Why have engineering courses always mysteriously required so many more hours of study?

Here in the UK it's been A-Level results day, when tens of thousands of our best and brightest find out if they've got the grades they need to go on to university. As usual, conservative commentators will be full of "it-wasn't-like-that-in-my-day" stuff, claiming that standards are falling and the qualifications aren't worth the paper they're written on any more; however, we should remember that this sniping from the sidelines has always been around.

I really don't know what sort of sad thrill these people get out of denigrating the efforts of the young people coming through (and their teachers), but they were doing it when I got my A-Levels some 25 years ago, and they'll be doing it in 25 years' time. It seems to me that the kids I know who were hoping to get, say, B and C grades today, are about the same academic standard as the kids who got B and C grades when I was at school. Whatever other changes have happened, that's good enough for me.

One of the few aspects of education which hasn't improved, as far as I can see, is at university level, and that's the continuing disparity between different subjects in terms of commitment required. Engineering courses have always suffered from this, mysteriously requiring three or four times the number of hours of study as certain other courses - and the students choosing their future careers know this. With most of them now being forced to juggle study with part-time jobs, who can blame them for leaning towards courses where the demands, in terms of study time, aren't so high?

I'm not suggesting that engineering courses at university should be "dumbed down" to the lowest common denominator. But the playing field does need to be levelled if the UK engineering sector is to get a fairer share of the best our education system has to offer.