Case Study: Access to Engineering through HITECC

SUMMARY Most engineering disciplines are going through a crisis, with industry being able to offer graduates secure employment but with higher educational institutions being unable to provide the numbers of graduates needed. Looking further back, the polytechnics and universities have unfilled places on first‐year undergraduate courses with the traditional A‐level students choosing prospective careers in business, accountancy, management etc and turning their backs on science and engineering In this paper we do not propose to discuss the reasons for this decline, we shall instead look at the various routes to engineering and in particular the ‘open access’ route for mature students, and we propose the use of self‐learning packages on access courses