Record highs for Wits' mining intake

In less than 15 years, the number of first-year students registering in the department has risen from 43 (in 1999) to 302 at the beginning of this year.

There has been a particularly sudden jump since 2012, requiring that the first-year intake be split into two streams to keep class sizes manageable. The school is also hiring more staff to meet this increased demand.

Professor Cawood said that the school is pleased with the demand for its courses, despite the extra pressure that this places on its resources. It is already putting extra effort into academic and other support for new students, to give them the best possible chance of success.

Saturday classes

Extra maths and physics classes on Saturdays have been one way to address the lack of academic preparedness for university.

"The outcomes-based education (OBE) system simply does not prepare students well enough for engineering studies," he said. "This is evidenced by the fact that their grade 12 marks bear no relation to the marks that they get at university."

The other main area of support is financial and logistical.

"Less than 30% of our students have a support system in Johannesburg; many of them have never even been in Gauteng before," said Professor Cawood. "Many first-year students are the first in their families ever go to university - so they are not sure what is required when they arrive, and often there is inadequate provision for accommodation and meals.

"In other cases, students have been booked into sub-optimal living arrangements, which are not conducive to learning. We have raised money from sources like the Department of Mineral Resources, Eskom, SRK Consulting, the London Metals Exchange, BME and the SA Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (SAIMM) to put students into a situation where they can focus on their studies."

The school aims to attract 150 new students into the degree course each year; this is generally augmented by up to 50 students who have not passed all their subjects and must repeat first year.

Postgraduate entries stabilised

At the postgraduate level, the Wits School of Mining Engineering has stabilised at a level of about 200 students per year. Entrance to the postgraduate programme is strictly controlled to develop and maintain a better match between available lecturing resources and students serviced.

He said that it is unfortunate that in managing overall student growth the postgraduate programme is negatively affected, resulting in the postgraduate programme shrinking from 340 students in 2010 to 191 postgraduates in 2013.

"If we had the lecturing capacity, we could easily double the size of the programme," said Professor Cawood. "One of the reasons is our unsurpassed range of specialisations, which allows us to accept graduates from other disciplines and convert them into the specialists required by the mining industry.

"Most engineering programmes will only take you into a postgraduate course if you have a first degree in that discipline. We don't work like that. We accept any first degree, provide them with a specialisation, and 'convert' them to what the mining sector needs. An example would be converting an economist to a mineral economist by adding the mining and mineral economic content."

Another recent development is the school's certificate-level studies, which are experiencing very good growth with the two Level 6 Certificate programmes in mine resource management (MRM) and mine planning from 54 students in 2008 to 77 in 2013.

These courses are aimed at practitioner level and represent an important Wits Mining School initiative to address the shortage of skills at this level. These two-year, part-time certificate programmes are aimed specifically at practitioners to prepare them for either promotion or employment on mines.

"The learners must spend eight weeks having lectures at Wits over a period of two years," said Professor Cawood. "It is a practical qualification with various on-the-job assignments over the duration of the course. This is an area of critical skills shortages at this level and we could probably attract many more students if we had the capacity to grow further."

Although the labour-related disruptions in the mining industry prevented some students from fulfilling their vacation work requirements during 2012, he said that there were no signs that these events dampened students' perceptions that mining was an exciting sector with plenty of opportunities.

"We saw this in the demand for first-year seats in the programme, which was at an all-time high at the start of 2013," he said.

The disruption of vacation work will mean that several second- and third-year students will not be able to graduate at the end of 2013, despite the fact that they would have passed all their academic subjects; this is clearly a problem for industry and the university, he said.

Stronger partnerships between universities and industry

In a recent paper for the SA Institute for Mining and Metallurgy, Professors Cuthbert Musingwini, Huw Phillips and John Cruise of the Wits School of Mining Engineering highlight the benefits of stronger partnerships between universities and industry in efforts to close the skills gap.

"It is important to bear in mind that it usually takes about 10 years of training and development after graduating with a bachelor's degree (BEng, BSc) before mining graduates are appointed to their first substantive managerial position, when they start to make a full contribution to the mining company," they said. "This timeframe dictates that the education and development of mining engineers (as opposed to 'competitive poaching') should be treated as a corporate strategic decision."