Until the funding is sorted, design education will suffer

I have experience in recent years of being an external examiner on design courses at two UK universities. On each occasion, I have been horrified at the staff/student ratio, the amount of access that students have to tutors, the poor standard of general education that students possess on entry and the delusion that many graduates have that they are God’s gift to design. Until these shortcomings are addressed – and, of course, they are all funding-related – then we will continue to churn out too many poorly qualified, talentless, deluded graduates for too few design careers. Harsh but, sadly, true.

Alan Herron, Creative director, True North, by e-mail