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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.
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.
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)