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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!
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."
As the IEEE frequently points out, if there were a shortage of engineers, salaries would be going up.
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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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.
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.
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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?
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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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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)
True basic research doesn't have a goal. It has a question. If you already know your goal, you're not doing basic research.
No, take the money and offer it as a prize. First two companies to do X get Y.So (a) the government is setting the goal and (b) it's providing (some) funding on the back end rather than the front end. This is not research.
Research is when a scientist has an interesting question, hypothesizes an answer, and then goes about trying to (frequently dis-)prove it. A typical grant proposal has to lay out those three items, with the last part (the experimental method) in some detail, including materials and timelines ("deadlines"). Most grants I know of are for specific time periods, and you're not going to get any kind of renewal without showing progress (one way or another).
Often, one project will spawn many new questions ("uesless side items"), which should be the only "goal" of pure research. Each would, of course, require approval of a new grant application.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
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.
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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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