Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the... — James Dyson

Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.

Author: James Dyson

Insight: There's a practical argument buried in this that goes beyond just "engineering is important." Dyson is essentially saying that some investments pay for themselves if you think long enough. A generation of engineers designing better products means better exports, which means tax revenue and economic growth—money that flows back to the government that funded them. It's less about charity and more about seeing education as infrastructure, like building roads. The tension here is real though. Most governments operate on shorter timelines than "long-term payoff." Politicians answer to voters every few years, not investors in 2045. So even if Dyson's math works out eventually, it requires the kind of patient capital that's increasingly rare. Meanwhile, individual students do get charged fees, and they do take loans, because institutions can't wait for exports to materialize. What's slightly counterintuitive is that Dyson isn't arguing engineers deserve free education because they're special—he's arguing it's just smart economics. The same logic could apply to nurses, teachers, or researchers. Once you accept that some education generates returns for society that exceed its cost, the question becomes which fields, and whether we trust government to think in decades instead of quarters. That's often where the argument actually breaks down.