Is engineering education in Australia really watered down - weak and substandard?

Looking at my UNSW civil engineering intern’s timetable, I was genuinely stunned. He can have two weekdays a week with virtually no scheduled classes. For a civil engineering undergraduate program, that is simply unbelievable.

I graduated more than twenty years ago from one of China’s top schools of civil engineering. Back then, our timetable was packed across all four years. And it was not just the core professional subjects that made it demanding. We were trained through a much broader and heavier engineering foundation. In addition to mathematics, mechanics, structural analysis, materials, geotechnics, dynamics, design and detailing, we also had to study descriptive geometry and engineering drawing, advanced physics, engineering chemistry, electrical engineering, building services engineering, surveying, and even project management tools such as critical path method and network diagrams. In fact, I was exposed to those project management fundamentals more than twenty years ago, which later helped lay the groundwork for my PMP qualification in the United States.

Our professors were also deeply committed. Some of them would even give extra lectures to the whole class free of charge during evening self-study sessions. That was the culture: serious discipline, serious responsibility, and serious engineering education.

What makes this even harder to comprehend is that today’s students should be learning more than we did twenty years ago, not less. On top of all the traditional engineering fundamentals, they now also need to understand digital tools, computational workflows, software environments, and increasingly AI-related methods. The body of knowledge has expanded, yet the intensity of training in some places seems to have gone in the opposite direction.

Across much of Asia and Europe — especially Eastern Europe — engineering education still rests on one fundamental principle: strong fundamentals first. Students are expected to work hard, calculate hard, and build real technical depth. That is how engineers are made.

By contrast, too many Australian programs feel watered down. Broad, flexible, lifestyle-friendly — yes. But rigorous? Hardly. Too often they look less like serious engineering formation and more like commercially packaged degree products designed to keep the international student pipeline flowing. In plain English, they can feel uncomfortably close to diploma mills.

Civil engineering is not meant to be easy. It deals with gravity, structural failure, public safety, and human lives. It also has to deal with earthquakes, typhoons, landslides, fluid pressure, and all the uncertainty and complexity that come with the real physical world. If undergraduate training is already this light, it is entirely fair to ask how deep the foundations really are — and what kind of engineers such a system is ultimately producing.

And I say this with full confidence, because I have been practising in Australia for the past ten years and have seen the local system from the inside. I also come from a far more rigorous engineering education background. Without comparison, there is no real understanding — and once you have seen both, the gap is impossible to ignore. In this case, the contrast is not just noticeable; it is uncomfortable.

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