Engineering and the British Economic Problem

Measured in status terms, British engineering does not, as an occupation, rank very highly, even though some individual engineers do. There is a considerable literature on this topic. Watson (1976) reviewed numerous studies of occupational prestige in most of the 

After being given examples of professional engineering tasks. 

Four related points help to account for the low status of British engineering academic traditions peculiar to Anglo-Saxon education. 

Both the old landed elite and the new wealthy classes had feared the mob, and both had privileged positions to defend. Rather than fight each other, a process that occurred in some European societies, they built a classic, and for our time the most important, British compromise. The old interests offered a range of political and social concessions. The middle classes were given the vote and non- 

Educated Victorians left their countrymen with two mental legacies which have since been millstones around their necks. One 

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