One gotcha is that the degree might not be accredited. At least that is what I understand from this sentence in the article: "It’s a £15m project which, if successful, Dyson hopes to eventually gain university status and award its own degrees to up to 100 students a year." However I admire Dyson's efforts to train the people they need.

Edit: Actually maybe it is accredited. From the Dyson Institute's FAQs: "What is the Dyson Institute of Technology?

The Dyson Institute of Technology teaches high quality engineering degrees to the next generation of tech enthusiasts, alongside a full time role at Dyson.

During this four year programme you’ll learn about engineering through hands-on experience in our Research and Development department with academic training provided by WMG, the University of Warwick. You'll graduate with a Bachelor of Engineering degree."

That last sentence is not a clear statement.

Is that supposed to mean: that any accreditation by UofWarwick somehow applies to Dyson as well? The FAQ simply doesn't mention any accreditation whatsoever specifically for Dyson. Could be rather important, one way or the other.

It's fairly standard for non-academic teaching organisations to have their degrees sponsored by an established university. For example the Centre for Alternative Technology offers a number of masters courses without itself being a university [0]. This is probably more common for postgrad courses, but no reason why it couldn't work for undergrad too.

https://gse.cat.org.uk

Academic teaching organisations too, for that matter. It's quite common for a college to also offer some degree-level courses that are accredited by a local university.

(Note to non-Brits: "college" in the UK is mostly for lower-level and vocational courses, it's not a synonym for university like in the US)

It's actually also quite common for undergraduate courses in the media industries.

I think a bachelor degree would be unusual for the UK. Aren't most engineering degrees in the UK undergraduate masters?

Not necessarily; the University of Lincoln which has one of the newest engineering schools (in partnership with Siemens) offers undergraduate bachelor of engineering degrees - http://lincoln.ac.uk/home/engineering/undergraduate/

You normally do a Bachelor of Engineering - B.Eng.

I think if you apply to any university they'll strongly recommend that you should be doing the MEng instead. The BEng isn't enough to even get chartered is it? So you'd need to do another degree anyway.

If the unis I've looked at are any indication then many offer an integrated masters programme but most students will be on the bachelors route. At the institution where I work (Uni of York) many more BEng degrees are awarded than MEng.

You don't need the Masters degree to be a chartered engineer as far as I know.

If you graduate and gain enough experience on the job (probably more cost effective than being at uni for another year) to be considered to have an equivalent standard of education I believe you can become a CEng with a presentation.

I would guess the 'gotcha' is it's only a course for 25 people, and more comparable to a scholarship rather than a new model for engineering teaching.

It looks great, and I'm sure it will be a great education for the lucky few, but I am skeptical that it would scale to larger numbers. The incentives are there at the macro level but not the micro which would be needed to encourage a broad range of companies to participate.

There is no need to look in the fine print for reasons why this model could not be all around beneficial. It's right there in the headline: private corporation finances education degree.

Dyson have all the interests to do so, as it will attract talent and every drop of the student's time is devoted to learn material that will be 100% applicable to their day to day functions in the enterprise.

In more general terms, if all education worked this way we'll only be studying the inner workings of vacuum cleaners (or computers, or anything else that is a commercial product) and not abstract math, theoretical physics or philosophy. It might work in this particular case, but a society should be vigilant in not selling out to commercial entities all means of education.

Again, I am very happy of this particular project and hope it can reduce unemployment -- but wary of saying "Aha! Why don't we do this everywhere!?"