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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.
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)
> Computer sciences: ... 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.
Good sir, I fear you have confused a degree in CS with a certificate from a trade school.
If they are teaching the right "old stuff", it's every bit as valid today as the "old stuff" they teach you in mathematics, chemistry, physics, or any other field of science.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Computer sciences: Whoa, has this stuff changed.
How much has Djikstra's algorithm changed in the last 4 years? Floyd's? What about dynamic programming in general? Integer programming? Let's go even simpler - how much has recursion changed in the last 4 years? Or even object oriented programming? What about regular expressions or formal language specification methods like EBNF? What about the various bit operations, like shifting, and, or, two's complement, and what they're good for? How has the basic maths behind perspective transforms changed recently? What about the major standard Unix development tools, like gcc, make, and cvs?
These are just the things that I can think of, off the top of my head, which I've learnt in my CS degree, which will be applicable for a long time to come. The most valuable thing you get out of any degree is not knowledge, but methods and ways of thinking.
Don't say "Computer Science" when you mean "Technology". Technology outdates, Computer Science matures.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
These are just the things that I can think of, off the top of my head, which I've learnt in my CS degree, which will be applicable for a long time to come. The most valuable thing you get out of any degree is not knowledge, but methods and ways of thinking.
..
I agree. I find that too often, geeks seem to come off with a "it advances so fast, college is worthless", not realizing that in less than five years, a CS degree is going to mean the difference between (what will then be) blue collar assembly and maintenance and engineering teams.
Being a "computer guy" who can fix things verses someone with a degree in CS will be like the difference between a garage mechanic and a mechanical engineer working in Detroit...
And it's funny, the geeks are laughing at the VC's and stupid e-flops now for being short-sighted.
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
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.
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