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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.'"
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.
I think it's about the cheap market here. Relentlessly trumpeting that "we can't hire enough skilled talent" encourages more people to get a degree or enter that job market which increases the supply and drops the cost of acquiring talent. A more honest statement would be: "we can't hire enough skilled talent for the wages we want to pay."
It's really no different from the claims in the hospitality and service industry that seek to keep employees there cheap.
more of the same on Twitter.
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.
See, I agree with that. It goes in line with the last line of my post...Let the government pour money into pure science, and release the results to us under an open license. I've got no problem with that; it's exactly the sort of thing the free market isn't good at funding, but which often turns out to have profit potential anyway. And it creates high end jobs, which is a win-win. Better to use tax money for something like that than fricking corn subsidies.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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
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!
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.
Because central planning really really works. And because PARC didn't discover anything of use, and all those Intel and Microsoft research labs popping up like mushrooms after a heavy rain don't exist, and the numerous research universities throughout the nation, with millions and billions of dollars in endowments, are really just studying not even string theory, but silly string.
A private company creating some interesting things does not invalidate the argument that academia researches things that aren't profitable. It's a complete tangential straw man. To summarize all academic research into a bland sentence about a particular area of physics is deceitful. Industry is good at bridging the last gap between an idea and a product. usually things that are within 5 years of being useful. Academia is better at doing basic research, research with no immediate profitability, and research that industry simply doesn't have a desire to fund. Laser's, the computer, algorithms, genetics etc... were all at one time just random academic ideas with no profit in sight. Once it hit a certain point industry took up that research and made products out of them. Basics research is high risk, you get results but the results are rarely usable in a product. Thus governments usually fund it as Industry is often extremely risk adverse.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The endowments pay for buildings and pay TA salaries, but the research is done thru government grants most of the time I believe.
What private company is going to be investing in string theory research?
Fundamental science research is important, whereas it is stupid for a company to invest in this research unless they think there will be profitable applications. Science is much more than just finding useful or profitable applications.
As the IEEE frequently points out, if there were a shortage of engineers, salaries would be going up.
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
Yup. When I was in college, they were doing this even in the programming classes. For IT majors, they used to teach programming classes in C. After a some complaints that C was 'too hard' they decided to switch to (bleck!) Visual Basic. I understand that IT majors don't need programming at the same level as CS majors, but for cryin' out loud, programming in C is not that difficult for someone who's career choice is IT!
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I've taught undergrad and grad-level courses. I've had occasion to look at older tests and talk with colleagues about how it was "back in the day." My vague impression is that this notion of "things getting easier" has more to do with how much "hard work" people used to put into things that are now trivially automated. Things like using log-tables, slide-rules, and diligently searching for books in the library. Those things are now easier, but they've been replaced by other (arguably higher-level) tasks like using spreadsheets and computer languages, or citing properly. In a sense, the standards have been raised. Whereas at one time formatting your lab-report was a way to differentiate yourself ("Wow, you used a typewriter!") it is now considered mandatory to have everything formatted nicely, have proper graphs with error bars, etc.
Now, having said all that, I fully admit that my anecdotes are no more scientific or meaningful than the anecdotes of others who say things are getting easier. My main point here is to question whether that is really the case. So, really, I would like to see some serious analysis of this issue, that gets beyond anecdotes and counter-anecdotes. An analysis that distinguishes between issues like 'difficulty,' 'abstract knowledge,' 'problem-solving skills,' and 'critical thinking.' These are all different aspects of how "easy" school is, and how "smart" you are upon graduating.
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.
I am currently at college as a CS major and I chose this because I enjoy computers and it can make me lots of money
Sorry to rain on your parade, but doing CS is not by a long way assured to make you lots of money. I did it too, and loved it, and while I do have a higher earning potential, it's quite clear that to get at it I would have to do some pretty dull jobs where other people decide my tasks. My main interest is research, and I am considering starting my own software house, but I do not assume this will make me rich. At best I hope for a comfortable living, or at least working for myself.
The myth of huge wages for CS bods is a hangover from a decade ago. Most CS people earn a reasonable wage, but only if you take a few chances and risk being very poor, or start your own company and risk going broke do you have a chance of the big bucks. Its very chancy, but a good risk for a young person without too many commitments. This brings CS into line with innumerable other professions.
A programmer can only demand high wages after many years of quality work and further study. The best paid programmer I know, who earns many times what I do doesn't even have a CS degree, he's 100% self taught.
Conservatives will always say "Man, nothing stimulates the economy like a war." I'll amend that to be "Like a war that doesn't occur on your own soil." But there is a truth to that, massive government spending on goods, services and R&D will stimulate the hell out of an economy. But what if we didn't put it towards war? What if we said we're putting a WWII level of effort into developing a new green economy and fixing our infrastructure? That's a task easily the equal of WWII or the following Marshall Plan. That's investing in the future. What are we getting for pissing away $2.8 trillion in Iraq? Might as well gone to Vegas and had the mother of all parties, you'll have as much good to show for it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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
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.
Perhaps because our government doesn't pay for our education?
At 10-20K per year, you can only go to school so long before you're too broke to continue.
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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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.
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.
Did the students get dumber, or did his expectations go up over time?
... your interviewers are often engineers who have spent years in the field, and it's easy to forget just how much you didn't know when you were fresh out of college. So we tell them to try to look for someone who has solid fundamentals and is smart... if they're smart, they can learn the rest of what they need to know quickly. If they're not... you probably don't want them even if they do know a particularly technology X, Y, or Z.
It's possible the lecturer has been in the field so long he doesn't remember how much a new engineer simply hasn't had the opportunity to learn.
We sometimes see this phenomenon in industry when interviewing new college grads
(Somewhere else in the thread someone was complaining about CS grads not knowing x86 assembly. Is that really a surprise? If they've done assembly for any architecture, and are reasonably intelligent as more CS grads probably are, they'll pick up x86 just fine. But to expect that they've been exposed to x86 assembly specifically seems a little unrealistic, especially given that most CS grads will never use any assembly language after graduation)
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.
Not true in all cases. Your wife's school may not be teaching science but my son's primary school is. It is his passion and he has been with several teachers who have actively incorporated science as part of the core material.
The failing that I observe however is a large number of students falling very far behind in math. At his school the situation is so dire that the kids who are at the level they should be have now been moved into "gifted math" while the main group is attempting to learn things they should have mastered two to three years ago.
The literacy brigade has definitely lorded over all subjects. Witness that there is often a nightly reading requirement, in fact parents are sometimes required to sign a piece of paper indicating that the child did in fact read his daily allotment, but there is no nightly math requirement, no summer math club, none of the pushing to practice math let alone enjoy it. Students still get the picture that math is somehow not fun and something to be suffered through.
We seem to have low standards for math, and we pay teachers pitiful salaries that are not commensurate with the number of hours a decent teacher must put in for preparation, actual teaching and grading. I'd like to see teachers given very competitive salaries based on merit, where parents collectively vote on merit based on what they observe, along with test scores and observations from the local principal. The tenure game and low salaries don't seem to be working. Teachers collectively appear frustrated and students are being pushed to successive grade levels without actually achieving everything they need to at each level.
Huh. And I got through school with minimal loans, and will have it paid off being less than 5 years out of school. Really, you're blaming other people for your bad decision with the degree you took, and the asinine amount of money you spent for it? You can get a good education for less than $30K, and that's all 4 years, especially if you have a part-time job at the time.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Bush just asked for another $46 billion you'll never see again. Imagine if that was invested here in basic research.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You are wrong. The US is not "near the bottom of the list" for infant mortality; it's ahead of most of the world. It is behind many other developed nations like Japan, much of Western Europe, Canada. That's not because Canada or Japans health care system doesn't try to save all the infants we do, it's because their health care system is better, as is their teen pregnancy rate.
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
Question: Was it any more difficult for the foreign students to make it to an American university in the first place? By which I mean, might some of the weeding been done ahead of time for the foreign students?
Or have you only comfort...that stealthy thing that enters the house and guest then becomes host, then master - KG
Secondly, PARC discovered a LOT of stuff that's useful. The failure of PARC was in Xerox's failure to understand or capitalize on the discoveries. Read "Fumbling The Future" for an inside look. Again, massively tangential. Government funded research != centrally planned economy, or even centrally planned economy. PARC discovered interesting almost marketable things. They didn't do very much basic research. That example is entirely irrelevant. There are something private industry does very well (wealth creation, incremental innovation, production) and some things it does really poorly (basic research, unprofitable services, high risk low return ventures). Nothing you said has anything to do with this fact, nothing you said changes the reality that basic science research has been, is going to be, and ought to be funded by the government. The notion that government funding = centrally planned is "libertarian" propaganda. The government has a lot of say on what gets fundedbut they depend on the distributed network of academics to come up with the proposals.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Compare your conclusions to the article that the summary references:
The article says the US produces too many science and engineering grads than the market demands. What they forgot to include was "...that will work for less than $40K". Those MF'ers actually expect to get paid once they get their degrees.
The only thing saving the US is the H1B program!
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If your I.Q. is in the top 10%, isn't it reasonable to expect a salary in the top 10%? You are obviously intellectually capable of doing almost anything, so your opportunity cost is likely to be quite high.
Half of all people are of below average intelligence. Most of your 42% is in that bottom half. What do their earnings have to do with the earnings of scientists and engineers, who are much closer to the 90th percentile than the 50th?
See what I've been reading.