We are entering June and many Bachiller students have already taken their selectivity exams waiting to find out the results that will allow them to choose one career or another. While some are already clear about what to enroll in (whether by vocation or knowledge of the sector), most of the time this decision is subject to the job opportunities that said career has. And it is that there are certain degrees (such as medicine or computer engineering) that have a much higher level of employability than others (such as fine arts or journalism).
However, among all of them, there is a career that is rarely chosen to study at the university but its employability is close to 100%. The goose that lays the golden eggs of engineering that, due to the ignorance of the students, loses more students each year despite their job opportunities: agricultural engineering.
The data. With summer approaching and the start of the new school year, there are empty places in their classrooms. And it is that in recent years a marked decrease in enrollment to study this engineering has been detected, which gives clues that the generational change is not taking place. According to data from the UPM, during the 1990s there was an increase in students in all engineering fields, including agronomy, which was around 5,000 students at that time. Then it experienced an increase driven by the opening of new Universities with this degree.
However, since 2005 that number has been plummeting, with a drop in those enrolled in master’s degrees and careers, and now stands at around 2,200 students, less than half the number three decades ago.
High employability. But the reality is that it is a sector that moves 110,000 million euros a year and has not been unemployed in any of the crises. According to Adolfo Peña, professor of the Master’s Degree in Digital Transformation of the Agri-Food and Forestry Sector at the University of Córdoba (UCO), “there is a very large demand, it is a career with 100% employability”. According to this EFE article, in the last five years there has been a change in the mentality of companies in the sector, which has led to an increase in the demand for technical profiles for the field.
The field needs engineers. We must bear in mind that we are in a context where feeding an increasingly large population has become an economic priority. And the field needs more engineers to make decisions about food production, sustainable development, and the rational use and management of natural resources. Drought is currently a big problem that needs thinking heads and drastic solutions that only these engineers can carry out.
Because? One of the main reasons is ignorance. Students often do not know what this job covers and associate it with working in the field, they end up choosing other engineering fields. As Rosario Haro, deputy director of Academic Planning at the UPM School of Agricultural Engineering, indicates in this article in El Español, Agricultural Engineering is “the great unknown of biotechnologies” and she believes that “it has not been able to correctly transmit students what the degree consists of” and its relevance.
It’s not what it seems. But the truth is that the rural world in Spain is modernizing by leaps and bounds, now with the use of drones or GPS control of crops, plants and droughts. In fact, it is a sector that is increasingly similar to telecommunications, incorporating satellites, big data, machine learning, precision agriculture and even genetic modification. At Xataka we have covered some of these topics and how technology is revolutionizing the field.
And it is that an agronomist is not limited only to the state of the crops or the environmental network, but can act as director of construction projects, land use planning, environmental feasibility researcher or as a biotechnologist and microbiologist. Undoubtedly, an exciting path in the times to come.
Imagen: Unsplash (William Daigneault)
In Xataka | I am over 50 years old and I have started to study a technological career
