A civil engineer has been making the news recently. In fact, with 22k shares, and 35k reactions on Facebook it’s quite possible this guy might be the most famous civil engineer of our time! Alas, he’s not talking about our profession, but the sheer cost of becoming an engineer. He’s talking about the student loan.

Ages back, when I started this blog, I discovered a similar surprising fact; that civil engineers won’t pay off their student loan. When I read Crowther’s, now viral, post I decided to check back, and, according to the same Student Load Repayment calculator Civil Engineers are still not going to pay off their loans.

Civil (and in fact most other traditional) engineers are particularly affected by rising tuition costs simply because, to become chartered, we’re all encouraged/forced to get an MEng. And that means that we pay 33% more tuition cost than your average degree. We’re not the only profession to require a longer degree, most medical practitioners do too (and architects; unexpectedly).

An extra year will set you back £9k tuition and £3k maintenance, plus a bit- so let’s call it £12.5k. If we consider the MEng year to be the last to be paid off, then (at an average/low 3.5% interest rate), this year will actually be costing you something in the region of £20k.

To be ‘worth the investment’, over a 30 year career those four letters (MEng) need to be earning you a salary that’s constantly about £670 above everyone else’s. And guess what, Engineering pays its best graduates circa £4k below the average. Maybe we need to lose the notion that it takes 4 to 5 years to make a Civil Engineer (something I’ve never been convinced of), or perhaps just admit that Civil Engineers aren’t paid enough.

Something will have to give, eventually; the country needs more civil engineers- and the one thing I can say for certain to any one thinking about joining is that you’ll start you’re life a year later than your contemporaries in IT, law, media, etc., be paid less then them, and have your student loan hanging over your head for the rest of your life.

And we still wonder why we can’t attract enough talent?