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

I think it's good

[orkysoft]

It allows poor people to get a university degree, which is really expensive in America, and so build a better future for themselves and their children.

Also, it should be good for the country as a whole, having more scientists and engineers. Those extra beakers and hammers are really valuable!

Re:I think it's good

[MontyApollo]

I'm not convinced that there are that many jobs available in science (thus not much need for more graduates). Engineering is probably different though.

Re:I think it's good

[orkysoft]

I haven't had time to think it through that well either, and now that you mention it, there is a plan in The Netherlands to make school books free for high school children. My cynical reaction to that is that the school book publishers will raise their prices, and only a few people in the government will notice it while the publishers laugh all the way to the bank.

But then again, I also believe the plan to make people pay per kilometer of car use is a scam at best (some IT company pushing a ridiculously expensive project that will keep them busy for years), an Orwellian system at worst (it involves tracking every car on the road). It can be, and is in fact being, done much simpler by having a tax on gasoline. That automatically punishes the gas guzzlers more than the fuel-efficient cars, as well. I can't understand how the politicians who are pushing this project haven't thought of that as well. I can't remember any of them arguing why more fuel taxes aren't a much cheaper way of metering car use.

Re:I think it's good

[harlemjoe]

On several points, I firmly disagree.

Students saddled with debt The recent student loan scandals have shown us that most student "aid" in America is in the form of loans, and the whole industry is one big racket engineered to rob the unprepared (students) and the taxpayer (govt subsidy on interest). Recent college graduates, not to mention dropouts, are saddled with insane amounts of debt.

Government money better spent this way

From the recent New Yorker: President Bush's 2007 budget shows, for instance, that it's four times as expensive for the government to subsidize and guarantee private loans as for it to issue those loans itself. In other words, the current system is not just corrupt. It's also inefficient. So why are we stuck with it?"

Finally, my personal hypothesis is that was placement in college affordable for a demanding major, the more incentive for children from poorer sections of society to avidly pursue it. "Free" is a very powerful word. As long as it's reasonably strenuous to get in (i.e. quality and selectivity are not being sacrificed for price or subsidy), I think the demand could be great enough to drive reform in individual high schools. Inspiring such bottom-up reform in the bloated bureaucracy that is our public school system is far more worth it than any "top-down", watered down establishment approach.

Re:I think it's good

[orkysoft]

You are entirely right, but I don't know how politicians could fix the mentality of parents, other than by employing extremely heavy-handed measures, which would probably be unconstitutional.

So educating the kids and encouraging them to become responsible adults, despite their bad upbringing, might be the best they can do.

Re:I think it's good

[Gibbs-Duhem]

What struck me as most interesting is the "or teaching" part. The people who major in pure science, who can't find or don't want jobs in science, can't just immediately move into finance as I see many of my friends doing. Instead, they have to do *something*, and if that something involves providing a larger pool of qualified high school science teachers, then society wins. It's sort of like military service, they commit to either teaching, or actually doing work in the field, but either way, they *can't* flip burgers or go into finance without repaying all that tuition.

Re:I think it's good

[deniable]

Yeah, but making teachers isn't as hard as keeping them. We have huge problems with retention. Having a teacher survive the first five years is hard. This proposal may keep them for four.

Re:I think it's good

[AstrumPreliator]

show me one country full of highly educated people that are in poverty.

Cuba.

Granted their situation is a bit unique because of the USSR's involvement there.

Re:I think it's good

[XchristX]

show me one country full of highly educated people that are in poverty Easily.

1. Sri Lanka. 91% literacy rate. Abysmally high poverty and an economy that's in the shitter thanks to the little Sinhala-Tamil "race war" of theirs

2. Palestine. Most Palestinians are actually very well educated, but, well, you read the papers, right?

Not my intent to disparage any country or culture, mind you. My point is that education is certainly necessary to remove poverty, but it is far from sufficient.

Re:I think it's good

[xenocide2]

I have a story from my senior year in high school. During AP physics (a class of ten boys, the only girl enrolled dropped the class before the first day of school!) once day, a former student of the teacher came in to give a short demonstration of neat things. It turns out that the dude had a PhD in chemistry, and offered to work for the school. As I understand it, the school didn't consider him because he would cost too much. So now he works for the EPA figuring out ways to measure emissions without being on an owner's property (who often dislike surprise inspections). Now maybe he simply was asking for too much, or maybe they were already looking at budget cutbacks, but 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.

Re:I think it's good

[Anonymous Coward]

I call BS on all this "poor people can't get money to go to college" crap.

My parents are quite wealthy. Both of them were college educated, and coming from poor families, both of them paid for college themselves and believed that their children should do the same. I immediately filed for my FAFSA for student loans after being accepted into a UC school for an electrical engineering degree, only to discover that even though my parents were giving me nothing, their "expected parental contribution" was in the several 10's of thousands of dollars range (seriously, wtf?). In fact, their incomes disqualified me from receiving subsidized stafford loans and required I get PLUS loans (which I, not my parents, currently make the payments for...).

Of course, if I had been a minority or had my parents made much less money, I'd have had an easier time receiving financial aid. There's also a boat load of scholarships available if you are, surprise, a female/minority/poor person going into engineering. Not so much if you're a white guy who's parents are wealthy.

Back on topic, I've made the point for a while that the nation should be subsidizing the education of Science & Engineering, since the initial investment now will generate a boat load of revenue in the form of taxes (both income and corporate!) over the next decade. We REALLY need to encourage people to go into S&E as they enter college - the mistake being made is that we push it in the middle school/high school level, and students drop the ball when entering University so that they can "enjoy the college experience," which is funny since I quite enjoyed my engineering education. I make enough now to be able to pay off my student loans over the next couple years and smirk as my roommate goes back to being a barista at Starbucks with his communication degree (ironically the same job he worked when we started college).

Re:I think it's good

[SIIHP]

You bring up an interesting point, which I've never seen appropriately discussed.

In some of our special ed classes, there were what were called "co-teachers". In our specific implementation, there was essentially one teacher and one behavior specialist, who were also both trained in the other's discipline.

I've never seen this approach used in classes like biology, chemistry, or physics, classes that are hands on, lab oriented, and require special attention from the teacher.

Why not use two "teachers", one specialist in the subject, who also has teaching credentials, and one teacher who also has science credentials.

Re:I think it's good

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the joke on teaching mathematics through the decades:


Teaching Math Through The Decades
Teaching Math in 1950:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

Teaching Math in 1960:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?

Teaching Math in 1970:
A logger exchanges a set "L" of lumber for a set "M" of money. The cardinality of set "M" is 100. Each element is worth one dollar. Make 100 dots representing the elements of the set "M." The set "C", the cost of production contains 20 fewer points than set "M." Represent the set "C" as a subset of set "M" and answer the following question: What is the cardinality of the set "P" of profits?

Teaching Math in 1980:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

Teaching Math in 1990:
By cutting down beautiful forest trees, the logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down the trees? There are no wrong answers.

Teaching Math in 2000:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $120. How does Arthur Andersen determine that his profit margin is $60?

Teaching Math in 2010:
El hachero vende un camion carga por $100. La cuesta de production es.............

Re:I think it's good

[put_the_cat_out]

I couldn't agree more. I had a retired PhD physicist as a calculus teacher for two years in high school. At one point in his prior career, he had been a member of the Manhattan Project. He was the biggest influence on my choice of college and decision to become a pedigreed physicist.

Re:I think it's good

[jafac]

Maybe a better plan would be to take the money that would be spent on a NHS (National Health Care System) - and build free National Medical Schools to train new doctors - FUCK THE AMA. Vastly increase the number of new, qualified physicians in the job market.

Physician salaries plummet. Medical costs go down. Every OTHER industry in America begins to prosper again, because they can now afford to provide health care for their employees again - and we won't need to Nationalize or Socialize anything. All we need to do is break the AMA's Monopoly on Physician Schooling.

(yeah, there's still the drug-company problem. . . one thing at a time).

Great Idea

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon working or teaching in the field for at least four years.

Mandatory four-year teaching might cause some problems (flooding the teaching profession with irreverent or apathetic just-want-to-graduate students), but this is a great start to a great idea. As a current student struggling with something akin to $50k yearly tuition, I'd take this deal in a heartbeat. I think four years of teaching is a small price to pay for my own four years of education -- and I'd be giving back what the academic community had given me.

Another economic fallacy.

[Anonymous Coward]

There seems to be a fallacy that people believe where pumping out more college graduates somehow equals to more jobs being created and also helps create a better economy. This is just not true.

You have countries like Canada and Egypt where the government spends a lot of money on education but have a higher unemployment rate than the U.S.

The notion that pumping more money into a system ( especially when the government is involved) will fix any problem is just bad economics

Here is a paper that argues that what we need is to let the free market work, to get the government out of the education biz and NOT subsidize more college graduates.

The paper is called "The overselling of higher education"

http://www.johnlocke.org/acrobat/pope_articles/the _overselling_of_higher_education_report.pdf

I suggest all /.'s take a read.

Re:But have they considered

[wamerocity]

Me again. In all seriousness, a great book i would recommend to everyone to read is Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat." I thought it was very even-handed, straightforward view at globalization, outsourcing, and how it effects the American and worldwide marketplace. However, during his closing talks at the end of the book, he makes a very well-worded warning/prediction about the future of this country- that America needs to place more value on it's scientists and engineers or else it will lose them. In a country where MARKETING and SALES offer some of the best paid salaries, brilliant minds will not spend the money, time, and incredible effort it takes to get an engineering degree. We will continue outsourcing our engineers from India and China, and the time will come when China and India will outsource marketing and sales to the US, because it will be what we do best.

I truly applaud this senator for the initiative and believe that that ALL states should follow suit and offer a similar program, to help keep the sciences strong in the US.

Re:More selective != better

[Anonymous Coward]

Being surrounded by smart, motivated students already makes the school better because it inevitably encourages students to work harder and learn more - and probably also encourages the professors to think that the students are worth the effort of teaching/mentoring rather than just lecturing. It doesn't matter what facilities a school has if the students (and staff) don't care about what they're doing. My question wouldn't be whether better students make a school better, but whether traditional methods of selectivity actually get better students.

Re:Is the plan short-sighted?

[Wizworm]

He only has to forgive student loans after the student has been a resident in the state for 5 years. They have been doing this for teachers/doctors for a long time, haven't you guys ever seen Northern Exposure

My only issue is that this is nearly 10 years too late for me. Of my Engineering graduating class I know less than 5 people who stayed in the state.

$1000 for Graduating HS on Time

[Doc Ruby]

How about the government just gives everyone who graduates highschool on time $1000 cash, no questions asked? To use for college tuition, buying a car, a year of free cheeseburgers, or anything else they want, no strings attached.

It costs the government something like $30K a year to keep a person in jail. Not to mention how much it costs to run the rest of the judicial system, to build the jails, the damage caused by their crimes, or the taxes they could have paid if they were free to work. By the time we're done with the difference between a free person and a jailed person, it's probably over $50K a year. The average Federal jailtime is over 5 years per sentence, or well over $250K per prisoner (many get multiple sentences per lifetime).

People graduating HS on time are less likely to commit crimes and go to jail. So every person who the bonus spares from jail is worth over 250 people who get it, but still go to jail. In other words, if the increased on-time graduations reduce the crime rate even as little as 0.25%, they're worth it. It's probably closer to needing only 0.1% or less to "break even". And that's not counting other benefits, like increased productivity, reduced teen pregnancy, and all the other benefits of on-time graduation.

We can afford a lot more investment in Americans' education. Some targeting high performers who need more money for even higher performance. Some targeting low performers at risk of creating more damage than it costs to prevent. Education is always the investment with the best return. Investing more will pay off quickly, creating more money to invest, and improving the country across the board as a "byproduct".

Re:Yes, it would work.

[rkcallaghan]

My question is, what do you mean by "American"? Do I count, as a naturalized citizen of this wonderful country? Yes.

have you ever thought about why these people came over here to learn in the first place? Wouldn't you, for a free ride?

Seriously, when did "Americans" become so hostile towards immigrants? When our politicians gave them free education, and tax incentives to employers to hire them over equally qualified Americans who had to pay for their education with a lifetime of debt.

~Rebecca

Re:Yes, it would work.

[rronda]

You assume that the number of jobs is finite and therefore a foreign person will take the place of an American. At that level of education (and at any level really) many times jobs are created out of the work of this person (and the interaction with other highly skilled workers).So there is no evidence that your main assumption is even valid.

Yes, he/she will send money to their home country and will at the same time spend money in rent, services, not to mention that he/she will eventually start a family and pay for school for his/her American children. Finally most of the people in the most sophisticated fields of knowledge will choose to stay in the US, as his/her colleagues, conferences and job opportunities are all here. The money sent to the home country is most likely a small fraction of the wealth created by the worker.

Consequences for the research/credential question

[saforrest]

One major issue in my own undergraduate education (in mathematics and computer science) was the gulf between those who were comtemplating a future academic career in the subject, and those who merely wanted a credential to progress on to industry.

Yes, there are some students who straddle the fence — in a way, I was one myself — but for the most part the undergraduate student population is rather sharply divided between the research-directed and the credential-directed. The fact that programs have to accomodate both lead to conflicts — the research-directed students complain bitterly about dumbing-down of material and excessive commercial influence on the curriculum, while the credential-directed complain about having to learn a ton of useless theory which will be irrelevant to their future.

I mention this because I speculate that Max Baucus' proposal would certainly change the current equilibrium between these two camps, particularly if free tuition is only for science/engineering students. True, there would be a lot more research-directed types who can't get into university now for lack of funds, but I imagine most of the people who'd come who aren't there now would be credential-directed.

There's also another reason they'd be credential-directed, which is the tone set by the policy itself. There's something a little disturbingly utilitarian about the proposal of granting free tuition only to those people. This sort of philosophy makes me wonder whether the line would be drawn around science/engineering as a whole, or around only those science/engineering programs that have a utilitarian (read: "commercial") appeal. I would think it would be hard for the government to argue that engineering and category theory are "useful" but that philosophy and rhetoric are not.

If, however, research-directed programs are ruled out, the result would likely be a forcible segragation of research-directed and credential-directed students, even more than there is now. Maybe this is where we're headed anyway, but it would be regrettable as the forced mingling of the two has been hugely productive for both in the past.

Re:This is already going on....

[trogdor8667]

Tennessee did the same, only it was five years in impoverished areas in Tennessee. The kicker? You didn't get your tuition free at the time... the state simply agreed to pay off your loans AFTER your five years were up. And, to date, I've not heard of them actually paying a cent out...

Re:Yes, it would work.

[Wavicle]

Actually, I disagree. If we keep them, they take a job from an American. If we send them home, they compete with us from abroad, and make money for India/China instead of for the US. In either case, Americans lose.

Yeah, um... these Americans who are qualified for the job but losing them to Indian or Chinese candidates... Could you send them my way? It is damned near impossible for the company I work for (a semiconductor manufacturer) to get Americans just to apply. I don't like hiring foreign talent over native talent (actually I only give a recommendation), but when we have an open job requisition and I'm looking at 10 resumes (7 from India, 1 from China, 1 from Bangladesh and one native) and the only American candidate is laughably unqualified, WHO ARE THESE GUYS STEALING A JOB FROM?!

I used to be seriously critical of outsourcing and the H1-B program . I was fairly certain that my current employer wouldn't even consider me. I went from phone interview, to face-2-face interview to job offer in a couple days. I almost had heart failure when I told them to bump their already generous offer by 10% and they had the increase approved the next morning.

I have taken ongoing education courses at the local university trying to get some locals just to $*&%ing apply - AND THEY WON'T DO IT. It is 10x easier to hire US Citizens than to get an H1-B Visa sponsored. I hate recommending someone who has only a tenuous grasp of the English language. We need more STEM majors in this country so that I don't have to go through this shit.

We don't need more engineers

[Animats]

The US doesn't need more engineers. If it did, salaries would be higher. In 1970, engineering and law salaries were about equal, or so says the IEEE. That's certainly changed.

The US doesn't need more engineers because high-tech manufacturing has gone offshore. Where the manufacturing goes, the production engineering must go, and the design engineering follows. Then the brands go. Then top management. Then the financing.

Read the Lenovo story. They're not a spinoff of IBM. They're a successful Chinese PC company that bought IBM's PC business to expand. IBM is just the company to which Lenovo outsources US warranty service.

Re:Consequences for the research/credential questi

[Jazzer_Techie]

This is a very insightful point. I've definitely observed this divide within physics. The research-directed types (of which I would consider myself one) are willing to pursue careers (probably in academia) regardless of the financial benefit, assuming of course that it provides enough to subsist on.

The main draw of the credential directed outlook is financial, and I don't think it's schooling expenses, but rather long-term earning potential, and thus a sense of security, which is the main incentives. More research money makes a career in the field more appealing. No one wants to spend their entire life squabbling over a handful of $10k grants, but if you know your field is going to be well-funded, even if your salary is less, you gain a much greater sense of stability. (I think more people who have the inclination to do research would choose to be 'poor' and stably funded than either slightly wealthier and poorly funded or 'poor' and poorly funded.)

Thus, if one really wants to increase US science and engineering power, the first thing that needs to be done is to provide more federal funding of research. The private sector isn't going to fund pure research because of the long timescales on which it pays off. Long term investments are ideal roles for the government. Educational incentives are great, but it doesn't do any good if they're not given the resources to make use of their education.

Re:Any companies driven by passion?

[EL_mal0]

Most companies are started by passionate people. Because of that, companies are almost universally driven by passion in the early stages of most companies. Look at Google (started by a couple of Stanford grad students), or YouTube, or Gateway (a couple of guys building computers in a barn). These companies all started as small projects driven by passion, but we all can agree that at times, their actions are driven by profits and little else.

It is true, and unfortunate, that most companies cease to be driven by passion, and are soon driven by profits when they decide to go public, or are sold to a publically traded company. Then the passion of the founder(s) is passed off to some board whose only passion comes in the form of the huge bonuses they get at the end of the year for exceeding forecasters's predictions.