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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

$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".

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.

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.