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Study Says US Needs Fewer Science Students
cremeglace writes "It's an article of faith: the United States needs more native-born students in science and other technical fields. But a new paper by sociologists at the Urban Institute and Rutgers University contradicts the notion of a shrinking supply of native-born talent in the United States. In fact, the supply has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude, while the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering in greater numbers than in the past, suggesting that the threat to American economic competitiveness comes not from inadequate science training in school and college but from a lack of incentives that would make science and technology careers attractive. Cranking out even more science graduates, according to the researchers, does not give corporations any incentive to boost wages for science/tech jobs, which would be one way to retain the highest-performing students."
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't give a rusty fuck what some study says people should or should not go into. I work in the fields I love, and I'd recommend it to everyone else. If you want to do science, do science. If you don't then don't. Who really cares what some frigtarded academic thinks anyway? Final thought - how often is it that we look back on these studies five or ten years later to find out they were somewhere around, oh, dead wrong. if these guys are such friggin' geniuses at predicting the future they should go make $Billions in the stock market.
If all you care about is money than go into politics or join the mob (it's ethically about the same).
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When you keep downward pressure on wages of scientific positions; When you don't offer people compensation for the utter destruction of their social lives required to seriously pursue science, they gravitate toward management. (for comparison, at least medicine and law provide salaries commensurate with the effort required for the education)
You never see those massive bonuses going to the mathematical wizards, engineers, or design teams who are actually responsible for the profits. It goes to some otherwise average person who sat in his office and barked orders.
Don't be surprised when the truly intelligent notice where the money is going and choose to expand their social lives in the process!
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From the article:
The supply [of science students] has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude from an analysis of six longitudinal surveys conducted by the U.S. government from 1972 to 2005. However, the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering in greater numbers than in the past, suggesting that the threat to American economic competitiveness comes not from inadequate science training in school and college but from a lack incentives that would make science and technology careers attractive.
From the Associated Press:
Average tuition at four-year public colleges in the U.S. climbed 6.5 percent, or $429, to $7,020 this fall as schools apologetically passed on much of their own financial problems, according to an annual report from the College Board, released Tuesday. At private colleges, tuition rose 4.4 percent, or $1,096, to $26,273.
So we have the costs of already outstanding tuition fees rising in a faltering and near collapsed economy. Many top positions in fields of science require Masters or Doctoral level education. A Master or Doctoral level of education also demands a Master or Doctoral level of tuition. In an uncertain environment for employment, the risk of entering the field of science, can be high.
Instead of going into science or mathematics you see the smarted minds who are more money minded going into the financial fields. They are intelligent but because of the upbringing in a capitalist society desire money more than anything. So they become investors, stockbrokers, and deal with money all day and night.
What we need is to recruit the best of the best, have private industries, and government, pay for the tuition of these individuals or offer them guaranteed job positions. Does a promising young high school student enter undergraduate school looking for a degree in bio-medicine? Have a major cancer research outfit pay for his tuition. Or have a medical technology firm cover his tuition. Or have him pay for his own tuition but make it known publicly that anyone with a degree in 'science' who applies to 'x job' will have his college tuition fees and loans paid for in full by the company if he works x number of years.
Maybe we need to lower the tuition for higher science. If you want a degree in particle physics, wave physics, astro-biology, or whatever, then you tuition is significantly lower than your peers. My graduate work was in television broadcasting, if my peers studying medicine and high level math had lower tuition fees than myself, I would not have batted an eyelash.
If you cover the tuition fees of our smartest students, and they go on to become the people who provide us with life changing nanotechnology, or cure HIV-AIDS, that money will pay off 100 if not 1,000,000,000 times more down the road.
We need to invest in our future by investing in our brightest minds and steering them towards occupations where they can make a lasting difference in the world.
So, by this rationale, in order to get more top talent in science, we need to let more talent choose other fields, leaving a scarcity of science grads, which will drive up salaries, and lead more top talent back into science? That's kind of like the argument that cold water boils faster than hot water. Of course, lots of people think that's true, too.
Along the same lines, I'd like to hear the author's explanation of why employees in finance continue to get paid more and more, even as more talent floods into that profession.
Not every price is set solely by supply and demand. In this case, I think culture has a lot to do with it, as do negotiating skills (which geeks don't generally have in abundance). Science and math types are still considered dorks, and the leeches who work on Wall St. or Madison Ave are the cool kids. Fewer science students isn't going to change that.
Nope, that's not what the summary is saying. It's stating that we have a steady stream of scientists and engineers, but it seems like they choose another career path when they realize they'll just be overworked and underpaid. Go fig, when it's easier to get an MBA and become a CEO who gets a golden parachute for tanking their company based on short-sighted decisions to appease stockholders then it is to go through 10+ years of training and pay off 100k in student loans.
You've got yourselves a brain drain. Growing up in Australia as a geek I had the sole intention of getting out of the country, going to university in Europe and finding a decent, well paid job there. In Australia there was no funding or development, no highly paid jobs, little basic research at all, and as a student cash was the big draw to get out. The brain drain was almost epidemic. The USA wasn't an option due to your ridiculous Green Card Lottery. Very glad I did too as I simply had more, and better opportunities. There are some truly excellent innovations that still come out of Australia built literally on a shoestring. Realtime over-the-horizon radar that can image a supercarrier off the coast of Japan is one example, and it is constructed from thousands of hand wound wire, wrapped around cotton reels. So it is possible to have success (albeit non-financial) in the midst of a brain drain.
Reducing the Green Card quotas further, and kicking foreigners out of Science will certainly reduce the number of graduates, and the intelligence of the nation. Weren't most of the USA's scientists working on the big name projects of the last 50 years foreign born anyway?
I'm an assistant professor and I can see this type of thing going on first hand. I get paid okay but expectations of the promotion and tenure committee in terms of papers, research funding and teaching requires 50-60 hours a week of work minimum most week. My record is 110 hours over 7 days, what a nightmare. The reason for this situation is that science funding by the federal government has been more or less flat for about a decade but the number of professors has increased and the expectations of the universities from professors have gone up.
My students take one look at me and immediately make a career decision in another job besides academics or even science in general. I don't blame them either, even I hate my job sometimes and I couldn't ever imagine myself of being anything but a scientist -- but at this point, I have one more year to go for tenure but taking that dream position at the coffee shop in western Colorado and skiing all winter is starting to sound really good.
Maybe money isn't the sole motivator. Did it ever occur to you that maybe there are students that really want to go into science, but because of the job prospects (or perceived lack thereof), don't think they can *afford* to go into science?
I mean, if you think you are going to give up 6 years of your life/potential income [well, you can still work while in school, perhaps, but probably not make as much income as you could if you were working full-time + overtime at a job for those years], and spend $60,000 (plus interest, so probably closer to $100,000), say, to get a Masters in Science, and then you think you will only make 40,000-60,000/yr, you might not think you can afford that. I have a cousin, only has a high school education, works for a road construction/repair company. On the one hand, he has to work a lot of overtime, but on the other hand, I think he's making in that same $40,000-60,000/yr range [maybe more]. He's been doing that basically since he graduated from high school, and never had to take out any student loans. So, the way I see it, someone in his position potentially comes up about $300,000 ahead (on graduation day) of the guy who went to school for 6 years and took out those loans.
That's the reality of education. In order to justify the expense, you need to make good money after graduation - such people should probably be starting at $70,000-$90,000 yr almost straight out of school, with raises every year which outpaces inflation, just to allow them to recover that "lost" $300,000 over the course of say the first 10 years of their employement, and then continue to make that kind of money after that so they come out *ahead* of the people who didn't go to school.
But, it sounds like, from the article, that's not happening, so while students might be attracted to science, they may just feel that they can't sacrifice their financial future in order to benefit corporations who aren't willing to give them reasonable compensation for their education.
I would make the fairly obvious argument that the number of scientists is largely irrelevant compared to the amount of work they produce. A single Einstein is worth an infinite number of mediocre physicists who never end up producing any work in their careers. This is important, because (at least in my experience in academia), 95% of academic scientists and maybe 80% of engineers produce nothing useful in their lifetimes.
While there may be a glut of scientists, there is no glut of *good* scientists; we always need those. Let's not kid ourselves - the number of possible problems scientists and engineers can solve has not gone down over time. If anything, it has gone way up.
Don't confuse science and engineering; they're two radically different disciplines with totally different goals.
Yes, most academic scientists probably don't produce much of value, but that's just like how a paleontologist, for instance, only has a certain chance of finding some great fossil that significantly adds to our knowledge of dinosaurs. This isn't that much because of the paleontologist's skill, but more because of chance: will he find that fossil, or not? Scientists don't create truth, they search for it. If they find something really useful, then they're remembered for generations. If they don't succeed in their search, they're forgotten.
Engineers don't search for anything. They create things. Even the most mediocre engineer can create useful things. So I really doubt your claim about 80% of engineers creating nothing useful. If they're employed as engineers, they must be producing something useful, or else they wouldn't receive a paycheck. Now, how useful that product is to society is debatable, of course. The engineers who created the Ford Pinto, for instance, didn't exactly create something wonderful, and considering how that car killed people, it probably had negative utility. However, they did the work that their employers asked of them, and as management was in control and refused to allow engineers to improve the design, it was they who were responsible for any deaths. Less spectacularly, many engineers work on things which are ultimately trashed before seeing production. I've seen my share of that in my own work. But again, just because management decides to trash something doesn't mean it isn't "useful", it just wasn't profitable enough for them.
As for how many scientists are needed, that depends on how much science a society wants to do. If you want to do a lot, then you need more people working on the problem. If you don't care much about learning new things, then you don't need many scientists. I'd say that our society doesn't really need that many scientists, because it really isn't that interesting in finding out new things and doesn't want to invest the money needed to do so, because it doesn't return a profit quickly enough.
Indeed, that's their thinking, but they're dishonest about the motives: officially, they say that the native talent simply doesn't exist, not that it exists but only at prices they don't want to pay.
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You should probably consider a nice career in banking and move to Wall Street then. Its not exactly a secret that the big Wall Street banks have pretty much devoured the U.S. economy and they run the government, insuring that their success will be guaranteed by the Congress, the President and his Wall Street friendly administration(same for Dems and Republicans), the Fed (by printing money and giving it to them at zero percent even if it destroys the dollar) and in times of the trouble the U.S. taxpayer. They are a huge percentage of the U.S. economy now and their compensation dwarves pretty much every other career.
I was reading earlier this week the U.S. now has the greatest income inequality in the world except for Singapore and Hong Kong which are tiny city states. Last time we had income inequality at this level was in the 1920's right before the Great Depression. Lord Brian Griffiths of Fforestfach, vice chairman at Goldman Sachs Intl., a life peer under England's nobility scheme, and Christian theorist of "biblically based wealth creation." recently said: "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all." The dirty little secret is Goldman Sach's keeps all the prosperity and opportunity for themselves and their rich friends, and the rest of us will never see it unless we manage to join their exclusive little club. We've pretty much returned to aristocracy and are certainly in a plutocracy with a tinge of kleptocracy since when Wall Street screwed up they smoothed it over by outright legalized theft from the rest of us.
The article doesn't spell it out but all of America's best and brightest are going to Wall Street and big business, not science. Unless they are idealists or altruists they go there because that's where the easy money is. Its mostly money being produced via elaborate legalized Ponzi schemes but that doesn't change the fact if you make it on Wall Steet you get money for nothing and chicks for free. Whose going to enter the exciting world of Physics when they can have that, at least while the party lasts, and it appears after a brief glitch its back bigger and better than ever.
@de_machina
Actually you gain the privilege of becoming an administrator for the rest of your career. The only professors I knew who spent a decent amount of time doing real research were retired. The rest spent their time teaching, chasing grant money, and attending meetings. You really have to be a little crazy to go for an academic career these days.
Its solvable by a simple law- no employee of a corporation may be paid more than 10x the average employee. So if the CEO wants that raise, everyone gets a raise. It also stops outsourcing, as if the CEO wants to make megabucks, he has to pay those workers as much as he would US workers.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
"The Federal Reserve does not print money."
Read up on quantitative easing. It is what the Fed's been doing massively since the crisis. It is printing money though its done electronically. From Wikipedia:
"Quantitative easing is another way to influence monetary policy, only recently begun to be used in the United States. Other countries, such as Japan, have provided a template for some Fed actions. Essentially, quantitative easing provides a method for the central bank to provide funds at lower than zero interest rates, in order to increase the monetary supply and combat deflationary forces. This is accomplished by the Fed purchasing U.S. government debt with newly printed U.S. currency. In essence, the Fed is monetizing the debt. In the current (late 2007 to today) macro-economic environment, the slowing velocity of money has induced U.S. central bankers to pursue a variety of new, and to some radical, policies to produce economic stimulus."
They also allowed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to acquire bank charters so they have access to this free money to fuel their commodity, stocks and bond gambling. It is helping to fuel the current bubble in stocks, bonds and commodities.
It is inappropriate for investment banks to have access to the discount window. Paul Volcker has been lobbying hard to get the Obama to stop it, but Geitner and Summers being stooges of Wall Street are ignoring him. Discount window access should only be allowed to conservative commercial banks who don't gamble on the stock market. Ever since the repeal of Glass Steagel and they let Citigroup access it, and certainly since they let Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and what's left of Merrill access it they've created massive potential for abuse and for bubble creation.
@de_machina
There's a simple way of preventing that, which I proposed a few years ago. Pay the CEO bonus in arrears. Give them a reasonable (but not excessive) salary which they collect every year. For each year, they then get three bonuses paid two, five, and ten years later based on the company's value at the time that the bonus is paid. The proportional size of each bonus increase, so they might get the value of 2000 shares after two years, 5000 after five and so on.
If you make short-term decisions then you may get the first bonus, but the second and third are likely to be very small. If you make medium term decisions then you get the a large second one (which will be larger than a large first bonus), and if you make long term decisions then you end up with the most money at the end.
This also has the benefit, if advertised before hiring, of working to select CEOs who think in the longer term. Someone fixated on short-term success will look at an advert for a position where the total renumeration for one year's work is paid over a decade and not be interested. Someone who is used to thinking in terms of decades will think it's an interesting challenge.
This also encourages the CEO to train a competent successor, because their last bonus will not be paid until ten years after they have retired and so they have an incentive to select someone who will make the company value increase over the next decade.
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