There’s a brilliant paper by Professor John Briscoe (of Harvard University) in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management [American Society of Civil Engineers, 2010: 136 (4), 409−411]: Practice and Teaching of American Water Management in a Changing World. He makes the point that decades ago students came from all over the world to American universities to be well trained at Masters level in water resources and sanitary engineering. Briscoe notes that, while the world has changed (and still is changing), the courses haven’t (at least not sufficiently) and therefore the US is losing its place in the world of graduate education: what happens now in the US simply isn’t relevant any more to the needs of middle- and low-income countries; similarly what’s needed in most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is not wholly relevant to the needs of most countries in Latin America.
I suspect this sorry state of educational affairs also occurs in most other industrialized countries – in the UK, for example, you can easily count on the fingers of one hand the universities who offer appropriate graduate training in environmental health engineering for warm-climate countries (you might need both hands if you wanted to include western Europe).
►See also Declining by degree in The Economist of 4 September.
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.