“I don’t see tuition fee as the right tool”: An Interview with Professor Megill
Hochschule Rhein-Waal professor William Megill sheds some light on student issues such as tuition fees and shares some cool solutions in technology towards sustainability.
On a recent afternoon in the middle of the farms in Bedburg-Hau, somewhere on the border of Germany and the Netherlands, I walked to the living room of a seemingly quirky house to find Prof. Dr. William Megill sitting by the window. He wore small, round-rimmed glasses and a comfy tee shirt — his only nod to drizzling outside a sip of tea with some added milk.
Megill is both a physicist and a biologist, responsible for teaching the multidisciplinary Bionics courses at one of the largest English-speaking universities in Germany, Rhine Waal University of Applied Sciences. He has developed and mentored the university’s Submarine Team since it was formed that won awards such as The Most Unusual Design in 2016 and The Best Female Run in 2018 at European International Submarine Race (eISR). He was recently appointed as the Internationalization Officer (Internationalle Beauftragter) for the faculty of Technology and Bionics.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Why do you think the faculty of Technology and Bionics has such a high dropout rate as compared to other faculties?
I say this to my students on a regular basis that when a medical doctor makes a mistake, one person dies. But when an engineer screws up the design of a software system of an airplane, boom 400 people are dead. The difference is in engineering, we let people in the program with actually quite marginal marks as compared to medicine where you don’t get in unless you get a 1.
Undergraduates get in trouble because they don’t seriously internalize what they study in the lectures. It seems easy in high school but now they’re in the university. A lot of Master students run into trouble because they expect the system to work like it did at home and it doesn’t. So, I think a lot of our issues come from the time it takes to adapt to the way we do things here. I’ve also lost several students to jobs who get hired by industries because they already have a Bachelors.
I don’t know how many people who ran out of money had to go home. Do you know 10000 euros that they need to get in the blocked account every year? How many of them have to work at Amazon for huge numbers of hours to be able to finance their stay here and how are they able to study? And when they do study, is it effective? Because they just worked at Amazon all night and they come home 5 o clock in the morning, they then need to go to the class. So, lots of reasons and the university is aware of all those reasons. But we don’t have any way of collecting those kinds of statistics and furthermore, we don’t want to collect those statistics. That’s personal information belonging to you. I don’t see any reason to collect that kind of stuff. I’m happy our standards are good, they’re reviewed, classrooms are good. And in large people are happy with the teaching.
Do you support tuition fees in Germany?
I think they are probably the wrong tool for what they were trying to achieve with their tuition fee introduction. There’s an argument to be made that says people who are paying personally for their tuition are going to be more invested in it and therefore going to finish in a reasonable amount of time. At the moment, Germany has made the decision that we are not going to do tuition fees. They introduced it in Baden-Württemburg and it didn’t work the way they thought it would work.
It isn’t any advantage to the university to introduce tuition fees because all that means is that the government reduces the amount of funding. And you reduced the number of students coming. We need engineers. We need scientists. We need people in this country. Do we really want to throw up another barrier?
There needs to be a balance and if that means there needs to be a compromise that says you get the first three semesters free and after that you start paying, that’s a good model in some other countries. Or maybe you pay the second or third time you try an exam. I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do. I don’t see the tuition fee as the right tool. There are lots of other tools that can get people to finish on time.
What is your say about preferring only qualified migrants under the Skilled Labour Immigration Act in Germany?
Every country in the world is short of tradesmen, tradeswoman. We need craftspeople. What you want are the people who can work in the assembly lines, people who are skilled in the crafts. Those are the really useful people that the world needs who can come into the country with a skill of some kind and immediately contribute. The foot of the bottom end of the crafts are the skill sets of people who don’t know how to trade, who couldn’t learn how to do it because they were too young or never really had a chance to learn. And yeah you know what society needs those kinds of people too. The problem you have is their arriving in the country is seen as needing a lot of assistance to get going because they don’t have anything to immediately offer the country. So that’s why you need to have these training programs for those who don’t have skills, you give them skills, you help them out.
There are going to always be people who want handouts and every country has that problem. That’s not an immigration or racial problem, that’s human nature.
So, what do you do with the unskilled and the desperate that are arriving with the only skill they have is that they can walk five thousand miles? That’s a skill. That’s a survival skill.
But is there space to take everybody? As much as we want to help people out, just welcoming them to Europe and having them live on our streets isn’t necessarily the solution. Yeah you don’t want more people dying in the Mediterranean, that’s stupid, but at the same time you want to help them to create situations that help them have to not migrate in the first place. The whole right wing turning back sending them back to Libya where they’re going to get killed or they’re going to fall victim of organized crime, no we got to figure a better way.
What are your plans as the newly appointed Internationalization Officer of the faculty.
One of them is to make sure that we are recruiting from around the world in a balanced way. I need to have exchanges with European universities because that’s why people are coming to us to get the feel of Europe. On the same side, I want to make sure that for our European students are also able to travel within Europe but also able to get an international view of the world. But we need to find ways to make sure that our exchanges are practical, that they work for people. The real trick is to meet people in the same league that we are in. So that’s what I’m reaching out to. Those exchanges work really well because they’re similar school styles, have about 4 to 5000 students, they’re a close campus, in a small town and they’ve got a really good relation between professors and students.
And so, is it only for universities or also for institutions like space agencies let’s say, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)? Could we potentially do something with them?
We can set things up when we find someone within that organization who’d be willing to sponsor our students to have a couple of placements, to do thesis or final year projects. But I think that sort of an initiative needs to come from a student. So, if a student has a connection through an uncle or an aunt to do something, then they can at least get a letter in and get considered, then I’ll support the students who do that.
Can you highlight any interesting sustainable projects going on at the moment?
We chose to set up an electric Formula Student Team, so we are on that same path. Even in our Submarine Team, we are trying to make the propulsion system as efficient as we can because the efficiency factor is the factor that matters the most in the drag equation.
We have made them out of fibre glass in the past, but we can’t recycle fibre glass because the recycling cost is just too much. Okay so what do we do? We got to make it out of PET. We are making our submarine out of coke bottles or potentially the same stuff that a coke bottle is made of. So recycled coke bottles can be melted down and reused.
So, then no more fibre glass. A. I don’t have any breathing problems with my PETG because there’s just no dust involved in making the forms which in fibre glass is always the problem. B. Here I’ve got a relatively environmentally friendly material, it’s still made of petroleum but it’s something that I can reuse.
Eco-Marathon is a cool project. How far can I go in a litre of gas? Ours again is electric and so, how far you can go on a kilowatt of power or whatever the amount of energy that’s available. So, they’re making a really efficient vehicle that can travel as far as possible.
Then there are all those big projects around the spoy, the idea around it is that we can help develop technology that can help us improve the water quality of the spoy sustainably. Can u imagine if we had a little diving paradise in front of the campus? The water is 3 meters deep, it’s not great diving for three meters but why not. At the moment, the water is choked with unhealthy black mud at the bottom and is really an evidence of eutrophication.
