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The Science Education Myth
xzvf writes "BusinessWeek says that you should not listen to the conventional wisdom. According to a new report, US schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support. 'The authors of the report, the Urban Institute's Hal Salzman and Georgetown University professor Lindsay Lowell, show that math, science, and reading test scores at the primary and secondary level have increased over the past two decades, and U.S. students are now close to the top of international rankings. Perhaps just as surprising, the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.'"
Hey, supply and demand. I'm kinda a freak because I went to school and just studied what interested me without regard to how I was going to apply it to getting a job, but most people I know checked salaries, and went for things where they thought they could make money.
Additonally, once you get out in the field, you start getting a sense of what people make, and what you can do and would like to make, and if you figure you could make more money as an engineer, you go back to school and pick up the degree...None of this stuff is set in stone in high school, or even undergrad level college.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who remembers the glut of 30-somethings going back to school to get their CS degree in the 90's. If there is demand, people will try to fill that demand, because doing so will profit them personally. Conversely, people who try and fill a non-existent demand will be punished by the market, shuffled into a crappy job.
And for the inevitable people who're going to say, "All the US demand for engineers is being filled by H1-B types" I say good! More engineers in this country means more engineering work has to come to this country, because that's where the engineers are, and that's where the work will be done best. More work for engineers means more demand for engineers, and more engineers with jobs HERE means countless other jobs will be created by the money they'll be spending. Would you rather they stayed where they are already, and brought the work to their country? We can afford to do that for running shoes, but if we start exporting tech industries, that's a bad thing.
Using government funding to force produce a glut of science-types is silly. Better to use the money to kick off industries that require them, and let the rest take care of itself.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The highly paid market, or the cheap overseas market?
And does this study have a political agenda? after all elections are coming, and someone is certianly going to want to tout there education program that is failing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The math was done by US educated researchers using excel 2007.
85% of all educational statistics are made up on the spot.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
We have a problem. Management theory of late has tossed aside conventional wisdom of taking on graduates, training them within the organisation. Instead companies either contract out work, or seek only experienced "useful" staff. Trouble is those of us with experience are doing very well as the supply of other experienced individuals slows.
Those doing MBAs.. please consider the benefits of graduate staff. Yes they cannot do anything useful the day they get out into the real world. But in the long run technology companies will need experience or end up paying dearly for it.
A country cannot do badly by having too many educated people.
When I was at university I was talking to an old engineering lecturer and he was complaining that they had to lessen the difficulty levels of the courses even more because students were getting dumber.
It's not that scores are getting better, it's that the tests are getting easier. Also there is still a very high demand for genuinely smart people, but not so great science grads are being churned out at a higher rate than what is required.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
That doesn't seem to jive with what I hear on the streets. ?
More than the market demands? Maybe it's just local, but I know we have trouble filling engineering positions. I have many friends that are engineers and none of them had trouble finding work after college. That would tell me there isn't exactly a glut of supply in the job market.
Why is it then that almost every recent college grad we get at the office tends to not understand high level math?
Also their English is atrocious. It's like they teach in communication classes to talk like a street person. you do not submit a proposal to a customer with the words "plug up" when regarding their networking equipment...
and I quote... " We will plug up your networking gear for performance." WTF??? this is a college grad!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Can the Indian engineers finally go back home?
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
that our schools are graduating enough competent scientists. The problem is that we're not graduating enough extraordinary scientists with an extensive patent portfolio willing to work for subsistence wages.
Sheesh! I thought everybody knew that.
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Foreshadowing a critical shortage of French Lit. majors.
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The premise is that the there is a maximum number of engineers and scientists dictated by the marketplace. However, we really live in a technological society and everyone should know some degree of engineering.
This is my sig.
the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands
The good ones will create things with economic value, thus ensuring their place in the world. People who just want "middle class jobs" due to their credentials get what they deserve.
The only professions truly susceptible to market forces are the parasitic ones, such as stock market speculators and realtors.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I'm kinda a freak because I went to school and just studied what interested me without regard to how I was going to apply it to getting a job
A lot of people do that. It is actually quite common.
I am inclined to think that this observation about having too many educated people suggests a couple of things:
1) The oft-repeated corporate line that outsourcing is needed because American talent is unavailable is pure bunk (though we all knew this already).
2) The government could use this as justification for a reduction in the amount of student loans/grants it gives out....but it won't because:
3) The economic benefit of producing too many well-educated people is clear: we wind up with a lot of workers in the market who are burdened with bankruptcy-surviving student debts, thus making them desperate enough to work low-paying jobs for which they are very overqualified, much to the delight of their employers.
Me almighty market no want more science, reading or math. Me almighty market no like servants knowing me wheels and function. Ummmmmmm, almighty market want more gum for fresh breath, for speaking more. Yes, bring almighty market chewing gum. Make it spearmint, sugarless. Clap Clap
The article describes it as "a new report by the Urban Institute" with authors are listed as "Hal Salzman" and "Lindsay Lowell", but there's no link, and nothing on the Urban Institute's web page.
seems to be that all the graduates from US universities will look for work in the US. That will never be the case. Students may come to the US for specialized education and then take that education back home. One of the questions that should have been looked at was how many plan to stay in the US after their studies.
I've been saying this for years. The problem is not the supply, it's demand. I galls me when I see large companies, which have cut back their R&D budgets dramatically in the past decades, running TV ads about their math and science scholarship programs - wow, mad props to you, Mega-corp, for simultaneously working to both decrease demand and increase supply.
The problem is on the demand side. If you create the jobs, kids will fall over themselves to enter the field.
I think that MOST of slashdotters working in tech have known this. It's all about the MONEY. Studies have shown time and time again that the reason businesses are bringing H1-Bs over here by the boatload is not about lack of qualified US graduates--it's about $$$. Only a couple of month's back the Programmer's Guild exposed a video that advertised a class on how to weed out qualified Americans so your company can employ cheaper H1-B workers.
Unfortunately, as long as US workers don't see it happening in THEIR field (or are blissfully unaware), they do nothing. I'm afraid when Americans DO stand up, it will be too late.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
... ourchildren_IS_learning
Often people boil things down to a single number, and then misinterprete what it means.
The 'education' studies usually do things like compare US % of High School graduates going on to get a College degree with another country. Sounds like we are doing pretty bad, until you do a little bit more reasearch and find out that 85% of US citizens graduate high school, while only 30% of the other countries citizens get that far. Big surprise, there. They picked their richest and smartest 30% of the population and compared it to our "everyone except the worst 15%".
Then there are studies that show things like "US has worst prenatal care records in the world". But they leave out the obviously imporant fact that it is almost entirely caused by teenage mothers. If you ignore teenage mothers, the US has one of the best prenatal care records in the world. Our problem is entirely in the fact that we treat pregnant teenagers like scum instead of doing our best to help them.
You need to look beyond a single number, they are not helpfull.
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Once those insidious creationists get their claws even deeper into the education system, all that good science stuff will be put on the back burner in favour of other more "suitable" topics for today's troubled youth.
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
They myth came about in part from corporate lobbyists who need to paint a picture of a country falling behind the technology curve in order to justify visa workers and offshoring. Since it is difficult and expensive to disprove such claims, they mostly get away with it.
Table-ized A.I.
For example, 20+ years ago, the U.S. was a significant exporter of technology (right? This is what my elders tell me). Now China and Japan design our cell phones and motherboards. So if we the number of scientists and engineers has increased again, then we should start to gain back those engineering and manufacturing facilities.
"our children is NOT learning"
reading scores may be up. That's because schools all over the country are fudging the books to get federal funding.
math and science scores are most definitely not up. They don't even teach science at a primary level anymore.
I know this because my wife is a primary school teacher.
It's reading reading reading all the time with a generous helping of arithmetic.
oh, and one day of pseudo-sciencey edutainment.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Absolutely true. One of the beautiful things about the free market economy is you can differentiate between what people *claim* vs what people actually do. People claim that the US is facing massive shortages in the sciences, but all you have to do is look at the salaries. There's only a "shortage" if businesses wish to pay minimum wage.
It's also interesting how Business Week's research shows the U.S. near the top of lists in science and literacy when others claim we're falling back into the stone age. BW notes the cause of this discrepency:
*Interpretation* and *validity* of testing data is almost always flawed on some level. That's why my cynicism gene kicks into overdrive when I hear of Brand New Research demonstrating...anything. If someone has an agenda, any data can be *made* to say whatever they want.As the IEEE frequently points out, if there were a shortage of engineers, salaries would be going up.
Bits leaking out of the tubes is the #1 cause of network problems.
Big surprise. Tell everyone they need to go to college to become engineers, scientists, lawyers, et al, not enough jobs to support that scheme. Too many Brahmins; maybe you need to balance that out with Sudras, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas as well. The body of society can't just be composed of heads. It needs feet, legs, arms, stomach, back, hands, etc, to function properly.
Maybe just maybe, having people learn trades isn't such a bad thing after all. Not everyone needs to be, or can be, white collar. Then maybe we don't have to import labor (aka Illegal Aliens) into the US.
It takes a while for the information feed back to the corporate honchos to percolate through. Engineer salaries alone can't be compared. For example in India, to support one engineer, you probably need 0.1 cook, 0.1 diesel mechanic, 0.05 secretaries, 0.333 peons/errand boys ... Most of what you get from the existing infrastructure in USA, like reliable
grid electricity, commuting infrastructure, lunch provides, etc are all provided by the companies themselves. It is possible that at the present levels of productivity and infrastructure cost, it could be profitable to out source. But dollar is falling against euro, rupee etc. The salaries overseas are increasing at a faster rate. The breakeven point is quite close and the trend towards outsourcing is going to reverse. At that point, it is doubtful if we will have enough qualified engg grads.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
wait...
So does someone want to explain to me why, at my son's recent graduation from ASU's engineering school, 75% of the BSEE's, 90% of the MSEE and 100% of the PHd's were foreign?
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
What exactly is meant by primary and secondary levels? Are they talking about elementary and high schools? These do not necessarily equal science or engineering graduates. I want to know whether these numbers are a result of actual success in the classroom, or from a culture of academic hand-holding and feel-goodness. Does thi trying to imply that "No Child Left Behind" is a success? Will this story be true in five to ten years, when the current crop of grade schoolers enter their first post-college jobs?
All it says is that there is more top tier people being produced. Ok, it matters when it we engage in the h1b arguments. But it doesn't matter when it comes to the general education arguments. As long as an average joe graduating from HS can't do basic math, he can't be expected to adequately maneuver in the modern world. And yet he is. Of course, by "basic" I mean Euclidean Geometry and algebra of at least 2 variables. Here come's the torrent of anecdotal evidence of people doing just fine without it.... but a modern man without those skills is a tourist in his own life.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Computers are the tools used to explore computer science, not the end product. If you think they are, then you are actually studying computer engineering and not computer science.
I got my Bachelor's in CS back in 1985 and got my Master's in IT from Harvard in 2003. Not to toot my own horn, but I was the best programmer there. If anyone was in a position to make lots of money in CS, it'd be me. I'm still waiting.
Then again I believe the more you know, the less you need.
..while we are turning out more science students, all of them believe the Earth is 6,000 years old.
My wife is the Undergraduate Administrator for the EE department at a major University. Almost every one of her students gets job offers when they graduate. Some get the offers months BEFORE they graduate.
This post is anecdotal of course, but so is yours. A lot of it depends on what field you are talking about. Enginners tend to get hired right out of school though.
As a hiring manager in the IT field I've hired quite a few 'kids' right out of school. Did they need 're-education'? You betcha. Did they rapidly develop into valuable employees? Most of them, in time. Not all schools of management theory agree with your broad brush strokes.
So if I get N+1 credits that makes me more competent at a subject than N credits? And N credits in some other country?
I never read the actual study--just the article, but it does not sound compelling to me. A credit in country A is comparable to a credit in country B? And simply because scores in country A increase doesn't mean that suddenly A competence > B competence.
From the article:
"As far as our workforce is concerned, the new report showed that from 1985 to 2000 about 435,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents a year graduated with bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in science and engineering. Over the same period, there were about 150,000 jobs added annually to the science and engineering workforce."
Now if we assume that the number of people turning 65 (and retiring from a successful career in the IT industry) roughly equals the number of people turning 22 with a BSc,MSc etc.
Wouldn't 150 000 new jobs added now imply a shortage of 150K? The numbers don't mean much unless you look at the number of people leaving the industry.
and i'm not talking about the corporate interests who outsource and want to mollify displaced american workers
i'm talking about the other slashdot posters below!
hey, slashdot, here's a newsflash: you just don't need that many engineers and scientists in society. you don't. you need 10 guys to design the trains, 100 guys to build them, and 1,000 guys to run them
you just don't need that many at the top, at the creation of technology. you need plenty to build and maintain technology
by saying this, i expect this relevation to go over like a ton of bricks. i expect to be modded down
some people here apparently believe the point of life is to create some sort of utopia that resembles a college campus: everyone in research. or some sort of scientific monastic life
no, that's not a human society, and never will be, sorry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Like football? There's this money that's floating around in sports programs while libraries languish and science labs can't replace pipettes. You could salt the football field and burn down the basketball stadium, and they'd rebuild it where the library USED to be.
Case in point: New Science building was going to be built at my old HS.. Instead of the new library that was supposed to be put there, a new workout facility for the football players was put there. Let them burn in hell.
The "lack of skills" argument has always been bullshit. If anything, the majority of people are overqualified. Academic inflation is a massive problem. For every full-time Community College position there are literally hundreds, and in many areas thousands or even tens of thousands of applicants waiting in line. A Master's Degree is now about as common as a BA was in the sixties. Meanwhile access to knowledge has exploded even for those who don't pursue degree programs. Just watching 3D simulations on YouTube, you can learn more about biotechnology in a few days than most college students learned from an undergraduate degree a few decades ago. There is skill to go around.
The lack of education argument is nothing but a smoke screen just as it always has been. It's just way of shifting the blame for poor employment prospects away from major corporations and the government policies they've landed in place through the aid of their Republicrat benefactors and onto the middle class.
If you go back and watch Milton Friedman's series called "Free to Choose" you can see some choice examples of where this lie cum mantra originates. In episode three you'll see none other than a young Donald Rumsfeld talking about the new service based economy in which the emerging software industry is going to employ fifty percent of the population and he'll tell you how magically only the US will be able to participate in this market because only Americans can comprehend something so technically advanced as this newfangled software thing. Really an amazing performance. The shocking thing is that such a clearly moronic figure eventually made his way so far up the ladder of power.
But of course the catch to this magical trickle down service economy voodoo was that we're going to need everybody to get re-educated to participate. If you can't do Powerpoint and Visio, how can you expect to reap the rewards of this magic new ago. And hence the argument persists to this day that all the laid off GM workers will get new jobs when they learn how to use Excel and do Word macros etc. Yeah fucking right.
The problem with the economy is not a lack of education, it is a lack of leadership and a lack of responsibility on the part of the electorate that has bought into the greedy lies that will never benefit the majority of population.
I don't remember ever being told that [Engineering/IT/Business Management/Finance] education is only good in the [Engineering/IT/Business Management/Finance] field. Has this changed?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I haven't read TFA yet - this is /. after all.
I have heard parent's point repeatedly - that we're making tests easier.
I can attest that in recent years it has become administratively inappropriate to give negative comments to or flunk students, so we continually pass students who haven't really learned along to be with their peers. That they didn't really learn isn't THEIR fault, but until someone can figure out a way to teach them, moving them up to the next set of material isn't helping them at all.
However, when I think about the impact of the trends I see, it isn't "there's no one left to do research" it's how big and poorly trained everybody else is.
I'm consistently amazed by how they let anyone who ISN'T in a hard science/math program get away without really ever understanding anything about science or math. A huge number of people don't have enough backing in the scientific method to have a basic sense of what is or isn't a fact - even in simple real world cases they can physically deal with. (Like how to fix household items, how to tell if a circuit is blown, how to debug RCA connections to their TV, etc.) And don't have enough backing in math to convert measurement units or tell if they got the right change.
The entire idea that anything could possibly have or not have empirical verification is lost on a very, very large number of people...
And to be clear, while I think higher education ought to take some responsibility for ensuring that the graduates have at least a small degree of well roundedness, I think the main problem in US education is much, much earlier.
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What a concise and clever observation! It rendered your preceding text superfluous. You're obviously a magnanimous bastard as well ;) Had I responded, I would have taken a moment to point out GP's own horrendous grasp of basic syntax.
If the US educational system works anything like the UK one (where examinations are now set by private companies answerable to shareholders, not by matriculation boards answerable to universities as in my day) then examinations will have been getting easier over the years anyway to keep the pass rates high (since if any examining authority is perceived to have a low pass rate, then they will lose customers as schools switch to a different examining authority in order to keep their pass rates high).
Plus, there are a lot of christians in the USA, and a question like "Why is water denser than steam?" can legitimately be answered with "Because God says so" (insisting for the candidate to mention something like how the molecules in a liquid attract one another and so tend to be packed closely together whereas the molecules in a gas behave independently of one another and so tend to move apart might offend religious people).
These factors combined mean that while you might have plenty of science graduates, their qualifications are actually less valuable. This is an unsustainable situation, and something will break sometime soon.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
if you mean, sponsored as in, assign an amount of money to competeing private organizations (corporate or otherwise) with the full understanding everyone benefits then yes. However if you mean just government funded grants to orgranizations run by the government - then no.
Government only innovates when it HAS too. In other words, if there is no deadline (emphasis on the dead part) these types of things go on forver and evolve into useless side items that burn up tax dollars and never complete the original goal. They become line items by which Congress can divy up dollars to campaign donaters.
No, take the money and offer it as a prize. First two companies to do X get Y. Very much NASA's new programs which are related to how the X-prize went.
The last thing we need is even more government involvement. It already stifles innovation.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If the dollar falls much more Asia will start outsourcing to the US for engineering, tech support, etc. and the job market will pick right up.
When I talk to someone with a masters in CS, I do expect him to know x86 assembly. I've done plenty of work in a few assembly languages, but I've never had any reason to touch x86.
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factor 966971: 966971
Supply and demand....I make less adjusted for inflation than I did 10 years ago :(
If I was deep this is would be profound, if smart then wise, if a poet then verse. Here it is, you judge!
If by "conventional wisdom" you mean "the bottom line at the expense of everything else, including quality of product and quality of life for everyone below upper management", then by all means, ignore it. Too many companies today have completely lost sight of the big picture-- just like the day trading public who thinks an economy can run smoothly when people without a clue or long term goal keep everything churning as fast and randomly as possible.
I wonder what this means exactly. Just graduating with a degree in a tech field doesn't automatically make you capable. This is one of the problems with education. In Electrical and Computer Engineering, I found many more people drawn to the major simply because of the high starting salaries. They weren't necessarily interested in contributing anything to the scientific world. I don't consider them capable. Also, many of the engineers I know have severe communication problems. They are not what I would call capable either.
There's a shortage of skilled staff. I know because I am endlessly looking for them.
There's no shortage of CS graduates who can't put together a coherent paragraph and who write as if they were sending txt messages. Heck, some of them, a few, who studied outsied the CS course or are actually interested, might have good technical skills. But if they can't communicate it doesn't matter and the average graduate of a UK university outside the top three can't communicate. They can't put themselves in someone else's shoes. They don't think, "How will this look to the person reading it?" They've been taught to express themselves and that there is no one right way, and as a result they aren't good at being diplomatic and they aren't good at being exact.
In my experience, Americans are better, but still declining.
It's better to get staff whose first language is not English but who understand that communication is a two-way thing, not a broadcast.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
"...US schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support.
Perhaps just as surprising, the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.'"
If anything, the big shortage is of people to work with/direct/support the engineers, which in turn hurts growth in engineering jobs and salaries. The Navy is a great example. I work in a large building full of experienced, highly competent engineers. You name it, there's probably a team around here that knows all about it. The problem is that there aren't nearly enough people capable of coordinating all this work, working with the chain of command, and making the judgment calls necessary to keep programs on track. Based on the work I do every day, I don't understand what they did before my position was created (I'm not being arrogant and I wish I were joking).
Non-defense works the same way. How many good engineering teams out there are let down by idiotic management who can't or won't generate a functional business case, get engineers the support they need, take bullets for them when things go bad, etc? If the suits had their act together, then I would think that there would be higher demand for engineers at all price points because more of these companies would be thriving.
The point IEEE makes is valid... but salary is not the right metric. The total amount the company pays you isn't just your salary, it's benefits too. And with double-digit percentage increases in the cost of health care, a lot of money that would have gone to salary increases has gone into providing good benefits.
That said, I don't know what the trend is in total compensation nationally. I do know that in the DC market, software folks are in high demand, especially if you know some signal processing. And the market has been reflecting that.
First, there is not an issue with importing foreign labor to do the jobs that are not desirable here. This country was founded on the premise of upward mobility which, ultimately, is why we get the large influx of foreign labor. Each generation, barring a catastrophe or some other off circumstance, SHOULD be doing better than the one before it. So, since you seem so confident in your post, I invite YOU to become the "back, hands, and legs" of this country and go pick up a job in construction.
the irish didn't assimilate and go upwardly mobile
the italians didn't assimilate and go upwardly mobile
the puerto ricans didn't assimilate and go upwardly mobile
etc.
except... they did
and they are american
so it will be with the mexicans or the chinese or the indians, or whatever bogeyman of unassimilation and lack of class mobility is haunting your mind
you suffer from hisorical myopia, the reality of immigration is not what you think it is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Are all the mods indian today? That wasn't a troll, it was a joke about H2b visas. Go buy a sense of humor.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"Yet a new report by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, tells a different story."
I'm not disputing what they say, but the last time I check there is no such things as a "nonpartisan think tank". If there were that would defeat the purpose of having a think tank or policy institute or propaganda machine as they are formed to get the answer their benefactor wants.
people who drive trains live on park benches?
huh?
not wanting to live on a park bench is what motivates people to higher education?
whats that now?
you seem to have a dim grasp on reality
you only need so many people to do higher level things. there are cab drivers in new york city with PhDs. they drive a cab because in their home country, there's no job for them at all
just because you have a degree, doesn't mean you're going to get a high paying job: there's only so many people actually needed to do high level things
you understand that, right?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You'll see the wages of plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, joiners increasing.
Deleted
1) As a member of the higher education system, I can tell you the MOST common thing I hear from older faculty is that the whole system is degrading and not just at our university. Personally, I've only seen a slight decrease in student work ethic and ability to actually think but that may be because I'm looking for this trend everybody speaks of; and as time passes I get more removed from my experience as a student so it alters my perspective as well.
2) The source is a Think Tank created by and for politicians, one should be skeptical of any of the many "non-partisan" organizations out there like this. Especially the ones with this much corporate and world trade connections. A great institution has largely only one direction to go over time and it only takes a few bad eggs to send it downward. I've been a part of non-profits who collapsed from minority who spread like a cancer. (Note: I didn't say this was ever a great institution, I don't know.)
3) Engineering students are not even getting hands on experience that previously was available. They don't even know their CAD drawings are impossible to make because they lack the experience with the devices that make them. The movement is towards outsourcing all the real engineering of the university and replace it all with 'virtual engineering' because China is just going to make everything for everybody anyways. Some of the top guys in our state do their work hands-on combined with theory because they know in the real world the problems are too difficult to even simulate in a computer unless you have a level of understanding which has been ignorantly case aside by far too many institutions who's faculty should or does know better.
4) There is a trend in the USA towards 3rd world educational techniques at all levels. I have students who want it to degrade into 'learn by wrote' because it involves less work/thought. I know public school teachers who see the government/politics forcing these lesser methods upon their classrooms. Other countries churn out people too, but the all want to get into the USA because our college system is(was) different -- the funding and immigration benefits are a big factor-- but that will likely decline after the rest falls too low for too long.
5) colleges are turning into trade schools. Trade schools are just fine and deserve respect but they are different and should stay that way and not dilute colleges simply because the market wants pre-trained worker drones. A CS major should not get credit towards their major for learning to make websites (in a class that is nearly the same to one at a graphic design trade school.) A college education should be more valuable than trade school to the student; the employer has a whole different perspective. One can expect the increase in income from a college degree to decrease as the trend continues.
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I agree with the Business Week assessment that there is approximate parity between jobs and graduates. (And psosibly a surplus when you include recruiting from abroad).
I do think a significant fraction of the US population does not know enough math and science to function adequately in society and their daily lives - no that they need a technical job. I see widespread inaqequancy in avoiding math errors in shopping, filling out a tax return, making suitable investments - all important activities of daily life. Plus all the psuedo-science going around and basic lack of understanding of the universe as scientists know it is pathetic.
Reading the link, the article states that 150,000 jobs in science and engineering are added annually, not including those created by people retiring or leaving a profession, and 435,000 people graduate with degrees in science and engineering. From this he concludes "nearly two-thirds" fo the graduates take jobs in fields other than science and engineering.
This is idiotic. If he ignores openings from retirees, deaths, and people leaving the field, his isn't actually counting all the jobs. This calculation is essentially worthless. Given that this trivial calculation is misleading to the extent of being wrong, it's hard to credit much of the rest of what was said.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The article cites increasing SAT and other scores as evidence that the children they are smarter. I guess the authors don't realize that SAT scores are based on the percentile ranking of your raw score compared with the many thousands of other test-takers. See PDF table from college board. Perhaps if the author had been one of the superfluous mathematics grads he would realize that changing SAT scores reveal nothing about the aptitude of the students writing them, given constant difficulty of the tests year-to-year (which is entirely debatable, but another debate entirely).
Corn subsidies, along with a lot of the other produce based agricultural subsidies, aren't there for profit margins. They are there for security. By supporting agriculture in the US, the government is ensuring that in case of a complete economic crash, there is still an existing agriculture production market that is still capable of producing enough food to feed the country. It's like long term disability insurance. You pay for it every month, but you hope to hell you never have to use it.
Ethanol subsidies on the other hand, suck donkey balls, but at least they keep farmers on the land.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Okay, engineering graduates make about double liberal arts graduates. That has been consistent for several decades, which means that the supply/demand curves for those degrees reflect that. There is a premium paid for engineering degrees, because the skills required to complete one remain in short supply. If there was an oversupply of engineers, salaries would be falling.
Are salaries rising in computer programming? It depends on your time frame, which people miss. The late 90s was an artificial boom for programmers, caused by money moving into the field from VC's, etc., chasing performance. While that is the "free market at work," the free market returns to equilibirum in the LONG RUN, not the SHORT RUN. Since most of those VCs lost investors money, clearly it wasn't a good allocation of resources. However, wages are considered downwardly inelastic... During the boom people were getting big raises, especially if they jumped companies. 20%-25% raises to jump ship in 18-30 months wasn't unheard of, it was common. So wages move up with the market, but when the market tanks, you can't just cut people's salaries 20%, so you end up doing lay-off replacements, and the laid off workers hold out for salaries.
It's also the reason that housing prices don't rapidly fall, people sit on the market and hold out for a price as long as they can, and over time inflation eats at that percentage. Same thing with salaries, you freeze them for a few years and let cost of living go up to lower them. This actually works for most people, because despite the venting on slashdot, large chunks of people's expenses are actually fixed in nominal terms... Your car payment is constant based on when you got the loan, as is your mortgage, and if you are in a state like Florida or California with locked in home stead assessment values, you annual property taxes stay flat or might even go down. So while inflation eats at discretionary spending, your fixed costs stay fixed.
Over time, wages rise at approximately inflation + 1%. Because of productivity boosting in the 90s and 2000s, maybe we'll see wages rise at inflation + 1.5% or inflation + 2%. But in anyone year, that might be the 90s boom, inflation + 6%-7%, or the 2000s "recovery" of inflation -1%, assuming that real inflation is actually a bit higher than the new government metrics.
The fact is, if we watch salaries from 1980 - 2010, for example, I bet we see an annual trend towards inflation + 1%, but with most of it in the late 80s and late 90s, with downward real/flat nominal periods in the rest of the time.
It's like people expecting rediculous returns in the stock market each year. The 8% after inflation long term returns is no a function of regular growth, it's a period of 0 +/- 3% real growth, with a few years of 20%-25% growth in there, and a couple of -10% to -15% corrections throughout.
After 8 years of massive salary growth in IT, it is perfectly normal from a human nature point of view to expect that to continue and then blame the boogeyman (globalization, outsourcing, Bush Administration), but it's also the market correcting itself.
Alex
I'll rewrite that: 'US schools are turning out capable science and engineering grads that the job market underutilises'.
Knowledge is power, and if with 3 engineers we can build a bridge then with 30 engineers we could build an Orion or Daedalus spaceship and with 300 engineers we could build a Dyson sphere.
Universities output computer scientists who, if they have no entrepreneurial spirit or aren't already rich, will find themselves locked in a job market that hires people who think whether P=NP for crafting javascript in flash-polluted webpages. Same for physicists, chemists, and other scientists.
(of course, for the sake of balance, it has to be said that universities nowadays many times allow people with less brain than a wooden table to graduate with PhDs, and that young people today in general have little difference with their dark age counterparts and in no way they can be compared with their baby-boomer parents. We really live in a very miserable age, but it is a fact that some graduates do understand science and still find themselves locked into stupid jobs)
From a business perspective it makes no sense to hire people who are knowledgeable in 3 domains and make them work in only 1 of them, unless you are disillusioned by the lies of Taylorism and specialisation.
This isn't surprising since companies view research (especially scientific research) as a cost-center, then the market for scientists (especially the wide-eyed scientists that television told us we should become because science is cool) is not there. I've heard of people who have several degrees doing plumbing or some other job one wouldn't think a degreed professional would do because they can't find work doing what they wanted to do. When industry wakes up and realizes there is a competitive advantage to having researchers working just for your company.
OK - first let me say that I agree with you. CS programs around seem to be becoming more oriented to getting you out there in Java, C++, or (heaven forbid - C#). They don't care about skill, or understanding of a breadth of subjects. They don't want you to have transferable skills, critical thinking skills, or be a well-rounded individual. They want to know that you can bubble sort. Woopie. I'm in an undergrad program, and my first year, all we did for CS was two courses of Java, and Discrete Math, so logic and proofs. The rest was Sciences, Maths, and some arts courses. I seem to be at one of the dwindling number of schools that requires things like linear algebra and business courses to graduate.
... All this stuff is so low level, but I think it's important to know. Will I ever use it? Who knows. BUT, I hear my class mates complaining ALL the TIME about how "stupid" the course is, because they don't "need" to know it. Like I said before, a lot of schools are, sadly, pushing for 2-year completion, code-crunchers who wouldn't know how to write an innovative algorithm in pseudocode and realize it to any one of their favourite languages.
So, I'll get to my (main) point. I'm in a course right now. It's core, so I've got to take it, but I'm enjoying it. Computer Organization (part 1, actually). We're learning assembler for the HC11 processor. We learn shit loads of low level stuff, how to make NAND gates, how to take a circuit and convert it to NAND gates only, WHY this is important, making edge-triggered FF's, etc
It's sad, and disturbing, but makes me feel better, because I know that when I graduate, and I go to an interview, and someone asks me this, I'll be able to tell them exactly what it is and what it does. I've never seen x86 assembler before, but because I've been exposed to something like it, I can transfer those skills and adapt to a fast-changing industry.
Sorry that took so long and was so ranty, but christ, you know? Anyone with a CS degree that can't explain a linked list, binary tree, or boolean algebraic expression isn't fit to work at Best Buy.
I'm a student. I write iPhone apps.
"Get more education to qualify for a better job" is good advice to solve your individual microeconomic problem.
Creating more jobs for people with all levels of education is a macroeconomic solution to national economic problems.
It shouldn't be too surprising that more people tried to get college degrees in engineering and such, when they saw that getting a middle class lifestyle with just a high school diploma was becoming increasingly unlikely. But I always thought it was misdirected that politicians have encouraged more education to the general population to address the problems of unemployment and low wages. It reminds me of the saying, "if we all stand on our toes, we will all see the parade better."
Having graduated in the last year from a tech school with a physics degree, I can certainly see their not very well supported hypothesis at work. Or not at work, as the case may be. Although really, what I see is a lack of science jobs, engineering still exists, if you're good at it, and there's a billion openings for programming.
Having a B.S. degree is a really dumb place to be in America today. People really do only seem to want experience and advanced degrees. There's plenty of things for a mechanic or somewhat skilled type to do, in support roles, and there are a lot of companies who have dreams of picking up superqualified engineers or scientists who are already experts in their job.
From having read the article and comments here, I'd like to make some observations. First off, it seems like there is a very sizable percentage of Slashdot posters who are in the IT community. My anecdotal evidence about IT people is that some of them have this anti-education bias, in that they themselves did not seek out higher education or post-graduate degrees, and have done just fine, which means that they didn't need that higher education. Therefore, higher education is bunk, because you don't need it be successful. I definitely do not agree with that, because basically in the hard sciences, you go nowhere without your PhD.
The other observation I have made is that there is a tendency to look at IT people as being part of this "tech class" that includes scientists and engineers. To me, you need to make a clear distinction, because doing IT is very different than working as an engineer or as a research scientist. You simply don't need the same type of education because you don't do a similar type of job. Yet business pundits often times approach the problem and invoke IT job numbers, which are pretty much irrelevant to science and engineering.
I am in Physics. Half of the graduate students in my department are foreign, mostly from East Asia. I can tell you right now that that has more to do with the lack of domestic talent than the quality of that talent- in other words, there are still not enough domestic physics majors. And it is not that we are trying to attract foreign talent because they are willing to work for less. A friend of mine who is an international student just got a job offer from a well-known tech company that is close to 6 figures. That doesn't sound like peanuts to me. The problem is that as high as that sounds, it may not be high enough. Science and engineering pay better than many jobs, but they do not pay enough to encourage more domestic students to study those fields in college and then go on to get jobs. And while the American public may think it is hunky-dory to pay a PhD physicist 75K a year to do his job, I can assure you that it is not OK. For some reason, Americans are willing to pay doctors hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but a comparably-educated scientist gets to be merely middle-class, despite working longer hours.
To sum it up, scientists are underpaid, underappreciated, and well-below the national numbers necessary to ensure our continued technological dominance over other countries. Business people are cheap, and usually know next to nothing when it comes to science, and their advice should not be taken seriously, even with a boulder of salt. Business is what engineers who can't cut it in undergrad go into, so there are people there who are jaded against S&E to begin with (not that there are huge numbers, but I think most people who went to college know someone who fits this description). They are looking to cut costs, and one way to do that is disparage scientists and engineers, who as professionals, are not cheap to employ. Unfortunately, what they are being paid right now is STILL not enough, so businesses that employ them are in fact getting a great deal. If American business become convinced that we do not need more scientists and engineers, we are all screwed. An undereducated populace is guaranteed to lose money as jobs that don't involve their heads go the way of the horse and buggy, or even more likely, go overseas.
"once you get to a point where you have enough data, it only takes a few teams to design and test a drug. when one team is successful, it takes even fewer people to come up with a way to mass produce it." ...then it requires a couple of hundred to configure and run that mass production plant ...then there's the thousands to ship it, distribute it, fill the prescriptions, etc.
your mind is stuck in some sort of ivory tower where the only thing that happens in the world is academics
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I guess it depends on where you are :) I'm a college prof in Georgia; here we have HOPE scholarships that cover full tuition at public colleges (if not, tuition is about $1800/semester for full time, and won't increase after 12 credit-hours), plus some extra for books (probably not enough). You can definitely live on 1K/mo, which you can get even working at McDonalds.
So, in GA, many people can get a full education for much less than those $30K (and if you're worried about cost, consider AP and CLEP exams, and community college classes, which are way cheaper)
I completely agree. Let me list the observations I have made since getting my degree in engineering in 2005.
1. The companies that complain about a shortage of engineers are also the ones that require a minimum of a 3.5 GPA to even have a human being look at your resume.
2. Most companies pay $50k to start but offer few or no raises or opportunities for advancement.
3. Many engineers I know are going to night school for an MBA to get out of engineering.
Quick story: We had a guy at my company who had a PhD in mechanical engineering go back to school to get an MBA because the company wouldn't give him a raise. He now works for an investment bank and makes at least twice what he was making as an engineer.
The moral of the story is: don't become an engineer for the money, do it because you enjoy it. If you are smart and want to make a lot of money, go into business.
Industry may not be able to see past the next profit and loss statement issued to wall street but democratic government can't see past the next election cycle. Both statements are equally true, that is to say they are simplifications.
Neither is good at long term planning. For a concrete example I give you the American social security system (also the welfare states in all of Europe which are in much the same predicament).
Finally though it's not always open to view, those that control to money do control the direction of research.
It's also interesting to note that of the examples sighted by the GGP much of the original research was done by Bell labs.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
i know competent, published PhD's making $30k working as lab managers in state universities.
were demand that high, i doubt they'd be able to resist the siren's song of industry.
-- kieran hervold
friction not between "native" citizens of a country and newcomers, but friction within the same ethnic group, against newcomers based on date of arrival
good luck selling that pov, friend
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
To better support your argument you need to show where the university researchers money is coming from.
IIRC Government funded research is the minority.
As to your point:
Anyone who's done research and gone out looking for funding knows that if you want to get industry funding, they want to know what the applications and marketability are of whatever you're doing.
That's simply not true. Industry is as capable of seeing past next years P&L as government is capable of seeing past the next election cycle. Smart people know that research is not predictable regarding payoff. Industry funds long shot research all the time. They think of it kind of like venture capital. Odds are poor, but who knows what it will lead to.
Industry is less likely to fund 'underwater multicultural women's basket weaving studies'. Waste that the government should be held accountable for.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills
In a Free Market an American would be no better off than a Mexican, Chinese, an or Indian. The whole point of the "Gathering Storm" was that in America, we don't want to have starvation, diseases, slave labor, and 40% of the population that cannot read and dies before they reach 50. In short, the in America we do NOT want a free market in so far as the science, technology, education, and math are concerned.
The Storm's idea was that to stay at the top requires us to continue outcompeting all of the other countries, or at least stay at the relative top of the foodchain.
The "Storm" suggestions? Improvements and investment in education, research, and immigration to continue developing and gathering the best and the brightest minds that drive innovation, research, new technologies, new treatments, cures, whatever.
You were right about one thing in your post: you really don't know any better.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I'd like to see the raw data. I'm not sure I agree with the article. I don't see evidence of a huge glut of software engineering types. But I don't see a huge shortage either. As the article points out the other question is demand and our economy tends to yo-yo demand every 5 to 10 years so its hard to tell what "normal is".
Think Deeply.
Any wonder that the author of the Article Vivek Wadhwa has authored multiple papers on offshoring and outsourcing.
He wrote a similar rant in bweek about 2 years ago.
The red flag for me in this article is that demand for these good jobs is down. That is a direct result of the MBA objectification of business to the point that people are resources and if you can make more money in the short term by abandoning research, well do it. That was followed by the Regan era changes that made those same people say, well lets just move the manufacturing to Mexico and Taiwan and eventually China. I can make more money that way. The jobs we used to have for scientists to support the companies that did manufacturing and the engineers that turned that science into product have left the building. That is the problem here.
I think it in our best short, mid and long term interest to convince our business community that they live here, this is a democracy and we need as a country to have a strong manufacturing base and an research base to support them and as a people to have a strong base of manufacturing so we can all make a decent living and raise kids and own a home.
Remember that time when one salary could provide a good living for most people. Someone is now getting all the profit from those double salaries, because the living standard hasn't gone up that much. Someone is stealing our good lives. Who are these people and what can we do to get balance back to the economy and back a good base of industry with good science and engineering jobs.
To me that's certainly "reasonable," but it shows that CS isn't the way to get "lots."
If there's a surplus of engineers I'm not seeing it. I'm getting job offers for civil engineering positions and I won't graduate until the end of the year. Maybe it's different for computer science majors because of the glut that came out of the late 90's?
All I see are a bunch of baby boomers retiring and they can't seem to fill the empty positions fast enough.
No wasting time on History or Civics! :) Did it mention how many of these graduated could find the USA on the map?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
What are we getting for pissing away $2.8 trillion in Iraq?
Oil.
We keep troops there as an insurance policy against the halting of the flow of oil.
If they fail to preserve sufficient governmental and economic stability, then they are already present and positioned to take things over (though it probably won't come to that).
Yes, we have our own oil supplies, but we want to use their's up first, if we can.
And yes, oil IS more important than blood in this day and age. Tremendous amounts of it are needed not only for commuting to work, but also for shipping food to city, and the production of a wide variety of products upon which we are very dependent.
Our entire way of life is built around oil. We are swimming in the stuff. We simply can't afford to lose control of it.
... to get a surplus. Train too main, or cut too many jobs. Unfortunately, we're probably doing both right now. We'll see whether there's going to be enough startups to create wealth to purchase "stuff" or whether Wal-Mart will be our deluxe shopping experience.
Except that the original Bell Labs were a monopoly that had surplus funds which they couldn't (by government mandate) spend on increasing their hold on the market. Instead they poured it into R&D. Now that the Bell Labs are in a competitive environment (Lucent), the famous labs have essentially died. The equivalent today of Bells Labs is Microsoft, they spend money on all sorts of basic research both inside MS and at universities. When the MS monopoly goes so will the research, hence we do need government sponsored (but not directed) basic research because company R&D tends to be narrow, less basic and unpredictable.
Second, it's important to examine these international rankings. How many countries produce top-of-the-line scientists? It's not very many. Asian countries, such as Japan, produce superb engineers but lousy innovators. When it comes to improving upon an existing design, the Asian nations are second to none. But how many actual first-generation inventions come from such countries? Not many.
Why is that important? Because the market will saturate with such people, and saturate quickly. Innovators and inventors aren't subject to saturation, because they invent new markets. You can't saturate something that doesn't exist yet.
What has this got to do with America? Many American Universities are currently geared towards satisfying yesterday's markets, which means their students are half a decade out of touch by the time they get into the field. The same goes for British Universities, too. Once upon a time, employers would pay for students to go to University, as a graduate could be thrown straight in at the deep end and would function perfectly well - if not better than someone who had been in the field for a while and had drifted out of touch.
These days, that does not happen very often. The reason that so many places want certifications is that degrees are no longer considered a reliable indicator of ability or knowledge. And that's even after the fact that certifications are crammer courses that rarely impart understanding. Certifications are, however, usually very current. And that is why they have value to employers.
Consider this. Building something that has essentially been built many times before becomes menial labor. Building something new requires thought, imagination and comprehension. Downgrading the top-of-the-line to the level of menial drudgery may well push up a whole host of nations to near the top of the international rankings. If you expect your workforce to be incapable and incompetent, you will rarely be disappointed.
Finally, the proof isn't in the official charts. The proof, as always, is in the results. Is America a demonstrably geekier culture, these days? No, I wouldn't have said so. Universities in America show none of the revolutionary thinking they exhibited in the 60s and 70s, non-conformity is down, passions have faded to near-oblivion. Several hacks and projects by students in America have been classified by the US Government. Name me a single instance where this has produced an outcry, a duplicate effort or indeed any reaction at all.
Is that really important? Yes, it is. The sciences and technologies are fundamentally philosophies. They are works of the mind. If the mind has been dulled and is not capable of critical thinking, that mind is also incapable of performing science. (The recent case of Prof. Watson is a good example. He has clearly allowed his mind to be dulled over the decades, as demonstrated by his interview. His ability to manage is probably just fine, but the reason he had time to manage was because he was no longer able to do anything else.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The issue here is not how many students are being trained, it is how well they are educated, particularly at the earlier stages. Plus, job openings are for corporate positions, what this country needs is more scientific entrepreneurs.
that you agree with my original point?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IBM Research Labs in Zurich is a fine example. Scanning Tunneling Microscope, superconductivity, several other big inventions in recent years. This is only one of the many privately funded research labs. They don't get the publicity of the gov-funded labs.
...
In previous generations, private fortunes funded a lot of research. Even now, private fortunes have 400 engineers working on projects. Just heard this about a special-purpose high-performance computational system a few months ago.
Government funding makes science political, therefore no public money for cold fusion, no money for anything that might dispute global warming,
Give the tax money back to people, we will do just fine in fundamental research.
Correction - should be "liver or kidney failure" above. I read it over, honest!
In the town I live in the local employers carefully specify business degrees. The result being that anyone with an engineering or science background is not appropriately qualified for a job. Business degrees are better than engineering degrees...just more chances at jobs.
riiiight. i lvoe your summation of now versus then
all the previous immigrants who came here did glorious high paying jobs with their dignity intact
that's how you see history huh?
you're a genius
i mean that in the most sarcastic way possible
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I made just that point recently. The US economy is mature and our schools churn out more technocrats than needed.
USA producing more science and technologists that the market requires?
No kidding?
Wow, news to me!
Everywhere I read "Oh, we have to go over seas for cheap labor because we cannot find anything in the USA. We just don't produce quality science talent or engineering students, in sufficient numbers."
BULL.
I have been saying this for a long time, everywhere I speak about this topic.
We have got plenty of top people. The cost of living standards are too high in the USA to employ them however.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
That may have been the original purpose, but these days it's just corporate welfare for people in politically important districts.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
So we have enough scientist and engineers, huh?
Where's my flying car??? Will it be only a short time till I can get to Alpha Centari?? How about that cure for cancer??? How about that Fission Reactor? Time Machine? And of course...when can I teleport??
So.....since we have enough scientist and engineers, I'm sure I'll see these things really soon, right????
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf07311/ Source of funding for 2005 (S&E funding sources at colleges and universities; US aggregate)
Fed. Govt: 29.2 Billion USD
Industry: 2.2 Billion USD
Raw data is available at webcaspar.nsf.gov but I am not sure if you have access.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
There's no demand in the American market for American science/engineering majors because it's a lot cheaper to hire science/engineering majors from India.
Ever hear of outsourcing? There's a few good reasons for it being so popular. Science/engineering majors do score higher on average in general if they're not Americans. As such, they're not only better, but cheaper to boot.
Is that really surprising? It's not the quantity of education that's important, it's the quality.
I know plenty of people who graduated with engineering degrees and of the ten I was close friends with, 8 went on to non-engineering professions. Two became doctors, two became lawyers, two went on to management and two went on to "technical consulting" which means implementing oracle. The two other than myself that went on to continue engineering, one went to MIT for their masters and the other went to an oil service company and I'm not necessarily sure I know what he's doing now. So the problem isn't that they graduate lots of engineering majors, its that most people who get degrees in engineering end up doing something other than engineering. It seems to be the magic degree now, and if you got a degree in any technical major, your guaranteed offers, even if they don't apply specifically to your field.
First off, assuming the "demand" for engineers is fixed is ridiculous. Who employs people? In America, its corporations. Who starts or runs corporations? People trained in engineering are the second most likely, after management students of course. So, the people with the highest likelihood of creating excess demand for students are management and engineering students.
Training people to solve other peoples problems, to do so more efficiently or more cheaply is not the problem. If there's not enough employ for such individuals, it has to do with the structure of the market. Inventions still tend to come from engineers, and inventions still tend to make new companies or industries possible. This is what improves technology, productivity, and thus, economic growth.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
but that kind of solution is unattractive to companies. so they whine, they bitch, they lobby for more h1b. well too bad. the situation is easy to solve with the proper incentives. the industry teaches lessons through its actions, and the kids have seen. what do they expect?
since i can't edit... james watson mentions it in his interview with michael krasney on forum/npr http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R709261000 for streaming/download link to interview. there are disincentives to
Exactly how high of a level of math are you talking about? Statistics, Calc (I, II), Multi-variable, Differential Equations, Advanced Calc??
My independent double-blind placebo controlled trial showed that Bush getting re-elected was a strong indicator we don't have enough smart people yet.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
why are they still coming oh great swami?
a better deal is a better deal is a better deal
you seem to think the squalor and the sweat shops and the child labor of the late 1800s was a nirvana of fair immigration
in short, as i've already said, you suffer form historical myopia: you believe something is changing that isn't changing at all
because, you're a retard: you loudly talk about a subject matter your ignorance of shows mightily
that's what i got, asshole
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As a college educator and a recipient of education grants from both NSF and USDOEd, I would like to point out that this article sidesteps the real issue in science education. The purpose of science education is NOT to fill the job market with bodies, but to produce graduates who understand science. In this realm we have failed miserably for the last 10-15 years.
Our high school graduates fall far behind high school graduates from almost all industrialized nations in mathematics skills and understanding of basic scientific principles. Anyone who has taught at the college/university level can tell you this. Our undergraduate scientists are still about par with the rest of the world (which is a source of great pride to people who teach at this level, because we are taking far less qualified students and still bringing them up to a reasonable level). Our MS and PhD graudates are still among the best in the world, and it is only in this advanced realm that we are producing more graduates than the market will bear. Thus you have MS and PhD holders competing for jobs that once were held by BS graduates, and the glut appears to be at the BS level.
However, if you look to the future, it will soon be impossible for us to continue to bring substandard high school grads up to a reasonable level, especially in the biological sciences, where our level of understanding has changed fundamentally in the last 10 years. Almost ALL high school teachers, and MOST college biology educators lack a current understanding of biological science. That's why NSF and the department of Ed pay teams like mine to retrain teachers and bring current science to high school students.
Articles such as this one are very damaging because they will feed into the rhetoric in congress and the white house, resulting in further budget cuts to our basic scientific research support. The United States now produces nothing that the rest of the world wants except for skilled people, intellectual property and voracious consumers. This is the the true supply. If we continue to fall short on the first two products, the supply of the third will certainly dry up.