Free Tuition for Math, Science, and Engineering?

Gibbs-Duhem writes "Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus wants free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon working or teaching in the field for at least four years. From the article: 'The goal, he said in an interview last week, is to better prepare children for school and get more of them into college to make the United States more globally competitive, particularly with countries like China and India. "I think the challenge is fierce, and I think we have a real obligation to go the extra mile and redo things a bit differently, so we leave this place in better shape than we found it," Baucus said.' Do you think this would help with the US's lackluster performance in these fields?"

Comments

Re:I don't think so

[jmorris42]

> Honestly, I think the USA's best bet is brain-drain.

I agree. We don't need more damned unskilled labor, our government schools provide that in abundence. But if we want a snowball's chance in hell of maintaining our lifestyle and leadership position in the world we need motivated, educated people by the boatload.

So close the US/Mexico border by any means needed up to and including double walls with crazed killbots roaming between em. Then open the spigots on legal immigration... but in a totally selfish way. Just like you said, brain drain the world. Those declaring an intent to become US citizens move to the front of the line and ditch the H1B program.

Europe is about to descend into a long Arabian Nightmare and even those willfully refusing to see it will start cluing in on it in another couple of years and be looking for an option. We could cherry pick the best and brightest couple of million of em without even making an effort at recruiting. Not to mention how many we could pick off elsewhere with some effort, especially when it bacame clear to the smart ones just what we were doing and the likelyhood of it bringing about a total economic and cultural Golden Age... that they were being invited to be a part of. If we made sure we got a good geographic and ethnic mix and discouraged them from settling into little groups we wouldn't have anything like the problems with Americanizing them we have been having with the Mexican invasion so there wouldn't be much of a nativist backlash to worry about.