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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."
Probably won't happen. I was a freshman for the same thing 4 years ago, and now i'm lucky to find work down at the local grocery store. I suggest you switch to something more lucrative. I really don't blame the students in the article either. Its a shame too.
Ban Reality TV!
I'm to be a freshman in the fall as well, and I'm still going to Major in Computer Engineering, but only because I want to do something that I truely love, and really don't care about the pay. The truth is these jobs are going over seas, and they're moving quickly, but as we've seen with most of these job fluctuations, they tend to be short term (think: NAFTA and the like...), and they tend to stablize themselves quickly. Worst comes to worse, I'll move to India ;)
I think the biggest reason today that jobs are shifting overseas is simply the costs of running a redundant business. Very few companies are actually innovating these days, and those that are, do their work in the good ol' USA because of strong patenting laws (yes, too strong, we know..) and the like. Those same companies are offsetting the price of innovation by reducing the cost of tech support, sending it offshores to cheaper labor. I think the best way to get out of this is simply a change in buisness model; too many buisnesses are worried about the upfront costs as compared to the long-range profits to be gained, and are getting downright greedy and stingy when it comes to money...
Basically, the economic structure of America is changing. Don't like it? Move. Or stay here and adapt.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Maybe all the tards will finally leave CompSci and stop wasting the time of everyone else who actually wants to be there. Im sick of students who cant even code coming up through the system because they dont really care and have cheated their way as far as they have come. They are overcrowding the program and ruining the name of universities who would otherwise have impressive graduates coming out of their programs.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Yes, applications to US Universities are down in EE and CS, but you'll find the biggest drop was in international student applications. Recent restrictions on international students have made the US a painful choice for higher education. I think this facet of the enrollment drop has been glossed over for the most part in the media. I was unaware until I spoke with some people in my EE departement's graduate admissions office. Granted, exporting jobs causes some of this, but let's take a look at all the causes.
Very few companies are actually innovating these days, and those that are, do their work in the good ol' USA because of strong patenting laws
Take a look at US Steel. The executives went for profit and not development. They slowly became outproduced by Japan, which focused on technological development, not boosting profits and pocketing the money. When they knew the steel industry was headed for bust in America they layed off all of their workers, and looked elsewhere for profitable investments. Take a look at the steel industry in Germany. Laborers and executives fight for equal say in where surplus labor capital goes to, mainly not in CEO's pockets but rather the companies development. Toyota is also a good example, which assures lifetime employment. This does not mean that all companies in the US screw their employees when they see profit, or that other countries have across the board better social protection, either. But looking at the past does provide some insight.
My point of view...
The numbers aren't hocus pocus. I majored in CS and graduated several years ago. Just from personal experience, the unemployment rate is very real. The loss of jobs is very real. When I graduated in 2000, 100% of my friends had steady jobs. After the crash, 90% had lost their jobs and some had gotten new jobs. This not an exaggeration.
I guess you can't exactly say these job losses were caused by outsourcing as it was the dot-com crash. That said, jobs are being created but not much in tech.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Take it from someone who got on that track only to get off again (after getting my MA in history)...the folks who stick with the low-paying humanities track literally *can't* do anything else.
That might be because they love it so much, or it might be because they have such raging personality defects that they realize tenure is the only way for them to survive. There's a lot of dysfunctional people in academia, and not just cute eccentricity either. Narcissism and backstabbing the likes of which corporate America rarely sees....
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
Granted a lot of those people were wannabe hacks that didn't know shit about computers, but got a job anyway because basically *anyone* could get a job back then, but some of us knew which direction was up at least - having been programming computers since the 80's - and just wanted to bypass the stupid educational system that was taking WAY too friggin long to finish. Many of these people (myself included) decided after the bust to go back and get that elusive degree, only to find out recently that it ain't going to do a damn bit of good so why bother?
Many jobs in IT today do stipulate that the potential employee have a college degree with X number of years experience, but most of those (and many others) will accept "equivalent experience" as a substitute for the degree. The only place I can see this being an issue is for government contracting (you are on a lower pay scale w/o a degree), and possibly places like MS, IBM, and Sun... but who the fuck wants to work there anyway?
People in my position could go back and finish a degree, and then possibly get an advanced degree, but I'm getting older and starting to burn out writing code for someone else. In the next few years I will be starting up a business or two anyway and I doubt that a CS degree will help with that.
Anyway, I guess that I would like to have that piece of paper that says I actually finished the program, but realistically thinking it just isn't worth my time anymore.
Great for you, I have a doctorate from Oxford on applications of formal methods to massively parallel systems. Watching Tony Hoare prove Quicksort correct using Z is kinda useful and interesting but not because you are likely to invent an algorithm. I don't think I have ever worked on a project where algorithm performance was a major problem. Sure there are stupid choices (like the database package I once tested that used bubblesort).
You say - get them out of a book. Lemme ask you, how do they get into the book in the first place ?
Well probably Knuth or Hoare thought it up. Offhand I can't think of a really interesting algorithm since quicksort.
Its like the difference between arithmetic and problem sets. The ability to manipulate abstract algebra is an interesting and somewhat useful skill. I can hire people with that skill by the boatload (sic). What I want is people who can map from the concrete to the abstract and back again. About one comp sci student in ten that I interview is capable of that.
See, that's what Computer "Science" is really about. Ask Dr. Knuth - the father of Computer Science, whether algorithms are important or software engineering is ? He's written 3 tomes on algorithms, none on software building.
Actually that was the point of the extended books on the TeX documentation - which I have read and discussed with Knuth when I was working on adding math markup to HTML. It is not an algorithmic problem, its a representational one.
Making large projects work should technically not even be in Computer Science. Its mostly a management skill
Again you miss the point, I am not looking for robots who I have to spoon-feed problems to. I am looking for people who can take a set of requirements and an outline architecture and make it work with existing code. I don't want someone who can't use the code manager, or writes code that only he can understand.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
It was insanely difficult, and as an experienced programmer whose contributed significantly to several major OS project and started two of his own, I nearly drowned. The graduation rate was 30%. Even then a lot of people who could only be described as dildos made it through.
I was *appalled* one day when a friend called me from la sierra university down the street, he was having trouble with one of his assignments, "Did I have a minute?" His assignment -- write a program that converted Celsius to Fahrenheit. Specifically, he was stuck on the algebra of the situation. He didn't understand the equation 9/5x+32.
That being said, these corporations are full of shit, these people are quickly weeded out. Look through the smoke screen. There is a pool of talented engineers working at Walmart and living with their parents, if they're having trouble finding them they aren't looking.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It's funny, I graduate last year an Ivy League Institution with a degree CS and I would be more then happy to have that job. At least then I wouldn't have to be searching for a job in the retail sector. I have a $160,000 education and yet I can't even get a job selling computers at circuit city.
Hate to point this out but you are citing propaganda from a right wing think tank, the CATO Institute. It was founded by the Koch family among others who own one of largest energy companies and polluters in the U.S.
http://www.counterpunch.org/behan01192004.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/behan01192004.html
The Koch's are best friends with the Bush family and huge backers of George W.'s reelection campaign. One of the elder's in this family had a little fling with Anna Nicole Smith.
One of the CATO directors is, or at least was, Rupert Murdoch head of the Fox network and their right wing propaganda news network.
These people have a vested interest in trying to downplay the consequences of outsourcing. The Cato Institute and the Bush administration are 100% pro big business and pro wealth. They are 100% indifferent to the welfare of the U.S. middle and lower classes, you know the people that work for a living, except they want Bush to get reelected so they NEED to churn out this crud in the hopes people will believe it and still vote for him. I'm assuming you must be upper middle class aspiring to the upper class or just dumb to believe it. The Bush administration has put out rosy labor projections every year they've been in office and NONE of the jobs they promised would be created by cutting taxes for the rich have been created. Correction they have been created but they are being created in China and India.
The current rush to outsourcing is unprecedented in U.S. history. It is the product of a perfect storm, cheap container shipping, cheap telecom, collapsing trade barriers and the opening of China's economy and its massive, cheap labor pool. Couple that with the fact U.S. labor has been priced out of the global labor market by years of inflation, prosperity and declining education. This is not a transient anomoly to dismiss. Its an accelerating trend. It is either naive or deceitful to contend that its business as usual and its nothing to worry about. It was not so long ago that the U.S. trade deficit was $50-$100 billion dollars and we were concerned. It is now $500 billion dollars and exploding. The U.S. simply can't sustain this hemoraging of cash indefinitely. The multinational corporations on the other hand don't care. You see they are for the most part now truly multinational, headquartered in the Caribbean and manufacturing wherever they can find the cheapest labor. If the U.S. craters they will just sell goods to the newly affluent Chinese and Indians, its a bigger market than the U.S. anyway and they are just now aspiring to by all the things American's already have. The execs and share holders will probably still get rich unless the Chinese and Indian execs manage to fox them too. Whatever happens they will be living in gated communities or the Caribbean and will be largely indifferent to the fact most American's are going to be pushed in to poverty in the next couple of decades. Most American's simply cant compete head to head with workers in China and India without working for what are poverty wages in the U.S. Maybe they could take solace in service jobs that have to be in the U.S. but the Bush administration is eager to launch a jobs program for Mexican labor to insure those jobs will also go to the cheapest possible labor. So you are going to have to train a very select class of jobs to make a good living in the next couple of decades, lawyer or an MBA heading for a position in a multinational are probably the best bets.
The Chinese economy ia already at 6 trillion and is expected to eclipse the U.S. and EU, now at a little over 10 trillion, in another 10-20 years. I doubt its going to take that long myself.
There has been a real loss of more than 2 million jobs under the Bush administration which hasn't happened since the great depression. It can be attributed to the overmployment of the bubble and 9/11 but there is simply no way the U.S. economy is going to create good jobs again with the current ru
@de_machina
In the name of fairness, why don't you go take the LSAT, score in the 90th+ percentile (because that's what it takes to get into a tier one law school), then go look at Havard's curriculum for law school (where you will be doing A LOT of pro-bono work and A LOT of case review, and taking quite a few classes...) and then tell me that law school is a cake walk? ...just to shut people like you up. I took enough history courses with my engineering degree to get a minor if I so desired. Even ones that weren't required. I would have LOVED to have become a historian - unfortunately, the pay is miserable.
Not all EE's are illiterate, and this one in particular can legalese with with best of them. So don't paint us all with the same brush - and while I have no problem reading and interpreting Canadian law - I had to take a law course to qualify for the engineering association, FWIW, as well.
All engineers in this country are required to take many economics, arts, and english courses - humanities - so they are well rounded. Arts students IMHO do not have the burden of mathematics and science placed upon them that would make THEM as well rounded.
There are exceptions that prove BOTH rules. The other fact is lawyers do not produce new products in a society. They are a result of people being greedy and utterly miserable to one another. The state of the legal profession in Canada is not as bad as the USA - the concept of "nominal" damages still exists.
Who's the one painting who with the big brush? Nowhere did I state my skills were superior. I stated that EE and ME are the most difficult UNDERGRADUATE degrees to take. If you do an informal survey on campus, you will find most students agree with me. Law is a GRADUATE calling.
Secondly, I stated that I believe math is NOT difficult, and that it is mearly taught incorrectly.
Perhaps you (the lawyer) are the one who should learn to read more critically. Or, are you compensating for something?
..don't panic
I say that's BS. I went to high school in the 70s; it was incredibly lax. I used to make a point of doing all of my homework each day in the 25-minute study hall at lunch hour. I could do it because they just didn't give us that much work.
When I look on the news I always see people saying that we need to pile more and more work on students, and that they need to spend more time learning math and science and computers. Well, my high school had exactly one PDP-8 shared by 2000 students, and (much to my dismay) physical education was the top priority class (8 semesters required). My math and science classes were a breeze for most of the students.
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. While I was there I often saw groups of those highly-educated foreign students huddling at tables struggling to do their studies communally. Their background allowed them to eventually crank through their work, but without much imagination or independence. In contrast, I often figured out a unique shortcut to get the work done quickly so that I could get out to happy hour.
How could this be? I think that it was because the culture in the USA promoted experimentation and self-initiative. I learned more playing around on my own with soldering irons, model rockets, home-built pyrotechnics, my teenage-punk muscle car, etc. than any high-school lab could have taught.
I think that if we're having problems cranking out good engineers today, it's because we've lost that edge in instilling self-initiative in kids. Maybe it's because everything is so pre-fab today, like the way it's hard to find a set of generic Lego bricks, and kids don't have to use their imaginations as much. Maybe it's because there are fewer areas left where a guy tinkering in his garage could make a breakthrough like the original Apple computer, so people just don't try. Maybe it's because parents don't spend as much time with their kids; I learned a huge amount of stuff doing projects with my dad. I don't know, but I sure don't think that cramming more work onto school children is going to fix it. Creating a top-notch engineer is a much more complex process than a bunch of school assignments.
What's interesting is the lack of these basic skills in so many people I've encountered with CS degrees in my working life.
It's downright shocking, even, how unadaptable some of these people are. Many BS in CS people I've worked with spent all their time learning (insert programming language of choice here) and failed to learn the basic lessons programming teaches. It seems like a lot of these people missed the forest for the trees, which is part in parcel to the point I was driving at.
As for loving what they do, in my IT department of ~50 people, I'd say a scant 15% of them are interested enough in what they do for a living to work on something related but outside the scope of their actual 9-5 required teching. I couldn't be happier that I've found something I like enough that when I hang it up for the day at the Windows shop, I want to go home and mess with my Debian box, or hack an XBox, or read advisories on www.cert.mil, or post on /. or whatever.
Seems like most of my colleagues can't punch out fast enough so they can forget about tech for another day.
It's lame, and sort of sad.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
Sure, outsourcing is not to save money. It's to gain access to better educated engineers. Yup. And, I have a bridge to sell you, too.
OK, I'm in hardware, not software, so my experience may not be 100% typical for Slashdot readers. And in my field, it isn't India, but rather China and Taiwan where all the jobs are going.
I work for a Fortune 100 corporation, whose celebrity CEO is a huge and very public advocate of offshore oursourcing. And, she's notorious for laying off people by the thousands.
The last project I did (before quitting my division in disgust and completely changing job functions) was a design that I was instructed to outsource to China. I needed a staff of about 12 engineers. I was given only four and told to make do, without schedule or scope slip, and to use a Chinese outsource vendor in lieu of a more complete engineering staff. The corporation told me which exactly vendor to use. I had essentially no degrees of freedom.
To cut a long story short, the program was a disaster. Almost every single task that the outsource vendor did, had to be re-done in house to get it done right. The outsource vendor was incompetent, dishonest, and outright unethical. Oh, and in case you're wondering: the outsource house was one of the big name-brand Chinese houses, not some fly by night operation.
My tiny team pulled out all the stops, made unbeleivable efforts, sacrificing their private lives, and somehow managed to pull it off, with minimal schedule and scope slippage. They succeeded not because of the help they were getting from the outsource vendor, but rather despite the "help" they were getting.
After the product was launched, it came time for management speechifying and self-congratulation, and what happened? Our mid-level managers declared the outsource model to be a huge success, thereby meeting their objectives and collecting their bonusses!
My team dispursed to the four winds in dusgust, some leaving the company, some transferring to other job functions, but none ever willing to go through another similar program again.
So, while this comment is admittedly based on a sample size of one, it's a pretty representative one -- big, famous silicon valley corporation using a well known, large name-brand outsource vendor to replace two-thirds of an R&D team.
And in this instance, there is absolutely NO WAY it was done to gain access to better-educated engineers. The quality of the outsource engineers was pathetic. It was done to save money, plain and simple. I happen to beleive this case is typical of what's going on throughout the high tech industry. I know of many other examples that are just as clear cut, although once again I stress that I'm talking about Hardware/China, rather than Software/India.
One more observation. The company DID save money, so in that sense, it WAS successful (for some narrow definition of the word). But only because of the behavior it elicited from the engineers on my team. I'd call it a triumph for short-term cost-saving without regard for long-term consequences. We bust our butts to help the company out of their bad management decision. Could this model produce such a "success" a second time? No way! You can only abuse people this way once. Businesses are trying to make this sort of practice S.O.P., but it won't work. Sooner or later, they'll have abused and burned out all of their best people, and then youy REALLY will have to depend on the Chinese outsource house. Then, we'll see how successful the model really is.