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The Real Science Gap
walterbyrd writes "This article attempts to explain why the US is struggling in its competition with other countries in the realm of scientific advancement. 'It's not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It's a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.' I can hardly believe that somebody actually understands the present situation. It continues, 'The current approach — trying to improve the students or schools — will not produce the desired result, the experts predict, because the forces driving bright young Americans away from technical careers arise elsewhere, in the very structure of the US research establishment. For generations, that establishment served as the world’s nimblest and most productive source of great science and outstanding young scientists. Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.'"
We must not allow a MINE SHAFT GAP...err...science gap...
Faith works much better.
One that hath name thou can not otter
The youngest and brightest are being sucked up by the field that pays: structured finance. As a country you've put financial innovation ahead of scientific and this is the natural outcome.
when the government can't justify continuing it's own historically most prestigious scientific research program, there isn't much hope for the private sector.
When I was in college (not so long ago), getting a Ph.D. was basically considered an insane pursuit. The professors (whatever their motivation) would explicitly tell their students this. Aside from the grueling work and tough admission requirements for most programs, the end result was a mountain of student loan debt and a degree that was unlikely to even get you a tenure-track position anymore (since those were being phased out). You would end up $100,000 of student loan debt and a part-time instructor (or low-level researcher) job that barely paid your rent.
If the U.S. government wants more Ph.D.-level scientists so bad; start encouraging universities to open up more admissions slots, offering grants (instead of loans) for qualified candidates, and offering better paying post-doc positions. Otherwise STFU and stop complaining that no one is insane enough to go into serious research (more like serious *debt*).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
My dad grew up with Nasa/AMES Lockheed sponsoring the model rocket club at James Lick High school.
His brother went to an autoshop sponsored by Ford.
Straight out of high school, uncle went to work at the Ford plant in Milpitas, bolting bumpers on Pintos. Dad went to work in the sciences.
My generation had nearly free apple II's in school. We grew up to be the dot.com generation.
Somewhere along the line, we decided corporate support of training and equipment wasn't good enough. Greedy school administrators insisted on "Cash only" gifts, citing that corporate support was some evil incapable of having goals that are in tune with the education system. Bullshit, they just wanted to pad their own 6 figure superintendent salaries.
Meanwhile the corporations are moving onto countries where the educational systems have no problems working with schools to produce good workers.
If wanted to fix this problem, we'd ask some of the biotech firms to donate used gene sequencing equipment to high schools, with some training on how to use it. How many students would love to know how to sequence their own genes?
I'm moving to Mexico, where I can fly the American flag and light off fireworks on the 4th of July without getting harassed by some dipshit politically correct cocksucker.
I think the answer is glaringly obvious for five solid reasons. (1) Since US firms mostly offshore research and developement there is little or no reason to train at the collegiate level for such a career. (2) Those firms doing research here in the US import labor on an H1-B visa program. (3) Wall Street has lured some bright minds to come up with fancy, fuzzy mathematics to allow major financial companies to bilk the American people out of billions of dollars. The sharp math minds going to Wall Street leave a void in the research, experimentation, and development arena. (4) George W. Bush repealled a number of executive orders and was generally unfriendly towards science making it unattractive for industry to engage in research in the US. Bush and his faith-based, theocratic bent set us back a decade. (5) George W. Bush's no child left behind which further worsened the educational system in the US.
Let's not kid ourselves - the real reason those gifted enough to excel shy away from science is that this path is not conducive to having a life. It requires working long hours, frequently 7 days per week, for little pay (NIH stipends for graduate students are around $20'000), and in a highly stressful environment (those who've done research know how emotionally crushing doing scientific research can often be), just to become a sub-$40k post-doc for another decade thereafter, and then desperately search for a faculty position, to spend the next 20 years stressing over grant deadlines that threaten to destroy whatever little autonomy you've managed to gain, in an environment where something like 5% of the projects get funded.
In an environment, where most work to the limit of their bodily ability, and get paid less than their intelligence and time commitment would yield them elsewhere, young men and women find it difficult to acquire and hold onto a mate, and those who want to have families find themselves unable to support them, as well as spend adequate time with them.
And people wonder why in many top-tier institutions 75% of the graduate students in science are foreign-born?
...that someone is raising the real issue. I'm in the UK and studied for a science degree and from people I still know who graduated, only one of them is actually working in science now (5 years later). Of other friends I've made in the field most have left their science jobs. The most recent has just retrained as an accountant. She got made redundant from her previous job with a big pharma as they moved her whole lab out to china where they said they could have 6 equally qualified people for what they were paying her. People aren't stupid, they aren't going to study for something where there's no jobs, or what jobs do exist are all low paid rubbish with no chance of advancement. They'll all go become accountants and lawyers. Say hello to globalisation...
I am a scientist and manned exploration is basically a useless waste of money for us (and yes my research is deeply rooted into space exploration). Robots bring more data for a fraction of the cost. I have yet to hear any of my colleague complain about the government new plans for space. On the contrary.
It is assumed (when asking for money from the government) that there is some terrible gap in education--that America is doomed because somebody's program isn't funded enough. But evidence of this is never given.
Are our universities bad? Obviously not, as foreigners do everything they can to get into them. Are our primary schools bad? Doesn't look like it; foreign students make cheating a science just to keep up at the university level.
If our science students can't find jobs, the problem is a GLUT of science education. Perhaps we should focus more on trade schools than churning out more unemployed bio and physics majors.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It seems to me that this just proves that American math skills are good:
If student A spends over $100,000 on education, but finds there's no jobs that don't involve asking if they want whipped cream on their tall mocha late, how many years will they subsist on ramen while trying to pay off the debt with piss-poor tips?
If student B coasts out of high school and resigns themselves to the inevitability of their barista career, they'll be the manager in charge of deciding that Student A is way over qualified and might do better investigating the all the possibilities of frying something next door by the time Student A swallows their pride and applies.
The Digital Sorceress
Robots are fuckin' boring.
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
Two factors immediately come to my mind: military spending and the reduction of the progressive tax burden. The way I see it, there just is not as much money for the government to throw at science, with the exception of military science. Now, it is true that military science has produced a number of useful non-military results, but there are some fields that have not really been advanced by spending on military science -- the pentagon has little interest in funding research into coral reef development or studies on dung beetles (I write this wondering if someone is going to pull up a paper on one of those topics that happened to be funded by DARPA). It is also true that government spending is not the be-all and end-all of science funding, and that private sources can also fund science, but that is not a solution in and of itself -- corporate funded science suffers from a problem of biased results, and science-as-a-charity is not very sustainable (there really are not enough rich patrons willing to pay for research, especially for topics that are not "trendy").
Palm trees and 8
Even if the Apollo program was to a large extent a propaganda battle against the Soviets, it more than paid for itself in the technical innovations it delivered. The advancements in integrated circuits and miniaturization alone probably paid for the Apollo program many times over. It basically maintained the US's dominance in computers and embedded systems for a generation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's a lack of job opportunities.
If you want an education to set you up to take a job, train to clean toilets & mop floors. Those jobs aren't going away.
Otherwise, find something you love and plan on making, not taking, a job doing what you love. For most of us, we will be able to find an existing job doing that thing we want to do. (Or at least that thing we don't mind doing to pay the bills.) But a job is not an entitlement; it is not a right. Don't plan your life around someone else giving you a job.
Furthermore, if there is this connection between education and job opportunities, why do we have art history departments? Are there that many museums on the hunt for curators? Or is it just for all the Starbucks that don't yet have the minimum number of people hanging out behind the counter?
Your OMFG IT IS THE FOREIGNERS!!!1111! whining is crap.
1) The US doesn't offshore research more than it sends offshore anything else. It happens, but you stand a much better chance of winning a job from an Indian or Chinese competitor in R&D than basically anything else that isn't completely location specific. You are NOT going to beat India and China on cheap labor. You can win in brain power and the infrastructure that supports it. A few billion people means fuck-all if 90% of them grew up without power. The actual number of viable developing nation candidates you are dealing with is actually very small.
2) H1-B visas are not the devils work. If you lose to an H1-B, there is something wrong with you. H1-B's are expensive and unreliable. Even if a company breaks the law and uses H1-B's to save themselves 10% on how much they shell out in salary, that paltry gain doesn't make up for the fact that an H1-B might leave at any moment, probably has reduced English skills, is always under the threat of running home to get a decent job there, and you are on the hook for dealing with any immigration problems (which are hardly rare).
There is a problem in US science. Part of it might be cultural. I am sure part of it for PhD folks is pay, the slave like conditions you have to suffer, and the tenure system. You might even be able to point a finger at Wall Street... though I Imagine that bubble has gone boom. Blaming it on 'dem evil for-en-ers sounds a whole lot more like the whining of an enemy of science than a friend. Bush, Palin, and the other nut jobs that try and point outside of the nation for its internal problems are no friend of science.
While there is always much waving of hands and gnashing of teeth about it, the reality is that the USA by far leads the world in science. And speaking as a science grad student, it's much easier to get into science here than anywhere else in the western world. I know plenty of foreign grad students in the US, but almost no US students that had any motivation to study overseas. Personally, even though I'm originally from Canada, I have no plans to go back, because it's so much easier to get funded as a scientist here.
It seems to me most of the of the people who complain about the "science gap" are those who aren't actually working in the field...
You speak like the modern age has had a fundamentally different attitude towards science.
From what I'm told (I didn't live during that time, so I don't have firsthand knowledge), we used to have a government that strongly encouraged scientific research and development and considered it part of the greatness of our nation. Whether you consider it a problem with faith or with politics or with capitalism or education or whatever, I don't think you can say that about our relationship with science today.
It also doesn't help that we don't have a lot of hard science going on in business right now. Our current business environment emphasizes short-term growth over long-term growth, so scientific developments that don't lead to real gains within a few years are being somewhat ignored, so that the private sector is just as apathetic as the public sector, if not more.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
The best link I can find for the article is
http://www.marinetech.org/OSTO/documents/Job%20Prospects%20for%20Science%20Grads%20CHE%2021Sep07.pdf
The original article is behind a paywall unfortunately
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Real-Science-Crisis-Bleak/29178
Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.
You mean like arresting young chemists because their equipment serves a dual purpose and could be used to create something illegal like meth?
The US doesn't support people becoming educated, and this is just one more aspect of the problem. When I was in school I thought of going all the way to PhD. But come on! Spend all that money and live in poverty for so many years. Combined with the fact that doing this stuff is difficult and time consuming, it seemed like an incredibly masocistic exercise. I love science and math and would love to bury myself in it, but I am a slave to economic realities.
Furthermore when we say we want more people in profession X, we are making an implict admission that we want a somewhat planned economy. So we want more research and researchers? Guess what? Most of the important expensive research in the past has been conducted by the government anyway. So the government should just start doing more research.
One more thing, if a company hires H1-Bs, for each one they hire should have to pay a very heavy fee that is used to give one student a full ride scholarship in that field.
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Jocks get their pussy free, lawyers can buy professional pussy, and doctors are up to their elbows in pussy. Nerds? They get the leavings.
You can't fix the problem until you identify it exactly.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Many of the tech employers have lobbied congress to get exemptions to the laws regarding the hiring of foreign workers. They have cited the lack of qualified people as the reason for the need to hire H1b workers. I don't know what the truth is behind that claim, but I can tell you that the use of H1b workers has resulted in lower wages, fewer job opportunities, and less demand for those jobs that require specialized technical training. Job security is gone.
High tech employers have also gotten exemptions to the labor laws that limit the number of hours per week worked; people who work in the software industry do not have protection from employers who demand they work long hours. So, the quality of life for workers in the software industry sucks.
Someone ought to clue in the brainiacs about the reasons why nobody in the U.S. cares to take a tech/science job.
Best regards.
I don't read the article as focusing on any individual's entitlement to a "science job", but on the more general societal issue. A lot of people, rightly or wrongly, feel that the U.S. is falling behind in scientific research, and that this should be fixed. Many people with such views point to education as the root of the problem: they argue that the U.S. is falling behind in scientific research because our schools are not keeping up, either in quality of science education, or in their ability to motivate kids to be excited about science, or both.
The article is arguing that the diagnosis is incorrect: people are not going into science because there aren't good jobs in science, not because of a failing on the part of schools. Of course, if you think the number of scientists and level of scientific research we currently have is fine, then it isn't a problem to begin with. But the article's arguing that if you're one of the people who thinks U.S. science is declining and should be fixed, then you should look at lack of appealing careers, not at problems with schools, as the root cause.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The next career to disappear in the U.S. is programming. There are no more entry level jobs, they've all been outsourced. Hence, there is no new generation of programmers in the U.S.
That means any new innovation in computer software will be coming from India or another of the up-coming outsourcing countries.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
This basic discussion has been had numerous times here on Slashdot. Usually, it is about IT careers and declining wages, declining local resources, outsourcing and H1-B visa programs.
They all have the same basic things in common. Corporations, looking to cut their costs, are looking elsewhere to get cheaper labor -- even when that labor is for R&D and other highly technical trades and activities.
I have claimed that the government needs to step in and restrict how these short-sighted companies are behaving simply because they are having a tremendous impact on the economy. Others commonly respond in opposition calling this type of thing "protectionism" and all this. But the end result of allowing companies to seek labor outside of the U.S. [to lower costs] is that jobs and money is being sent out of the country lowering the average income and increasing unemployment. Many of these companies are selling goods and services to the very same people they helped to make un[der]employed. And the extended result is that fewer people are going to enter career paths in the areas where there is less pay and/or less hiring.
What we have is a cascade that will lead to "idiocracy" right here in our own nation. Many people claim we are already living that famous movie and in many respects we are.
We can call it protectionism or we can just call it taking care of our own first. Whatever the label you apply to it, we absolutely need to retain our most important advantages if we are to return to the top of the food chain. The U.S. is presently not the world leader in anything except military influence. With everything else getting sent outside the U.S. and countries who would normally use U.S. resources going elsewhere, the U.S. has lost a great deal of its competitive advantage already. U.S. companies are simply becoming "international companies" whose headquarters just happen to be in the U.S.
The symptoms of this pattern beginning to fail are in what we are starting to see today -- increased attempts to influence other countries to adopt our laws in order to protect our intellectual property... failing diplomatic measures, military measures are sure to follow. (After all, the whole reason diplomacy works is because there is a shadow of a military threat looming in the background... otherwise, who would listen to you or care about your interests?) Basically we are attempting to get the world to "do things our way so that things favor us more than you" and who will listen to that without excessive bribery and threat of military or financial action? These types of measures weren't quite so necessary in the past and now they are becoming a lot more common.
I think it is past time to reign in the companies that are selling out the population of the nation they call home. The consequences are what we are experiencing today. The effect is obvious. The cause should be obvious. If the cause and the effect are obvious, why isn't the solution equally obvious? I think it is and our government is so comfortable being paid and backed by big money interests that they don't know how to stop it from continuing.
Where shall we have lunch?
Just an idea from the outfield: maybe an added reason is that it's so much harder to make a contribution these days? We've gone from "Ow! Fire hot!" to needing a PhD or more just to achieve parity with the state of the art in some fields of science.
Engineering isn't much better- from spark gaps to iPhones in about a century.
We might need to start kids down the science path as early as the first grade, or come up with some radical new method of teaching/learning.
Ah, I'm just babbling. Ignore me.
When you have a educational system and culture that shields people from the effects of their bad decisions, even refutes the notion of causality, why would kids be encouraged to enter a field where causality is king? Isn't Obama going to pay their mortgage for them? Won't Al Gore save them from Global Warming? Won't giving $10 to a church save them from hell?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This is the problem for higher education in general. Universities are producing too many degrees. People waste a lot of time and school learning facts and information they will never use (or even talking classes where they don't learn anything) to vie for high-paying jobs that don't exist.
In the meantime, people don't learn the basic information that may be useful to them (like how to fix their car, how to do basic calculations and general problem solving). Nor do they learn useful job skills (universities leave this up to the their students' future employers). Pondering this, one may ask: "what exactly is school good for?" It is stupid to waste 4 (or more) years earning a degree just to fill a check-mark on some corporate recruiter's checklist? Yes. Yes it is.
This is a rediculously over-simplified misunderstanding of how society works. How do you propose "making" a job doing basic research? Research has to be funded, that's how it's done in our society. I'm afraid you're living in a fantasy world. This has nothing to do with anyone being "owed" a job. It has to do with setting priorities as a society. We've set up a system in which the priority is short term quarterly gains, and that's what we get. If you want a viable society in the long term, you have to invest in basic research.
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The IEEE points out that, at present, only about 1/3 of electrical engineers have electrical engineering jobs. They also point out that in 1970, electrical engineers and doctors made about the same amount of money.
Lawyers, though, are starting to get hit. Outsourcing of legal work is now available.
I realize reading the article is hard, difficult and long but at least it isn't broken up into many different pages but it is worth reading. Trust me, I did.
However as someone actually dealing with the crap associated with the sciences, it is dead on in the things it address. Why bother spending many lonely nights working on home work when you could be out getting laid in college? Why go into grad school to spend 6-10 years learning more about your field when you could actually be earning more money by not doing so? And lets not forget the 4-6 years of marking time in a postdoc position where you're basically the lab grunt to pad out your resume so you may have a chance at a position down the line. This is then followed by 5-6 years of probation before you can get tenure if you're lucky but more then likely you will end up marking more time before you even get a tenure track position. Then you spend the rest of your career fighting for funding to pay for your research and more suckers...er grad students and postdocs and never actually doing science again.
People go into science because they love it but it gets quickly destroyed because they realize that all science requires a community, expensive journals, massive amounts of time, politics and lots of other bullshit. If you haven't been through it or are going through it, you have no fucking clue.
You want to know why colleges have art history departments? It is so that those sports stars have easy majors to pass so they can play. It is because many students realized that it doesn't matter what the degree is in only that they have a degree for a job and who wants to study something difficult when there is something easy.
The only way to get the best and brightest to go into the sciences is to make sure they know there are job opportunities available for them that are worth taking. I know I sure in the hell didn't spend 4 years in college and 6 years in grad school doing physics to be making NIH standard ($37k/year) which is only slightly higher then what my high school dropout of a brother pulls in doing construction work for a guy he meet at a 7-11.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
train to clean toilets & mop floors. Those jobs aren't going away.
When is the last time you saw a crew of charwomen on their knees scrubbing floors? They've been replaced by one guy with a mechanized carpet cleaner or floor buffer. In a few decades (maybe more depending on the supply of illegal workers) these devices will be fully robotic.
"Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.'"
So..., you mean..., all that rhetoric against smart people (you know, those "intellectual elitists") has actually had some effect? Looks like the plans for creating a dullard electorate are proceeding apace.
Robots are fuckin' boring.
I found the Mars Rovers a million times more fascinating than the ISS. It might have had something to do with the Rovers actually doing stuff, rather than hanging out in space, swapping out CO2 scrubbers.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In a system of capitalism there are no gaps or shortages, just disequilibrium between demand and supply that determines price. The current "science gap" is that U.S. produced "science" is price uncompetitive with global "science". Same problem as in automobiles or consumer electronics. Even U.S. Government knows this; e.g. NASA uses Russia whenever possible to "do science" to stretch its $. U.S. talent is naturally seeking highest value occupations: e.g. financial engineering, law, management, health care etc., As long as these occupations are valued more by market (than "science"), it is absurd to talk of "science gap", especially when global markets are producing enough "science". A day may come when the currently lucrative occupations may not be so anymore; then the talent may flow to "science" if "science" has more relative market value. Two years back, mortgage & real estate were highly lucrative; now, many previous 6 figure earners are on food stamps. May happen to financial engineering too some day.
"Robots are fuckin' boring."
Robots are useful on earth and necessary in the utterly hostile environment of space, where humans "explore" nothing robots can't explore (at leisure, for longer, and vastly less money).
Robots aren't boring to the right kind of person, and science doesn't need the other sort. Let them go watch football or wrasslin'.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."