A practitioner's perspective on profession oriented engineering education
- In 2020 Malaysia will be a highly developed industrialized country. This aim is described in the Vision 2020 program. And Malaysia acts accordingly and founded five application oriented universities in the recent 2 1/2 years. How to set up application oriented universities and how to educate highly qualified application oriented engineers were the main topics of the 1st National Convention on Engineering Education: Profession Oriented Approach in Putrajaya, Malaysia, July 7-9, 2003. The author has been invited by the conference organisors to give a keynote speech on the economic relevance of Fachhochschulen to the German economy because Germany's professional and application oriented education system is a preferred reference model. This paper presents statistical evidence that Fachhochschulen are indispensable to the German higher education and economy.