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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?"
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!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
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.
Cutting tuition will always improve the talent pool, because it removes an arbitrary obstacle. That's why the University of Georgia System has improved so dramatically in the last 10 years. The HOPE Scholarship made college so cheap that anybody can go, so the schools can all be a lot more selective.
the benefit to society if that extended that to people get business degrees and law degrees? I don't think our country has a large enough per-capita rate of lawyers or salesman, so we could really benefit by offering them free tuition too. Oh and also history majors, because that is a useful major too. :D
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
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.
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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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".
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make install -not war
Since I like helping bigots, here's my link for you: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276508,00.htm
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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.
The motivation?
Passion, sir. Passion.