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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.
The math was done by US educated researchers using excel 2007.
85% of all educational statistics are made up on the spot.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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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
A lot of people do that. It is actually quite common.
I am inclined to think that this observation about having too many educated people suggests a couple of things:
1) The oft-repeated corporate line that outsourcing is needed because American talent is unavailable is pure bunk (though we all knew this already).
2) The government could use this as justification for a reduction in the amount of student loans/grants it gives out....but it won't because:
3) The economic benefit of producing too many well-educated people is clear: we wind up with a lot of workers in the market who are burdened with bankruptcy-surviving student debts, thus making them desperate enough to work low-paying jobs for which they are very overqualified, much to the delight of their employers.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
For example, 20+ years ago, the U.S. was a significant exporter of technology (right? This is what my elders tell me). Now China and Japan design our cell phones and motherboards. So if we the number of scientists and engineers has increased again, then we should start to gain back those engineering and manufacturing facilities.
Absolutely true. One of the beautiful things about the free market economy is you can differentiate between what people *claim* vs what people actually do. People claim that the US is facing massive shortages in the sciences, but all you have to do is look at the salaries. There's only a "shortage" if businesses wish to pay minimum wage.
It's also interesting how Business Week's research shows the U.S. near the top of lists in science and literacy when others claim we're falling back into the stone age. BW notes the cause of this discrepency:
*Interpretation* and *validity* of testing data is almost always flawed on some level. That's why my cynicism gene kicks into overdrive when I hear of Brand New Research demonstrating...anything. If someone has an agenda, any data can be *made* to say whatever they want.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
Sanjay from Bombay will work for a slave's wage. Americans won't.
How ya like dat?
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.
..while we are turning out more science students, all of them believe the Earth is 6,000 years old.
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.
So if I get N+1 credits that makes me more competent at a subject than N credits? And N credits in some other country?
I never read the actual study--just the article, but it does not sound compelling to me. A credit in country A is comparable to a credit in country B? And simply because scores in country A increase doesn't mean that suddenly A competence > B competence.
From the article:
"As far as our workforce is concerned, the new report showed that from 1985 to 2000 about 435,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents a year graduated with bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in science and engineering. Over the same period, there were about 150,000 jobs added annually to the science and engineering workforce."
Now if we assume that the number of people turning 65 (and retiring from a successful career in the IT industry) roughly equals the number of people turning 22 with a BSc,MSc etc.
Wouldn't 150 000 new jobs added now imply a shortage of 150K? The numbers don't mean much unless you look at the number of people leaving the industry.
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.
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.
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.
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Corn subsidies, along with a lot of the other produce based agricultural subsidies, aren't there for profit margins. They are there for security. By supporting agriculture in the US, the government is ensuring that in case of a complete economic crash, there is still an existing agriculture production market that is still capable of producing enough food to feed the country. It's like long term disability insurance. You pay for it every month, but you hope to hell you never have to use it.
Ethanol subsidies on the other hand, suck donkey balls, but at least they keep farmers on the land.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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
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.
You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills
To me that's certainly "reasonable," but it shows that CS isn't the way to get "lots."