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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 want my salary to go up
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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So... the sociologists say there's too many technical scientists? That's just what I'd expect from those namby-pamby girly-haired soft-science types! I'll bet they've got a correlation study and everything. Well, maybe the technical scientists say there are too many sociologists? And we've got freaky equations and stuff.
Yeah!
Who you going to believe, pretty demographics charts or complicated equations? Eh? EH?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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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.
Perhaps we should commission a group of scientists to formally study the idea.
Who wants to write the grant proposal?
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?
The ponderous population of smart people in the US is an untold bane on our society.
:(
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.
Ernest Rutherford once said The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't
Oddly enough, quantum mechanics draws pretty much the exact same conclusion.
*Ducks*
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
I studied Math. Not the worst possible choice for an undergrad, really: the level of conceptual abstraction and logical rigor make it difficult, maybe even somewhat more so than some other technical fields, but in terms of sheer number of hours of coursework, it's considerably shorter than engineering, which allows a student to take a lot of other courses and still graduate in a reasonable amount of time. And it's a pretty good education, too.
I don't think I'd do it again.
It's exceptionally clear that not only does the marketplace value other skills (law, finance, business adminstration, plumbing) more highly, but that 90% of the population doesn't even understand what it is you learned. I'd have been far better off to pick a Math minor for core skills and rigor and pair it with an Econ or Business Major. And let's not even go to the Electrical Engineering degree I originally considered. Unless you're doing it for sheer love, it's a waste of time.
That's the general prognosis. As a career choice, STEM fields offer mediocre to middlin' rewards. Particularly when you consider the alternatives.
Tweet, tweet.
Isn't imposing your opinion on how they should pay employees, rather than letting employers set wages as they see fit, rather anti-Free Market?
If you're doing a PhD in the physical sciences, then you're almost certainly not paying tuition directly (let alone a level of tuition proportional to your degree as you seem to claim). Otherwise, absolutely zero people would be doing it. MD, JD, and MBA programs can charge a lot because you'll make a lot of money once you've got the degree. The same cannot be said for a science PhD.
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.
On the other hand, the 'meaningless' work done by those 'mediocre' scientists could very well be setting the foundation for the next Einstein to do something truly marvelous. Science is not a series of disconnected "Eureka!" moments; it's a steady accumulation of small but meaningful hypotheses that allow those superstars to formulate workable theories.
And what about all those potential superstars being lost, because they can't get the work experience they need to develop their potential? How many of those next Einsteins have gone off to work in something totally unrelated because of financial concerns? Sometimes it takes a lifetime for someone to produce that truly meaningful work. By narrowing our focus to people doing 'useful' work, we kill a lot of long-term potential that could arise from the research being done for the sake of research.
The *EOs are appointed by the board, who are their good buddies who they golf with every weekend. And only the largest shareholders have any effect on the board's makeup. The whole thing is a big good-old-boy system, which is why CEOs get giant pay packages even when they drive the company into the ground. If they were paid on merit, they would get paid according to their performance, and not get squat if they don't do a good job, but that's obviously not the case.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was on an evaluation team that was charged with determining how well a government program had addressed a "shortage" of a specific skill set. On the committee was an economist from a big university. He opened the meeting with the comment: There is no shortage; the government is just not willing to pay market value.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I would LOVE to go back to school, get a doctorate in physics and work in the field doing ANYTHING related to physics.
Instead I'm a Engineer hiding in a marketing dept happily making between 150-200k/year and I spend my lunch and weekends madly reading about physics, politics, ancient history, all the things that I really love, and would love to get paid to do.
Instead I write white papers, talk at conferences, run tests on hardware that I love, and I do for the most part love my job. But I would SOOO much rather being working for the DOD, or a school, or anyone, doing research. But I can't live on what they make.
And so I remain an engineer hiding in marketing eagerly awaiting Brian Greene's next talk :)
Smoking cigarettes makes it less likely you will ever get parkinsons (source). Which chemical is it, nicotine, harmaline, what? At first noone knew... its probably nicotine. How is it doing this? Theres a crapload of different versions of nicotinic receptors, is somehow interacting with a specific protein that makes up one of them (seems most likely) or even sticking to some other thing in your body and changing what that protein/whatever does (less likely)? Probably nicotinic receptors... which kind? Theyre made of combinations of 5 different proteins that arrange together to form the receptor, theres 17 proteins that could be part of these that could theoretically arrange in any combination you want...someone had to narrow down the possibililties. So ok theres only like 6 different combinations of these subunits we find in the parts of the brain that are supposedly involved in parkinsons (knowing which parts were involved was its own whole multimillion dollar expenditure) which one (or maybe more than one) of those is what nicotine is interacting with to make smokers less likely to develop Parkinson's? Probably ones containing a4B2 (alpha4 and beta2 are names for 2 of the 17 possible subunits). Whats special about those? What type of neurons are they located on? Is nicotine doing this at the cell surface... or getting into the cell and doing something before these receptors even reach the surface? Is it increasing synthesis of these, or decreasing degradation? Where exactly is it sticking... how is the binding site shaped and what amino acids are involved... and what chemical and structural properties should a chemical have to make this anti-parkinsonian effect happen?
Once you know that, you can design a drug to fit, but then you also want to figure out how to make it also have chemical and structural properties that make it not altered to some nonfunctional form by your liver enzymes, pass the blood brain barrier, etc, that way people can just down a pill rather than get shots... or worse need to get the drug injected into their central nervous system in some way.
Its all very boring to anyone who doesnt like a good, complex mystery... but someone should be doing it because there are ways to figure out each step of the way (it might take a couple years and a bunch of money but its doable). And this isnt even my field.
Not trying to contradict what you're saying (because I fully agree), just thought I'd be anal and point out that your theorem only holds true for x > 4. ;)
That's totally useless. What we really need to know is how to package lots of bad loans into a derivative and make it worth a fortune. That and how to hide a CEO's income from the IRS. This science stuff just pollutes the mind, and distracts us from putting more money into another Wall Street shell game.
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?
Once we get decent robots (and they can now pick loose nuts out of a bin), 99% of jobs (even low skill ones) go away.
Buy a grocery shelf stocker robot for $50k and let go 6 people. It's never sick and works on holidays.
50 stockers lose their job and are replaced by one repairman-- but with proper design, even he is a minimum wagejob ("check code: A5, replace module 3")
If you can read a piece of paper and enter numbers, your job is threatened in the near future.
We have to find a better way than scarcity to distribute time at the beach, good food, and other resources or it is going to get extremely ugly within the next 20 to 30 years.
Too many people- no value to society- 1% of people having stuff- 99% of people not having stuff. Historically that doesn't go well.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Who needs a science education to scavenge rats for supper?
My rat trap is better than yours, sucker!
I see we have a business major chiming in.
And while [flat for] "about a decade" is an exaggeration
Bet your ass it's an exaggaration. From the link you gave me:
1998: 11.49 billion
2008: 23.84 billion
That's DOUBLE by any reasonable standard, not "essentially flat."
The year-over-year increases barely kept pace with inflation in most cases, and sometimes fell behind. I don't know about NSF and other non-DoD scientific funding agencies, but I'm guessing they suffered the same fate.
Actually, everything went up faster than inflation. Not even talking about Bush being the
first president to fund stem cell research, or push through actual tests of student/teacher performance.
The only problem I see with Bush's science policy was that he actually gave TOO MUCH to all the Lysenko wannabes over at DoD.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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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1. A strong nation needs scientists and mathematicians more than anything else.
I'm willing to grant that for the sake of argument, although it does expose your personal bias
2. The idea of not increasing native-born scientists on the basis that "employers ain't gonna pay more if there is an over-supply of scientists" is totally bullshit.
Not even a little. It's supply and demand. If you've got 35 qualified applicants for a job, you can afford to be choosier in who you get and what you pay them, than if you've only got 2 qualified applicants. The author of the study may overstate how much of an influence this plays on overall salary and retention, but that doesn't make it "Total bullshit" as you put it.
3. Most of the scientists in America are foreign born. And those foreign-born scientists have no difficulties in going back to their homeland if they can live better back home.
I attend Purdue, which is always in the top 5 for international students as a percent of the student body, and is usually number 1 or 2 for international students in the Graduate Programs nationally. However, international graduate students (or undergrads for that matter) don't make up anywhere near 50% of the student body within either demographic. You could claim that international students are not evenly distributed across departments (I don't know that to be the case), but I'm in the sciences and they don't even make up 20% of my departments graduate students. I've seen no evidence that they make up more than 30% in any given department. It's all circumstancial, but leads me to believe that you are completely wrong.
There may be a field out there, possibly your field, that is made up predominantly of foreign born scientists, but that does not appear to be representative of All science and mathematics nation wide.
4. Imagine the scenario of foreign born scientists leaving America while there are not enough native-born scientists to fill the posts, what type of future America gonna have?
Most of the foreign born scientists I know are trying their best to stay in the US. The problem is that companies need to be willing to sponser their Visa's and at least in my field they seem very unwilling. I know several former students who are doing Post-Doc work at the university in order to stay in the US long enough to find a sponsor. The number of applicants for permanent US residency far out strips the number that the US is willing/able to approve each year. As a result, when no longer able to find a Post-Doc most of those foreign MS and PhD students I know have had to return home to China, Ireland, India, Nigeria, etc, so the situation you describe has already happening without the sky falling in on anyone.
4. Does that anti-science sociologist want America to become another Zimbabwe?
The US has been training and exporting educated foreign born scientists for decades and we've retained our competetiveness. There is no reason to believe that it will change if we educate a handful fewer scientists every year.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde