Johannesburg — THE number of good engineering and built environment academics returning to the private sector was so high that the chairman of the committee of deans of engineering and built environment faculties, Prof Francis Petersen, wants to speak to Business Leadership SA's technical CEOs about how to curb the problem.

The Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) reports that SA's engineering faculties and university of technology departments have about 300 vacancies.

This comes at a time when questions are being asked on how much the current global financial crisis will affect big capital expenditure projects as industry and governments across the world pull in their horns.

The Jipsa report also shows that these faculties and departments will need 1000 more academic staff to cope with the increase in students.

The number graduating with university degrees in engineering increased from 1177 in 1998 to 1226 in 2004. But now engineering academics have to conduct a mental balancing act between projections of what industry will need, and how many people they graduate.

When university of technology graduates are included, the total number of graduates increases from 2341 in 1998 to 3160 in 2004.

"What we don't want is misalignment between what I call the three Es - education, employment and economy.

"You don't want to provide people who can't get jobs," Petersen said at a presentation in Johannesburg on science and technology advances.

Even so, the numbers of engineering and built environment academics leaving SA's tertiary education institutions for the private sector was a worry, and Petersen had proposals for industry.

The deans' committee he leads also wanted to lobby the education department on the way in which the higher education funding formula was used to calculate institutions' subsidies per student.

It planned to make a case for a slice of the R3,1bn fund which the government has made available to the higher education sector in the next financial year.

The committee wanted to impress on industry that poaching engineers and other built environment professionals from academia was a short-term solution to SA's shortage of experienced skilled workers, which was in turn part of the global shortage, Petersen said.

In the long term this would negatively affect the quality of students that universities and universities of technology were able to graduate, he said.

Petersen was proposing the secondment of working professionals to teach in higher education institutions. He also suggested "dual appointments" where the professional continued working in industry, but was simultaneously appointed to a higher education institution's teaching staff; or vice versa.

Other proposals included the boosting of academic salaries to entice professionals back to academia, and to explore the ways in which research and development could practically help South African society.

The problem with the higher education funding formula was that it allocated funds per student based on how much it cost to educate them, which meant the fine arts got higher student funding than engineering. The group wanted this to be changed to favour the teaching of scarce skills.

Engineering has been identified by Jipsa as a scarce skill, and Jipsa wants SA to be producing about 2000 engineering graduates a year by 2010.

While SA had experienced a construction boom, there were some signs that because of the global financial crisis some of the big projects that were on the cards for SA might be re thought.

British mining giant Rio Tinto said on Wednesday that it was reviewing all significant spending plans including more than $5 bn earmarked for major aluminium projects in Canada.

Eskom, which had been planning to spend R150bn over the next five years to 2013 to upgrade and expand its services now faced hurdles created by the global credit crunch.