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Statistics On The Degrees People Earn
Xzzy writes: "Over on NASA's space science page, they recently posted a link to a PDF file with a bunch of numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics, focusing on geekly-type jobs. Interesting numbers noted were ones pointing out that over the past ten or so years, degrees earned in electrical engineering have steadily declined.. while degrees focused on fitness studies and recreation have sharply increased."
because getting your electrical engineering degree is ALOT of work. You have to really love science and math to stay the course and finish.
With such a boom in the telecom and computer industry in the last few years, companies are accepting more and more technicians, and in Canada, technologists, (like myself) for traditionally "engineer required" jobs. I personally know a few very bright people working for Nortel and Alcatel doing R&D who are technologists.
Why take 4 years to learn all your math and physics when you can make nearly as much money being a tech?
Why hire an expensive engineer when you can get by with a tech?
BTW, I have the utmost respect for engineers, and plan to get my degree within the next couple of years. For now, I'm content being a 1/2 engineer.
seems to be in Electoral Engineering. Or maybe there are too many, at least in Florida.
BTW - is there such a thing as an Honorary Degree in Electoral Engineering??
Wow, all of these fitness and recreation degrees, and we are still the most obese nation in the world. What a waste of time.
engineering == difficult
phys ed == not so difficult.
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
It's been suggested by other sources that a college degree may or may not be all it's cracked up to be. After all, you spend 4 years in college, you come out the other end with a piece of paper that certifies you've received an education that is now up to 4 years old.
Physical education: This degree can age gracefully. Nobody comes out with upgrades for kneecaps every six months. Nor has any stretching exercise gotten extensive venture capital attention. Aging doesn't seem to hurt this degree significantly.
Computer sciences: Whoa, has this stuff changed. Blink and you miss it. New manufacturing techniques, new technological breakthroughs, new things to keep track of... spending a day in a classroom filling your head with the old stuff actually robs you of the time you need to learn the new stuff.
Physical Education: good to go through college to get a degree in. The information will be useful.
Computer and electrical sciences: bad to go through college to get. Things change before you finish. And while it counts as some experience, the companies that are making the breakthroughs have to educate their workers because the stuff is too new to find anyone experienced in.
Conclusion: fewer technical degrees are being handed out because the students are looking elsewhere for their knowledge.
Side note: For those of you who pity the Phys Ed degree holder for not having a more technical position, consider those people who sit behind a desk typing away at a computer all day. Sooner or later they'll get enough out of shape that they need to join a gym or hire a trainer...
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You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
48% and 43% of CS PhD's went to non-residents and only 12% went to women.
This doesn't surprise me after looking at the graduate student pictures in the engineering builing hallway. This particular school (CMU) has seen a marked increase (from 10% to nearly 40%) women in the freshman CS class in the past three years. Maybe these statistics could be just as fluid in a few years?
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But as I think about it, this makes some sense. Firstly, some of the people who would have been interested in EE a decade ago are probably now being sucked into CompSci. Not to mention the number of people getting jobs in the computer industry without degrees. Most of these people probably would have, a decade ago, gone towards EE degrees.
Also, the number of degrees has gone up in the last 10 years, so the number of fitness degrees should go up. I couln't get into all those numbers, so I don't know if the growth there is inconsistant with other degrees, but I would supspect it isn't.
A college education is overvalued, period. My program was loaded with math and theory, being championed by many folk here as the end all. Anyone want to bet me more than 25% of the people out there spewing Boyer-Moore this, Dijkstra that, or Turing in between could do anything more than cover the very basics of said algorithms and concepts? Want to find me anyone out of academia (plenty of them in would work fine as well, but just to be safe) school greater than 4 years and get them to prove this or that is or is not NP complete? Or even make a decent attempt? Good luck -- *real* geeks, not self-styled ones, are very few and far between.
As with anything, you remember what you use, and forget what you don't. Give virtually anyone their 4th semester calculus final 6 years after they got an "A" and you're going to see some very poor results unless it's been related to something they've been doing since the final. Most forget, and very quickly. Some of the most brilliant scientists and "industry" types I know either have no degree, have a degree in something "unrelated" to their techie field, or have only a bachelors degree where at least a masters is the norm.
The answer there is: college is one way of learning, but not the only way, and often not the best way. While I agree, fundamental theory and math are important to techie types, college is not the only means to that end. Much of any "you're being graded" educational scheme is to give you basis and a few answers, then leave the rest to you and all your student buddies to figure out.
Many of the most grueling and difficult courses I went through were curved extremely heavily. Even though the failure rate was incredible in many of them, it was pretty damn obvious only a *very* small few of those that got A's really understood the material in the end. They got good grades simply because they knew the stuff "well enough" compared to their fellows.
Having a grasp of loosely related concepts does not, for instance, automagically translate into being a "better Computer Scientist" or engineer. You can make an argument that learning anything has some sort of subjective worth as far as your overall competence at virtually anything else.
As far as I see it, it's just a matter of human nature. Most people that graduate college want to believe their experience was worthwhile intellectually, and doing this or that improved them. Unfortunately a common side-effect of wanting to give something value is to devalue everything else, and point to your path as being the best way. A sort of status symbol.
Having a piece of paper with your name on it tells very little about what you know or what you're capable of. Not that an undergraduate education is worthless, or the experience of college in general, but most of the commentary I see goes way overboard.
Is most colleges don't offer degrees in binge drinking and drug use...
(as said by a student at a small liberal arts school notorious for its alcoholism...)
it really depends. geek job can mean alot of things. what i want to do is mathmatical modeling of biological systems. its really hard for me to get the training needed by picking up an o'reily book and going from there. if you want a career (notice i didn't say a job) that requires a more structured type of training then you will probably have to go to school.
eventually i think the more 133t geek jobs of today will be filled by people with higher education. the reason they are not being filled right now is that there isn't any real place you can go to get trained in this sort of thing.
eventually employers will want more security in who they hire. ie the managers will want to say to their boss we should hire schmuck number 1-he has a degree in whatever. this gives them some sort of implied credibility (sp?) to this schmuck. it's sad, but it's the same reason people use windows-its more of a cya thing.
john
-- john