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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?"
Because anything that makes the least bit of sense never does, in America.
Cynicism aside, this is a much needed proposal for the future of America. We are being left behind in so many markets due to increased global competition, but we are also lagging far behind in quality accessible education (meanwhile, tuition rates continue to rise).
I wish Senator Baucus the best of luck with this. He deserves our support.
Aside from that, don't forget that giving free college education to foreigners is great, considering that you get to choose how long you keep them, and where you let them work.
You save twelve years of fundamental education, and with just four, you get an engineer who will work where you want him to work, and for as long as you wish.
The same thing is done by European countries, they import graduates for example from Latin America, give them a free or a cheap Phd, and they get a cheap doctor in whetever they need, for 3 o 4 years of education. Of course, that money comes back in patent royalties, and expensive technology exports even to the same countries that provided the people.
As such, I'm a little skeptical of the scheme, but without knowing more of the implementation details I'm afraid I can't critique it in depth...
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So if you participate in this program and then lose your job, or become disabled, and are unable to work in the field for 4 years, not only do you have the regular problems of unemployment but you also have the sudden obligation to re-pay all that tuition? From the student's point of view, it seems like quite a gamble that the job market will be favorable 4 years down the road.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
If there is any sort of cap, the "free" tuition will just go to the people who would have paid anyways. If you assume that people who are engineering students are so because they like the field, they are probably the best qualified to be in the field. So if these scholarships are at all merit-based, chances are the same kids would get them. If they are not merit based, then you'll get poorly-qualified people signing up just to take advantage, crowding out the few who are qualified but are too poor.
So either the scholarships need to be available to anyone who meets the simple criteria of graduating and working in the field, or they probably won't have the intended effect of increasing the quantity and maintaining or improving the quality of engineering graduates. They'll just end up being a hand-out to the people who don't need handouts.
Honestly, I think the USA's best bet is brain-drain. We need to tear-down a lot of the post 9/11 every-foreign-student-is-a-potential-terrorist rules, and kill H1B, replacing it with a fast-track to citizen-ship visa (I say go so far as to make citizen-ship a requirement after 3 years on this theoretical visa) so that we attract and then keep all the smart people from the rest of the world.
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One of the big issues with education in the USA is poor preparation by parents. Kids go into school not knowing how to read at even a basic level, not able to pay attention, disrespectful of teachers, and in general are just shoved onto schools for them to babysit the little angels.
I know it sounds harsh, but the kids already in school are pretty much a lost cause. This country needs to focus on getting parents to perform the roles they are supposed to - socialize and prepare their children to be productive members of society.
Sitting them in front of the TV to watch the same DVDs over and over again, or to play Grand Theft Auto and shoot the homies doesn't count. That produces the misfits that are coming out of the schools in droves.
If this country wants educated people, we need to approach this problem differently than just offering free degrees in math and science. They are crap degrees now anyway. Kids get passed up the ladder from grade to grade because the teachers don't want to get dinged for flunking a bunch of illiterates and the classes have been marginalized to the lowest common denominator.
The problem right now is with parents. They are too interested in their own little universes to properly care for their kids. They need to know and act like kids are the responsibility they really are. They need to show interest in their kids. Not just plop them in front of anything that will keep them occupied while they watch American Idol or some Monday night footbal game.
If it increases the pool of qualified science teachers, it is -- and right now, there is a real shortage of math/sci teachers who know science and math, even leaving aside the issue of their teaching skills.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The motivation?
Passion, sir. Passion.
Honestly, if you have a degree in Physics and can't find a job, I'm not sure I want you in front of students as you must be a horribly weird person.
You ever thought that the job the Physics PhD wants is a teaching job?
--Mike
I'm not really sure if your post is implying that a PhD might teach poorly, but I had a PhD in physics as my high school physics teacher. I had never had another person with a PhD as a teacher before, and he was by *far* the best teacher I ever had. Pretty much exclusively due to his existence, I am now a fairly well published researcher getting my PhD in Materials Engineering from MIT. Granted, he's special in a lot of ways because he was willing to work as a teacher in an inner city high school despite being somewhat overqualified by our typical standards. However, I suspect that anyone who is able to get a PhD understands and is excited enough about their field so much that if they try at all they'll be able to generate many future PhDs who would never have thought about doing something more difficult than IT. Being Weird to an employer definitely does not imply that you are a bad physicist!
I plan to teach someday too, but currently I'm enjoying the heck out of myself doing actual research, so it'll probably be a few decades. =)
part of me wonders how effective a PhD would be at teaching high school students. Honestly, if you have a degree in Physics and can't find a job, I'm not sure I want you in front of students as you must be a horribly weird person.
What a small-minded comment. Not everyone is just after the money, you know. Most people who go to the trouble of getting a PhD have a passion for the subject, and often that is accompanied by a passion for sharing the subject through teaching. Have you ever considered that the person wanted to teach high school students, rather than viewing it as some sort of fallback job?