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U.S. Students Shun Computer Science, Engineering
n9fzx writes "The San Jose Mercury News reports on a study by the Computing Research Association which finds that 'Undergraduates in U.S. universities are starting to abandon their studies in computer technology and engineering amid widespread worries about the accelerating pace of offshoring by high-technology employers.' Enrollment in those fields has dropped by 19% in the past year alone." Update: 03/24 23:40 GMT by CN : jlechem wrote in with a related story: "Wired News has a story about how American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
here there's a massive plumber shortage and even people with PhD's are retraining.
Is this the beginning of a blue-collar revolution? Do you think its time to crack open each others skulls and feast on the goo inside?
It took me 6 months to find my first job in programming, and I got that one through networking. I'd spend my next few years making friends in high places and doing internships if I were you. Sending out 1000 resumes doesn't mean shit. Good luck.
More than enough BS
I think we should try to keep things in perspective. I am going to be making more in my first job out of university (Computer Engineering, graduate this year) than most school teachers will after 5 years. Do I make as significant a contribution to society as teachers? I'd say definitely not.
Random is the New Order.
Not all engineering is suffering, but the computer and EE areas certainly are. Civil, chemical, biomedical, mechanical engineerings are strong and growing.
I've talked to a number of executives of engineering firms and they indicate that offshoring is not really a major trend. Yes, it is impacting some areas very heavily such as support, but for programmers and engineers, it's a rather minor situation, and the good engineering/programming jobs are likely to always remain local to the company.
The weak job situation for most programmers is not due to offshoring, but rather to simply a lack of jobs, and the fact that the peak of students entering computer majors was around 1999/2000, so they are graduating in highest numbers right now - there's simply more demand than supply. The Merc and other publications are hollaring 'offshore' at the top of their lungs, and unfortunately some people can only hear what they hear the loudest.
Patent lawyer, military weapons specialist, president ?
The economy of the US churns out fewer jobs PER MONTH than the estimated population growth.
The census estimates indicate an estimated total growth of about 26,000,000 people between 2000 and 2010, which (assuming a linear progression, which might actually be reasonable seeing that our primary driving force behind population growth is immigration these days) amounts to 223,000 new persons per month. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were net 21,000 jobs added to reported payroll in Feb. (latest statistics) which is seen by most as a "recovering" figure compared to, oh, the previous eight to eighteen months.
Not to mention that changes in those reporting rules now mean that a "McDonalds Certified Culinary Engineer" is now considered an equivalent "job" to one in the skilled manufacturing sector.
I'm glad you feel very sanguine about the situation, however. Keep up the cheerleading.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Oh please:
"Kazmierczak acknowledged that AeA members are all business owners, not employees, but says this had no effect on the report's findings. "Yes, we do represent the interests of businesses," said Kazmierczak. "However, we believe our report is a fair and balanced look at the entire scope and context of the offshore-outsourcing issue.
Riiight. So the fact that the report was written by a bunch of business owners who are probably outsourcing wouldn't make me suspicious just one bit.
Uh huh... yeah.. and I'm Bill Gates. Last I checked unemployment in the US, the country with the most skilled workers on this planet, still have pretty high unemployment (especially in tech).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
At UTDallas every freshman says they are studying Computer Science or Electrical Engineering. By sophomore year its more like this:
I was a Computer Science major, but then I hate programming, only playing Counterstrike. Now I am a Business major. But wait I hate accounting. Now I am a (insert easy major) major.
It's easy to tell the real CS majors (When do we learn Perl?) from the wannabes (Why would I take UNIX if it's not required?).
bit trollent
What are they -teaching- you kids in school these days? Japanese Keiretsu haven't generally offered "lifetime employement" since the Japanese banking collapes, er excuse me, "destabilization" in the 80's. Certainly Toyota does not. Gack, even a business major would know this... Boydk425
One of the best things you can do in college is to impress your Comp. Sci. professors, IMO. Not only do many of them have business connections, but working with a professor on a research paper or project looks great on a resume. Some of them will pay you to work on these projects as well, and usually at substantially higher pay rates than you'd find elsewhere on campus.
Yes, applications to US Universities are down in EE and CS, but you'll find the biggest drop was in international student applications.
The University of California, system-wide, had an overall drop of 4.5% in applications this year (mostly because fees were raised 30% by one governor and then 40% by the next). But applications for international students dropped by 18%, mostly because they've had the devil's own time getting here to go to school. Some have missed an entire term after going home for the holidays and getting held up for no explainable reason when returning. (I'm sure there's an explanation, somewhere, but the students themselves apparently don't have the clearance to know why they're not allowed back after a two-week vacation.)
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
If only it were that simple.
Most other countries arne't very keen on the idea of Americans moving there. In fact, moving out of America is simply not-an-option for most people (the very rich, of course, always have options).
It is also not true that most new development remains in America. The American patent laws remain in full effect so long as the business who files for the patent is an American-based business. Whether or not the labor was performed by an off-shore business unit is irrelevant.
In fact, new development is the easiest sort of computer work to move offshore, provided you have a large development staff. Only for small businesses is it cheaper to do new development onshore...and the number of small businesses doing that is diminishing rapidly (the big ones having alreadey patented most of what the small ones could develop).
The work that stays onshore is largely in the area of maintenance. Keeping large-scale production systems running often requires programming and scripting abilities. Unfortunately, pure programmers generally don't fit the bill...someone who is a good network or database administrator and who can also do some programming is a much better match.
The bottom line is...the COMPUTERS aren't going offshore, and as such techies are still needed. But the pure coding of software is going offshore, and as such the notion of an "applications developer" is becomming a thing of the past in America.
I would hazard a guess that you dodn't know the answer because you never finished school yourself.
#1 keiretsu do not offer any kind of employment. The word refers to a business arrangement between multiple companies that follows along the Machiavellan idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
#2 Even today, and even in Toyota, the concept of giri-ninjo(duty-empathy) is still strong in Japan and likely will be for the next decade. Companies continue to run at reduced revenues holding onto aged employees because letting them go would be an insult to the years of faithful service given to the company. This is SLOWLY giving way to performanced based positioning and retention, but a majority of Japan's woes (and potentially soon to be America's) is the gross amount of bad debt produced in out of control investing. The dot-com bubble was just a taste of what will happen if China decides to float its currency ala Thailand.
The Wired story is dead on! I'd hire someone from Asia straight out of undergrad school any day over an American with 10 years experience. Why?
Education: Asians average an extra 150+ hours of K12 education a year. Most school systems teach responsibility from day one by assigning class leaders and having the students clean their own classrooms.
Work ethics: are centered around providing the highest level of quality all the time, not just "when it matters." If you ever go to Japan, before you go to see the temples, or the bullet train, or Electric town, go to McDonalds. You won't find someone wearing a stained uniform, chewing gum, and moving to get your food like they're in a competition to see how slow they can go. You'll find a clean restaraunt, with professional workers who zip around putting everything together like they're swamped, even if you are the only customer waiting. Oh yeah, and the food actually looks like the pictures there. McDonalds is a low wage job there just like it is here. The difference is simply attitude. Their's is good, our is....
You were expecting me to say money next....you were wrong. The cheap labor rates in the western area os SE Asia are certainly nothing to break my heart, but I'd still outsource to india and china even if their cost of living was 50% higher than here. It's all about bang for your buck and right now, America is lagging behind with no sign of recovery. I have no doubt we will, because Americans hate to be in second place. But then again, we also just gained the title of most obese nation in the world...what an honor!
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
I think IT workers have to take anything that a trade association of 3000 companies says with a grain of salt. "We want more trained workers, trained at their, or someone else's, expense" is a constant, never changing mantra of these associations. There is ALWAYS a shortage of trained people in their eyes, there are ALWAYS a huge amount of high skilled jobs that are going unfilled (unfilled at the wages THEY want to offer). The ITAA was apoplectic in the late 1990s about the shortage of trained people there were for careers that would be around forever. And this is the line they continued to play for the past few years, saying people need to come in on H1-B visas with skills Americans don't have and so forth. Meanwhile, I know people here on H1-B visas who told me they never touched a computer before they stepped foot in the US.
So take all of this with a grain of salt. I would trust information from other IT people then some of the doo-doo that comes out of the AEA and ITAA. Check out Washtech.org or TechsUnite. If anything, they help IT workers communicate with one another about various things.
are you crazy? don't you know that your whole brain requires activation, not just your left brain. I got a liberal arts physics degree from Saint Joes--yes the guys you see on espn--and value my liberal arts classes as much as my calc, math phys, etc. Besides, if you have any kind of job, you are going to need to know how to write both technically and critically. most liberal arts classes require copious writing and critical thinking.
i am so very tired....
Why not a few hard numbers? Enrollment trend at University of Washington CS Dept:
t udy/Sec3Charts/
t udy/Sec3Charts/cse.enrollments.pdf
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/selfs
Specifically take a look at:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/selfs
Definitely a bump in the late 90s.
Just why exactly would an employer needing to fill a position that requires only
"Customer Service, Phone Etiquette, Basic HTML, Photoshop and/or similar graphics programs, must be comfortable with Internet Protocol and Web based Software Applications"
pay more than 10.00 an hour to -anyone-???
Because it ALSO requires:
Two Years of College, Associates Degree or Equivalent Experience
That's worth more than $10/hour. $10 is an entry-level job. If that's the pay, fine. Then drop the bullshit "Associates Degree/equivalent" or offer a graduate-level wage.
It's really rather simple.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I was going to commend him on his choice for waiting to get married (based on my choices of marrying early), but then I read your post. I guess the lesson learned is to date as many girls as you can between the ages of 16-26 and then towards the 25,26,27,28 years pick one and keep her.
ok. one of life's lessons learned. Now people, listen to us old timers. We know what we're talking about.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
I went to one of the top engineering universities in the US and graduated in the top 1%. There were plenty of others like me there who did well despite not having been subjected to a fascist K-12 regime.
I want to applaud you for your creativity and your development of skills even when put in a lax system. But let me tell you that that's not the case for everyone. Many people in the US are losing their teenage years doing shit when they should be using the scholastic system of the state for their education and skills. I blame the lax education system of the US, extreme individualism of students, lack of respect towards teachers, lack of understanding of the importance of education from the parents' part, and (this one is personal) the people that argue all the time with the teacher (I say STFU and learn, then talk).
For example, the math they teach in Korean highscools surpasses that which is taught in US highschools by far. The fact that there are highschool students struggling with the mathematic problems in the SATs is a sad reality. I lived in Korea for 9 years and I sucked at math (btw, I still suck at it)... I probably got some of the lowest scores in my class. Still the SAT math was very easy for me. My classmates in Korea saw the SAT's math part and couldn't believe that this was the level of math required in the US to enter college.
If you take the average GPA of a student from the US and that from one from Asia (I'm getting too general here), the US student might have a higher score. But you have to be aware that the content learned in Asian highschools is extremely advanced. The competition in their system is just mindblowing. Competition is necessary to screen who can make it to the best universities, who can make it to a university in the city(i.e. Tokyo, Seoul), and who has to go to the crappy outer universities.
I'll take the example of Korea one more time... Students go to school from 7am to 9pm during weekdays(some schools till 11pm). Many students have to go to academic institutions to study more after they get out of school at night. Many get back home after 12am to wake up 6 hours later. On Saturdays many have to stay in school till 6pm. Some schools even make students come on Sundays. Most highschools make students go to school during the vacations. It doesn't matter if it's raining, snowing, hailing(?), or even if they're in war... a student's duty is to go to school to get educated. You might think this is an exaggeration; it's not. The average number of subjects a student has to take a year is over 12. They have to excel in all their subjects to make it to a good university. I don't want to talk much of the crap they have to go through in class... but just to list a few things that happened while I went to school; teachers hit students, they can use sticks (hockey sticks, pool sticks, brooms) or simply punch you, punishments are crazy, you'll be sorry if you're a smoker and get caught smoking, no questions are asked in class, you're dead if you yawn in front of the teacher, you eat lunch in the classroom, you clean up your classroom... I could go on forever. All of this is done to 'discipline' students who 'don't know what's right'. The punishments and the hitting are slowly disappearing.
I'm not trying to say that the Korean or Asian way is better or that it is 'good'. And not everyone in the Asian schooling system turns out to be a genius. Many people simply can't endure the mental and physical whiplash imposed on them. But, I'm just trying to say that there's a whole different world out there getting their brains fried with education. So, if you want to compete in the future, you better get those kids of yours a *real* education.
Which school? Dartmouth College
People should study engineering because they like to solve problems wtih technology, because they want to develop better ways of doing things, and because they are interested in why and how things work. They should not study engineering because someone suggests it is a sure path to high wages, responsibility, and prestige. We live during a time when technology and innovation in the US have been stifled by corporate bureaucracy, where economic growth means driving the competition into bankruptcy/merger rather than offering something new or revolutionary, and where financial resources are directed towards marketing, sales, advertising, and hyperbole rather than research, education, new ideas, improved ways of doing things or an expansion of knowledge.
Large american companies rarely ever attempt to provide anything new or different but instead concentrate on undermining their competition (if they even have any), obtaining goverment protection and favors for their market share, and generally securing a steady and growing revenue stream. There is unlikely to be much opportunity for creative, bright technical people in those sorts of enterprises. More importantly, there is a huge surplus of technically-trained people worldwide thanks to foreign educational programs that emphasize technical training over other areas. Meanwhile there is an equally large shortage of intelligent people with an education in something other than technology. There will always be a need for technically-educated people but there are a lot of people who have pursued technical educations who are lacking in any sort of aptitude whatsoever for technical work. A more even balance worldwide between technical and non-technical educations might be better for everyone in the long term.
Universities should require every one of their graduates to complete college-level coursework in math, physics, chemistry, and biology but they should not be graduating significant portions of their student body with coursework devoted almost entirely to those things. Declining engineering and computer science enrollments shows that college students are finally recognizing that their opportunities are more likely to lie elsewhere now.
I went to a top 50 college and majored in 'Mathematical Computer Science' getting a Math minor along the way... I'm still at the job I interned at during college -- and it's not because I like it. There are people I graduated with (2 years ago) that are still unemployed and many more that settled for webby, sysadminy scripting jobs. Not to say anything bad about those jobs however they don't exactly take advantage of a mathematical background.
You can bitch all you want about these damn kids nowdays not getting their math and admittedly, there are CS programs that completely underexpose their students to math (to say nothing of non-applied math diciplines) but correlation != causation. The jobs aren't there for the appropriately trained.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I'll take the example of Korea one more time... Students go to school from 7am to 9pm during weekdays(some schools till 11pm). Many students have to go to academic institutions to study more after they get out of school at night. Many get back home after 12am to wake up 6 hours later. On Saturdays many have to stay in school till 6pm. Some schools even make students come on Sundays. Most highschools make students go to school during the vacations. It doesn't matter if it's raining, snowing, hailing(?), or even if they're in war... I think that you are glorifying your own experience a bit here, or times have changed drastically. Let me point out some facts of the present: This past winter, it snowed about 4-5 inches and pretty much all Korean students in the Seoul area were given the day off. Most schools have gates which are locked on weekends, thus it is not really possible to attend school during those times. Friends of mine who attended the Computer Science program at Seoul National University and KAIST took an average of 4 courses per semester, mostly computer-related. I'm still a better programmer and understand much more computer theory than most of them with only 14 semester courses of computer-related undergraduate work. So, I was not the average student, but they are supposed to be Korea's elite? Even middle school students smoke in the bathrooms, avoid punishment at home by living in PC bangs, join gangs, etc. They are no better behaved than Americans despite their punishments. Whether or not they get into a good college really depends on the national college exam not your grades. If you fail, you can still attend vocational schools or study abroad... As a part time teacher at one of those "schools" (hagwon in Korea) that the students go to after school or on weekends, most students have no motivation to study and simply attend to be with friends. The reason they are there is to obey their parents, not because they are interested in doing well. Should I also point out that the US is still far more productive per man hour? The work culture is such that you should not leave work until your other team members do so, which means that during that time you may have absolutely no work to do. Luckily, my current company has adopted some Westernized values and this is not a strict norm. Sure, Asians still believe in punishment-based learning rather than reward-based learning and still practice corporeal punishment. What sense does this make in the workplace? How come you didn't mention the drinking culture? In certain situations, you are expected to drink alcohol as often as every night until 2-4am. Koreans turn to alcohol to relieve their stress, and tend to keep drinking or engage in activities that promote drinking for the entire night. It's really sickening to smell the breath of coworkers who smell like both alcohol and garlic at the same time, but apparently it is acceptable here... Koreans who go through college have completed 10 years of education in English, yet they have a really difficult time communicating in English. In countries like India, English is one of the national languages and people are expected to speak it, so at least they have some language competency. Though Koreans tend to work for only about 3x as much money as Indians in the IT sector, they are not a viable solution for offshoring because of the communication problems.