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There has been an increasing trend to view the purpose of universities as the production of streams of "work-ready" graduates.

Unfortunately, the real losers in this process are the students, who do not receive the same quality of education as I did as a student in the 1980s. Furthermore, this narrow, supposedly work-related approach is having undesirable effects. A recent article on the Institution of Electrical Engineers website gave a shocking picture of employer feedback from recent recruitment fairs. The gist was that many graduates were apathetic, had short attention spans, lacked interpersonal skills and displayed an unwarranted sense of arrogance.

Education should be a life-changing experience, not just a question of acquiring vocational skills or marks piecemeal via a selection of self-contained modules. True education is a passport to the land of the educated, which has no physical boundaries. Once entered, it is not possible to return to an otherwise unchanged previous life as the same person plus a few add-ons.

Mark Leeson
School of engineering
University of Warwick