricu­lum and ex­tra-cur­ricu­lum modes.There may be some who would ar­gue that there is an ex­ist­ing is­sue with prop­er­ly prepar­ing ad­e­quate num­bers of stu­dents in sci­ence and math­e­mat­ics and hence the idea of in­tro­duc­ing en­gi­neer­ing at the sec­ondary-school lev­el would make mat­ters worse.Well, a su­per­fi­cial analy­sis might so in­di­cate. On the oth­er hand, if the pro­gramme is care­ful­ly thought out and im­ple­ment­ed, then not on­ly would we pro­duce stu­dents with a firmer grasp of math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence but al­so with a grasp of en­gi­neer­ing de­sign and en­tre­pre­neur­ship.

Fur­ther­more, there are huge po­ten­tial fi­nan­cial sav­ings, as the teach­ing of re­me­di­al math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence and pre-en­gi­neer­ing sub­jects would be done at the sec­ondary lev­el and not at the ter­tiary lev­el.At present, some en­gi­neer­ing is done at the high-school lev­el. Tech­ni­cal Draw­ing (TD) and tech­ni­cal/vo­ca­tion­al sub­jects are ex­am­ples. Tech­ni­cal draw­ing was tra­di­tion­al­ly done on­ly for those en­ter­ing in­to the en­gi­neer­ing streams at the cer­tifi­cate, diplo­ma and de­gree lev­els.