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U.S. Science Gap Fictional?
James Cho writes "There are more science and engineering students than ever, says one Newsweek journalist. Inflated counts of Chinese and Indian students have created the myth of the U.S. science gap. While no gap exists yet, an exodus of retiring U.S. scientists could create one." From the article: "...a country's capacity for scientific and commercial innovation does not correlate directly with its number of scientists and engineers. Hard work, imagination and business practices also matter."
Why bust your hump getting MS or PhD in one of the hard sciences/engineering, only to land a job making less than 80k?? OR ... you can go to law school, or get an MBA, or sell cell phones, or flip real estate, and have a much greater earning potential for much less work. Until wage scale for engineering and the sciences returns its proper level there will be a deficit of people entering those careers.
I don't think it's an issue of the number of scientists, but rather how many do something so useful as to significantly change our society for the better.
If the federal government wants to increase our scientific advancements, it would be in their best interest to offer prizes for such things as solar panel efficiency, new energy devices, spaceship design (easy way to get to Mars if we had to), cure for certain diseases, etc.
(I don't know if they currently do prizes or not. I haven't read up on it.)
By prizes, I mean maybe a tax-free cash payout, no personal income taxes for the person for life, etc. Prizes that would guarantee security for the person for life.
I find it ironic that the only people likely to care about this apparent decline in US Scientists is us, the Science types.
There is a comment in the article pointing out that Indian and Chinese engineering graduates do "only a 2- 3 year course similar to our associate degreess" in the UK for certain, when you go to school to study, say, electronic engineering, that's ALL you will study for your three years (well, it was 20 years ago) there was none of this majoring/minoring crap it was 9-5 EE (and maths, and labs) for three years. If the Chinese and Indians do the same, THATS why you really DO have a skills shortage. In our old style system, you had to have had a modicum of liberal arts before you went to school, not expecty to be taught it at the expense of your degree.
Far more interesting is the comment that prices are FINALLY going up in the market, as shortage of supply has its wonderful effect.
I suggest we FIGHT to restrict the supply of Engineers and scientists, and not whinge about there not being enough.
Steve
" if an american engineer can do the work of 11 Indian engineers."
BLEEEEEPPP. Troll alert.
The universities love to talk about the "science gap" because they hope to tap into Washington's money faucet. Congress fell for the missile gap during the Cold War and the PhD-granting institutions figured out that they could use the same logic to get more cash. But the cash isn't spread out evenly. Tons of it goes to create new PhDs but little goes to employ them. That's why less than 5% of the PhDs get jobs in academia practicing their specialty. There just aren't that many jobs.
To get rid of the PhD gap, they should stop flushing newly minted PhDs out of the system. Create a sustainable system where 50-80% of the PhDs can use the knowledge they have. Too many have to go out and get a new career. It's just a rip off of the US taxpayer.
So whenever big science comes along talking about a shortage of funding, I laugh. They're terrible liars.
I am an engineer with a Master's Degree and even one of those silly Professional Engineer licenses. I work for a Mortgage company as an analyst / project manager. I gave-up on engineering years ago due to low salaries, poor opportunities and companies going down the tubes. People who fix cars make way more than engineers. Not a slam on them as I am thinking about going to tech school to do such a career change. There is simply a glut of people out there with technical degrees. Try hiring a programmer; you get flooded with thousands of resumes.
Hard work is meaningless in a bureaucracy. Imagination and innovation are simply incompatible with bureaucracy and office politics. Only business practices matter. That is why the modern workplace is an adversarial, backwards, anti-innovation toilet.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Business men claim that there is a lack of engineering talent grown here in the U.S. What they really mean is that there is a lack of U.S. engineers who are willing to work 60 hours a week for coolie wages - which is why they hire foreign engineers, programmers etc.
Technical people get very little respect in the U.S. Last week's Battlestar Galactica - where an engineering officer was promoted to command showed the way that the "people people" view technical people: "they only know how to deal with machines", "its all about the people - don't forget that" Of course "people people" are not technical people for the very simple reason that they can't be. The technical people who go into management tend to be technical incompetents who couldn't cut it where they were.
"People people" tend simply to be emotional bullies - stand up to them and they wilt. "People people" tend to make bad decisions that screw things up - hurting a lot of people in the process. Mostly their emotional strength is used for such ridiculous things as breaking off relationships - instead of making things work, they insure things are broken. While technical people get little respect from managers most managers don't know that the technical people are laughing at them behind their backs.
And yes, there is such a thing as a good manager - just like there is such a thing as an incompetent engineer.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, all deeply involved in technology but no degree for them. While not even close to their level i left college and joined the Navy. In 1972 I started working in tech. Did some systems programming. Did some hardware design and was deeply involved in a few very significant products. Put 2 kids through college, eventually got a BS an MS and an MBA at night cause I wanted to. Have anice house. Had a nice airplane. Lived in 3 countries. Retired froma major vendor after 33 years. Started a second career with a small "free software" company and love it. And I am no genius.
And I know some bright people do have degrees. rms for example
Point: While I would have been disappointed if my kids did not get degrees, I wouldn't confuse education with diplomas.
Hard work, imagination and business practices also matter.
In my experience, many organisations are organized in such way that it is barely possible for scientists to run a project successfully to completion. The more complacent they are, the more dysfunctional they tend to be.
The reason is simple. To get a scientifict project (in fact any project) near its goalpost, you typically need to coordinate a number of elements in an intelligent manner: People, for you do need a certain critical mass of scientific knowledge to get a good team; space, in terms of laboratories and offices; equipment; engineering support; money; computer hardware and software; and so on. One missing element can be enough to ruin your day.
Now look at the typical "professionally" managed organisation and you will see that rather than coordinated, these elements tend to be fragmented, sometimes very highly fragemented, each with its own manager. Who often enough will fiercely defend his turf against any interference and takes care great to ensure that any inter-departemental coordination is only done at the highest possible level.
The theory of it usually is that the scientists need to be "supported" by taking the responsibility for budgets and computer and other circumstantial elements out of their hands, to leave them doing what they are best at, science. Scientists are supposed to be no good at administration. But in practice it only takes two breaths for these "supporting" departments to effectively take over control of the organisation, forcing the scientists to spend more of their time on fighting the system than on research.
It would actually be far more efficient to hire more scientists and to let them improvise things in their own sloppy way, than to hire managers and administrators who are supposed to be more efficient.
I couldn't find any discussion of this statement in the cited article, so the submitter appears to have pulled it out of an unspecified nether region. Is there any actual evidence to support it?
When I started college 17 years ago the conventional wisdom was that the job market for academic scientists was tight, but that it was bound to improve as the big cohort of professors who got tenure in the 1950s and 1960s -- when colleges and universities were expanding like mad -- retired and opened up positions for new folks.
Now, 17 years later, the job market for academic scientists seems to be as tight as ever. So I'm pretty skeptical of the old "imminent retirement" argument. As the article does point out, the rate at which science and engineering degrees are awarded has grown by 38% over the last two decades. Doesn't this growth more than assure that we can replace our existing scientists as they retire? Has the rate at which scientists retire really grown by more than 38% since 1990?
As several other posters mentioned, American students are becoming very worried about spending a lot of time in school and a lot of money pursuing a degree for which there will be a high supply and low demand. Doctors go into huge amounts of debt, but they know that the debt they incur now will more than pay for itself later. Same with lawyers...these two professions are immune to economic downturns, and we sure don't complain about a shortage of either!
Now consider a student who wants to do pure engineering or scientific research. PhD's just aren't drawing the same salaries or lifetime employment that they used to. Tenured professors are an exception, but corporate research labs (AT&T, IBM, Lockheed, etc.) would invest im employees for the long term and make sure they were able to continue producing research. Today, every employee, scientific or not, is interchangeable. If you don't want to work for $60K, someone else will. Add to this fact that there are some areas of the country whose housing prices and cost of living are way out of control (New York, California, Boston area, etc.) and they just happen to have the scientific jobs right in that area (pharmaceuticals, Silicon Valley, MIT, etc.) Another point to consider is that you're out of the workforce for an additional 4+ years. Traditional pensions which kept workers comfortable for life are gone, and you have to do it yourself with a 401K and such. If you don't start right when you're 21 and get your first job, you can miss out on huge amounts of money later on in life. This is part of the reason why PhD's demand higher salaries...some of them are starting their retirement savings at 30!
Ask yourself this: Would you be willing to watch your less-educated peers flip real estate or crawl their way up the MBA ladder, while you made comparatively less doing much more important work? For some, the answer is yes, and those are the people who should be in their chosen fields. I'm not a scientist, but I graduated with a scientific degree. I work in IT, and there's a definite difference between someone who took an MCSE course, and someone who takes the time to learn the systems they're working on inside and out. The second type of person would probably answer "yes" to this question, simply because they enjoy challenging work. Managers make more money, sure, but it is a totally different skill set. (If you think your boss isn't doing anything, look again. Good ones are constantly keeping their techies shielded from political battles so they can do their jobs.)
I also think the gap is made up by foriegn students, just an empirical observations by educators I know. Universities can't find enough good talent at home, but they still need to fill positions. Science in this country just isn't as important anymore, I guess.
One change that I'd like to see happen in general is a return to a stable workplace. Back in the day, it was unrealistic to switch jobs every few years and have to constantly worry about layoffs. A lot of technical people I know aren't buying houses or other things simply because they don't know whether their job will be yanked out from under them. If employers were forced to really think about their hiring as an investment, things would change for the better. The prosperity of the 50s and 60s was a result of a strong middle class with stable paychecks who could afford to buy things. Companies who hire someone with the intention of keeping them, giving them training, and putting them in places where they'll be productive will eventually see ROI. The other thing I'd like to change is the promotion structure in companies. Pure people management should not be the way to reward great technical people; it leads to ineffective management. Instead, identify your best leadership talent and technical talent, and compensate them on two parallel tracks. The more you produce, the better your compensation, in either track. That would be a fair way to go.
"There are more science and engineering students than ever, says one Newsweek journalist."
True Journalists don't make claims, they report facts. In this case, the journalist is real; he reports facts (he is one of the real journalists, at least in this case.) The NSF provides facts that prove that more scientists and engineers graduated in 2004 than ever before.
The real gap in the US is a different educational one. There are plenty of bright people, graduating and contributing, as the facts show. Empiral evidence, however, points us in the direction of concluding that there is a large contingent of US citizens who have no idea what to believe, cannot tell the difference between a fact and a claim, and ultimately get confused and just choose to believe what they want to, or have to to, to deal with the insecure feeling one gets when the people in control of their lives cannot be trusted.
I recently revised my theory on Bush. I do not believe he was behind the tainted election results. Those who fixed the election chose him because he falls into the latter category. He is willing to say "I have the authority to do it, or - it is true - or -it is a good idea - for the Bible/my advisors tell me so." Bush is not a puppeteer; he is the favorite puppet of the military industrial complex, American corporations, and those who would twist and manipulate the words of Christ and the Bible to facilitate their own (not very well) hidden agendas.
Sadly ironic
Chum the waters with enough bogus journalists and you can say whatever you want. The proverbial fourth part of the checks and balances system doesn't exist anymore, because people will think "that guy is just offering up his opinion
There is a lack of qualified journalists in the US, not scientists, and that is where the real problem lies.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Two comments:
1. Even having free tuition doesn't "nullify the cost/reward argument": you need to take into account the wages you would have earned had you been employed full-time instead of being in school. (This is probably more of an issue for PhD candidates, since they're typically in school longer than those pursuing an MS, and it is also probably more of an issue for people who want to enter academic careers in which the salaries are lower than in industry, especially since some people can get a job as an "engineer" at a computer company with a BA and make more than lots of professors. It could still be an issue for you, though: you need to run the numbers.)
2. How do you know that your experience was typical? It can be a big mistake to generalize from one data point. Maybe your department is at one extreme, and the papers and studies are accurate. Here's a different example: I teach in a math department at a public university, and about 70% of our new PhD students are from the US. Should I generalize from my observations? Maybe we should just trust the NSF on this one...
This is the way Bi-Coloured Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.
I'm currently an undergraduate at a small science/tech school majoring in physics. Since there are only a handful of people in my field of major the professors know each of us on a first name basis. What I'm getting at is I often speak with the professors about their research and interests.
If there is a deficit of science and engineering majors I doubt that is the true issue. I don't exactly believe the argument the quality and motivation of the graduates has decreased either - but rather ambitious research isn't what it used to be.
Just recently we had a story on the discovery of CCDs. The scientists had an idea, deviated from whatever project they were working on, an tested their idea which led to a new technology and market. This is where the problem lies - in the present industry there is little incentive for ambitious or abnormal projects. Funds are allocated for very specific projects, and if some side discovery is made with that funding it may very well be frowned upon (did I ask for a CCD chip!?). In the academia there is a similar attitude of "publish or perish". Why research cutting edge technologies involving complex quantum mechanics, nanotechnologies, and so on if there's a chance of failure? You don't, because if you failed you'd be done. So, many scientists are studying basic things that can be guaranteed results. The professor I know well here has toyed with the idea of testing the EPR hypothesis with entangled atoms or particles. Unfortunately that's difficult, and after much funding he could very well fail. So most likely he'll never try, which is a shame because if he succeeded it would be one for the textbooks. Instead he's studying something practical, such as wetting of surfaces, that can assure a solid review and published papers.
It's really unfortunate people aren't taking chances due to this attitude.
I just don't see how sci/tech/math can be our nation's comparative advantage. The laws of math and physics are the same in low-labor-rate countries. Apples fall down there too. Thus, it makes economic sense to do R&D there.
Some cite "innovation", but it is a myth that only western countries/peoples have innovation. Most of the "innovations" that come out of the US of late are marketing or legal innovations, not really technical ones.
For good or bad, consumer marketing is our comparative advantage because we consume more than any other country. Face the new music and prepare for the new dance. Sci/tech/math is dying or stagnant here because our cost of living is too high.
Table-ized A.I.
The median real estate broker makes about the equivalent of minimum wage. The ones that make the big bucks are a small minority in the profession, and they generally bring personal assets that aren't common, and aren't the product of "a few months' night classes." The pay distribution is pretty similar to that of writers -- sure there are a few writers who make millions of dollars for what's for them pretty easy work, but the median income for writers from their writing similary is not even a living wage. The ones who make the big money in writing, like the big money real estate brokers, may have gotten a minimal education in their craft which helped, but the main thing is a natural talent for it.
The difference with engineering is that those without a real aptitude for it, if they work hard enough and pursue enough years of education, can still get decent-paying work in the field. Still, even in engineering it's the people with natural talent who take most of the big financial rewards -- often rewards in the same ballpark as top realtors and writers.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
They always say that there are two things you don't talk about at work, religion and politics, because it always degenerates into an argument where both sides are utterly convinced that they're correct and usually end up doing little more than slinging mud. Productive conversation comes to nil very quickly.
I'd like to say that, outside of work, there is one thing you shouldn't bother talking about and that's work. Why? Let's profile it the same way we would profile religion or politics. There are two sides. There is one side that has it good (whether because they were born into it or they got lucky) and one side that does not have it good (whether because they were born into it or because they didn't get lucky). Let's get one thing straight. How hard you work has nothing to do with it. Zero, zilch. Let's get another thing straight. How smart you work has nothing to do with it. Zero, zilch. Plenty of people will claim that they made it to success through hard work and perserverence but that is simply not true. It is a correlation and causation disconnect. Those very same people could claim, with the same statistical accuracy, that they made it to success because the weather had been just right on the day they hit their promotion, or their hair was exactly 2.5 inches long, or because they had eaten turkey the night before. Let me reiterate: the only two factors that affect the separation of the two groups are birth and luck.
So now that the two groups are defined, let's look at how the conversation will inevitably go. This is the same way that employment conversations have gone on this board, and many others, and in many pubs, and around many lunch tables, for years.
Person A is the person who has it good. Person B is the person who does not.
Conversation 1:
Person B: "My job sucks."
Person A: "You're an incompetent fucktard who can't do anything right and doesn't concentrate on your job."
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 2:
Person A: "My job is great."
Person B: "Mine isn't."
Person A: "You're an incompetent fucktard who can't do anything right and doesn't concentrate on your job."
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 3:
Person B: "I'm not getting paid enough."
Person A: "You should be happy just to have a job! There are people starving in China!"
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 4:
Person A: "I just bought a new car!"
Person B: "I wish I could afford one."
Person A: "You should be happy just to have a job! There are people starving in China!"
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
And that's how it always goes. Why do we even bother anymore? Nothing ever gets resolved. Person A is always self-satisfied and, usually, doing nothing but trolling B. B is always frustrated and looking for that lucky break and wishes A would quit needling them, for just once, and offer some real advice.
Who wrote this script? It's getting old.
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
Not to mention a patent system that allows people to innovate without getting their @$$ sued off for the innovations they come up with. These patent holding companies are killing our innovativeness. All they do is come up with an idea, patent it, then wait for someone else to come up with the idea, do all the hard work of design and implementation, then they sue because "it was my idea first!".
It has been said that "Americans invent as the French paint, or the Italians sculpt." If we are to stay ahead in our technical prowess, we need to remove the chains of thought that hold our top engineers back.
There's a quote that I particularly like from Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities which reads: "Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings."
This holds true for nearly all innovations. We take steps advancing ourselves from the progressions made from our forefathers. We had to invent the airplane before we could invent the jet engine. The automobile begat airbags. If some SciFi writer of the 1930's had invented a fanciful (yet at that time impossible) design for some type of internally jet propelled engine, then sued the first person(s) to come actually come up with a working plan of that idea; we may be living in a different era today.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I spent the time and money to get a MSCS. After going through 2 other majors I found I simply love computer science. I love learning. I love solving problems. And, I really get a charge out of seeing products I worked on selling in stores or being used in offices.
:-)
Troule is, the older I got, the more grey there was in my beard, the harder it got to find jobs. No matter what kind of training you have, in the US there is a serious bias against old people. Many people, (most people?) assume that if you are over 40 you can't possibly know anything about technology.
So, after getting the graduate degree, spending thousands of dollars every years for books and training, and shipping I don't know how many commercial products, not to mention writing and publishing many articles; I can't *buy* a job in technology. I was laid off on my 49 birthday in 2001 and I have not been able to find anything since then.
Once in a while I get an interview... It ends as soon as they see that I am "old"...
So, I am training to be a high school teacher. I teach part time at the local CC, but I can't get on there full time. There are so many people like me out there that I am actually under qualified to teach at a community college. In my neighborhood there are a half a dozen of us. We live on savings, part time jobs, and our wives incomes. It seems you can't get away with treating old women the way you can get away with treating old men.
So, if you want to go into science and technology, please do. The world needs you. But, plan on "retiring" by age 50 because no company needs you after that age.
Stonewolf
P.S.
Forced retirement isn't all bad. At age 50 I took up a martial art and meditation. The result is that I can now kick ass on most (not all!) of my young students, but I don't want to.
Heh, I'm assuming you're an engineering major...for the sciences (mostly biology and physics, less so for chemistry) take away 20k for each of those.