Finance Minister Trevor Manuel on Friday made a call for more direct links between educational institutions and industry — between, he said, ”learning and doing”.
At his acceptance speech as Chancellor of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Manuel said that the university already has an excellent partnership with industry, which is a great foundation on which to build.
”I believe the economic expansion under way and the skills challenges we face signal that this is exactly where we need to concentrate our planning and investment for the decade ahead,” he said.
And he asked: ”What are the dimensions of our investment requirements? If we are to achieve growth of 7% a year over the decade ahead, what would that mean for our engineering and technology enrolment?”
He said that behind the rapid economic growth of countries like India and China there is an astonishingly rapid educational transformation under way.
”It is the growth of engineering and science graduates that is perhaps the most striking feature,” he told his audience. ”China now produces three times as many engineers a year than the United States, and a recent study concludes that by 2010, 90% of all PhD scientists and engineers in the world will be Asian, living and working in Asia.
”Science and education enjoy a special priority in China’s current, 11th five-year plan, with stress on improving the examination and evaluation components of the system to ensure that the quality of higher education is deepened.”
The minister, who was a student and a member of the student representative council at the college, and is a recipient of an honorary doctorate from it, said that the Education Department under Minister Naledi Pandor has put institutional planning and review at the centre of the reform of higher education finance.
”We also need to build the analytical models and cooperative planning frameworks that will allow institutional planning to connect with investment and industrial plans in our economy and region,” he said. ”This has to be a more prominent part of our accelerated and shared growth and development strategy.” — I-net Bridge