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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.'"
The math was done by US educated researchers using excel 2007.
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.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Foreshadowing a critical shortage of French Lit. majors.
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No kidding. When I look how classes change in my field (CS) since the 60s, you have to wonder. Of course, a lot has changed since then and the focus moved away from hardware and keeping some huge machine alive to algorithm optimization, but one has to wonder.
We now get CS masters who cannot tell a PE header from an ELF header, know next to nothing about assembler, and couldn't even build a simple board to power and run some programmable IC like an Atmel or PIC because they know jack about electronic engineering.
We have some sort of watered down colleges here now that churn out "IT masters" in a 4 years fast breeder way. You will pass, somehow. I recently had the "joy" of sitting in an interview with a candidate who was the perfect example of what's wrong with those fast breeder tech schools. When I talk to someone with a masters in CS, I do expect him to know what happens when I do a
pop ebx
inc ebx
push ebx
retn
I do at the very least expect him to start pondering. He just stared blankly at me, he has never even seen any assembler. Hello? How's this guy supposed to write a compiler? How is he going to debug assembly? PE header? What's a PE header?
We're talking someone here who has a masters degree in CS. Not acc or bacc, where I could somehow at least excuse it. I'd question it, but it's excusable.
That's why our grades get better. Not because people get smarter, we just dumb and water down the tests until the results are what we want. I'm fairly sure we'll soon see college who can't read hexadecimal. We already arrived where they can't add them anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I believe the correct usage in that case would be, "We will pimp out your networking gear," etc.
Alternatively, one could use "trick out," "style," or "smack that bitch up."
Werd.
..while we are turning out more science students, all of them believe the Earth is 6,000 years old.
[not understand high level math...their English is atrocious] Here's an experiment you should try - increase the offered salary by 50%.
Pay more? That's like soooo 70's
Table-ized A.I.