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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.
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
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.
I'll another layer to this. I'm a foreigner and the thing that strikes me most about the States is experience is more valued than a degree (to some degree). So if you want any job, while you are at school, look for internships or co-op opportunity to get a foot in the door. I've been telling every student that ask me about career advice to do that.
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.
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"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.
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.
According to a recent article in the CBC (Canada), a similar situation is occuring in the skilled trades: specifically those jobs that require an apprenticeship period. There seem to be ample people applying to these college programs, but not enough graduating. The reason is, that despite the fact that older tradespeople are retiring and leaving a shortage, companies employing tradespeople are becoming unwilling to take on apprentices. They site two major factors: (1) They're too busy to train an apprentice (because of high demand for work and a shrinking work force), and (2) They're unwilling to invest the time and money into training someone that might just leave them for a better job afterwards.
But that doesn't change the fact that the second part of the statement (companies want people to work for cheaper) is left out in the press releases and news pieces done on the subject. The situation is portrayed as a dire shortage while old tech workers are fired and new grads are hired on for cheaper. Yes, this is what a market is but the people going into it as workers are not informed about that second half of the statement.
more of the same on Twitter.
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.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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.
Right, and I once knew an electrical engineer with a PhD who didn't know the color code for resistors! The shame.
Seriously, the purpose of a university education is to teach deep fundamental concepts, not trade skills. Now not knowing CIDR notation (RFC 1519) may be an arguable deficiency, but it is simply a notational device that may or may not be covered in the network theory courses he took, or may have been presented with an alternate notation (netmasks or even IP ranges).
The important thing is, did he understand the concept of what CIDR notation means and represents, once it is explained? Similarly, it's more important for an EE to understand the concept of resistance than to know the color code. A soldering tech, OTOH, could have the color code down cold without having the slightest notion of how electricity works.
To me that's certainly "reasonable," but it shows that CS isn't the way to get "lots."