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Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out?
Hugh Pickens writes "Christopher Drew writes that President Obama and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in science, technology, engineering and math but studies find that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree — 60 percent when pre-medical students are included. Middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion, but the excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg calls 'the math-science death march' as freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students where many wash out. 'Treating the freshman year as a "sink or swim" experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,' says a report by the National Academy of Engineering, 'is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.' But help is on the way. In September, the Association of American Universities announced a five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM fields to use more interactive teaching techniques (PDF)."
Public high school STEM classes are nowhere near sufficient as far as preparing students for a university-level STEM courseload is concerned.
Maybe if we made public education more about actually teaching and challenging students, rather than a game to see how you can bend the rules to pass the most students, then the first year of college wouldn't be such a difficult experience.
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Some universities in my country have too many freshmen so they deliberately try to make half of them drop out.
The percentage of high school graduates entering college has gone way up in the last few decades, as college is regarded as a right rather than a privilege. So it stands to reason that more would drop out, since college happens to be rather difficult. As a college dropout myself, I can attest to that: although I was at the top of my high school class in math, it was a math class that did me in.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
If the number of engineers has decreased and the teaching methods have been a constant ...
Seems like the problem is somewhere else in the equation.
...because STEM majors are so much more demanding than others. In addition to having heavier workloads, everything builds on everything else - if you fall behind, or don't master a particular fundamental like calculus or kinematics or chemical bonding, you're fucked. If you're getting a degree in English, and you don't master Blake, it's not going to have any impact on your study of Wordsworth, unless your thesis is a comparison of the two.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
the excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg calls 'the math-science death march'
What a load of B.S.
The problem is jobs... there aren't any in this country for non-H1B holders. Its very much like the market for French Literature, 1% of the graduates will get $100K/yr professorship jobs, the rest.... will not have a positive outcome.
Would a degree in Physics have been fun for four years? Sure. Would living in permanent unemployable poverty be fun for the next sixty years? Not so much. I'd rather see my kids being rich enough to own shoes, or not depending on food stamps for my next meal.
If you're going to end up with an "unemployable" degree, why the heck not get one in something more fun, with more women, better parties, less homework...
I encourage my kids to avoid STEM fields because they do not live in China or India. Why go into a field the government is actively trying to destroy? It would be like encouraging my kids to go into automotive assembly line work or textiles or manufacturing consumer goods or ...
(Note there is absolutely nothing wrong with STEM as a hobby.. nuke-eng or chem would be a tough hobby, but my son likes computers, and theres nothing wrong with IT/CS as a hobby, as long as he has some other plan, one that involves making money)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"...unfair to students..." Seriously, we should just hand them a degree since they deserve it right? And it should be free. Not everyone needs to go to university and not everybody can hack it in a hard science field. If we coddle people so it's easier to get a degree, that's not going to help them once they get out of school; the "unfair" argument isn't going to fly when you can't keep up at your first job. Know your limitations and go into a field where you can succeed. I'm starting to think the master's degree is the new bachelor's...
Engish iz ezier, much.
Limit of the sum of a Physics Major as GPA goes to 0 equals and Engineering Major.
Face it. Sciences tend to be hard. Math is hard, especially at higher levels when prepped by a high school system that really doesn't prepare the kids looking into such fields. I know I was never really challenged by my high school maths and then once I hit college calculus (not to mention upper division physics) which actually required study and doing homework to get and solve, it threw me for a loop and was harder than it should have been.
1-1.5 year in university will make you see that not only you probably wont be able to make good money in that profession, but your academic potentials in academia will also be limited with the same kind of filth that plagues politics/corporations - power play, interests, dirty dealings, people pulling shit to undo others and get ahead. you have to be VERY idealistic and persevering in order to attempt conducting science in modern academia.
i had numerous friends who had desired to actually be scientists in university, most of them let go of the idea early. those who actually persevered gave up later.
Read radical news here
Yes, science is "hard." (I don't think hard so much as there is a more limited number of people with the right aptitude... if science is you shouldn't be doing it.) But the rewards are with business and management. We don't need to go into why and how things are the way they are.... the OWS thing is indication enough that people can at least sense that something is wrong with the way things are at the moment. But there are some very qualified and skilled people who don't get appreciation, let alone compensation, for what they deliver.
And yes, I know there are some people who will respond "Bullshit. I'm a programmer/scientist/whatever and I get over $100k." Congratulations. You're not among the average. The real average is considerably different.
interesting hypothesis. prove it.
rewriting history since 2109
I dropped out because I found I could make the same money without the degree and am generally making more than my age-peers because I started the experience/raise/promotion cycle about 2 years earlier than them with the added benefit of having paid off my tiny little bit of student debt very quickly. Of course, I'm working in a field that doesn't require a P.E. which makes a huge difference.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
I completed a BS, MS, and PhD is computer science and engineering in the US. My grad school was top-20. I learned that surviving in undergrad is what's important, just as excelling in grad school and your later career is what's important there. Some of my friends from high school couldn't hack the surviving part, and I myself barely kept my head above water. Indeed, I often wondered what was the point of the six calculus classes, three physics classes, and three chemistry classes that I was taking in my first two years. In retrospect, it's true that they're to teach breadth in the fundamental sciences that, yes, do come into play later on in your career; however, they also serve as predators that eliminate the weak. If you don't have the stomach and focus to make your way through those classes when you're 18-21, what about when you're facing high-pressure deadlines throughout the rest of your career?
There is too much material for many programs to adequately cover in four years. Of course, part of this is because of the lack of good science and math curriculum in American high schools, but part of it is just the volume of material needed to adequately call someone "educated" in a STEM field.
The particular science I majored in had a very poor record for students finishing in four years, in part because there were three years of prerequisite work before you could take the most critical courses of the subject.
From my perspective, we either should start accepting that some programs need to take 5 (or more) years, or start doing more joint BS/MS programs where a student writes a capstone at the end of year four, defends an undergrad thesis, and then becomes a master's student to finish their program.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Because they want to develop software.
'Treating the freshman year as a "sink or swim" experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,'
They'd make more money filtering them on the output stage rather than on the input stage, since that is all that matters to the administrators, I don't understand why they don't do this.
I know the educational-industrial complex is corrupt and evil, I'm surprised the only "output filtering" I can think of is lawyers having to pass the bar exam after law school collects all the money.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The US does not need more engineers. Salaries aren't going up. This has been discussed before on Slashdot.
As for attrition, that's by design. The classic paper is "The Cooling-Out Process in Higher Education": "The cooling-out process in higher education is one whereby systematic discrepancy between aspiration and avenue is covered over and stress for the individual and system is minimized. The provision of readily available alternative achievements in itself is an important device for alleviating the stress of consequent failure and so preventing anomic and deviant behavior. The general result of cooling-out processes is that society can continue to encourage maximum effort without major disturbance from unfulfilled promises and expectations."
"Cooling out" in this context comes from a criminal term, "cooling out the mark": keeping the victim of a con game from coming back with cops or a baseball bat. It's not about being cool.
The alternative is tougher admission standards. If you can get into MIT, you have a 91% chance of coming out with a degree. Cal Poly, 40%.
One alternative is better vocational education. In the US, that's a dirty word, because all kids should go to college. In Germany, it works. German makes it hard to fire people. As a result, there's an incentive to train and retrain existing employees. Germany also has a functional apprenticeship system.
We have slacked off on students over the past several decades, making it an easier experience, and we produce dumber students. When they get to the "hard sciences" they are shocked by the need to actually apply themselves and study hard. It's hard to sugar coat science, math and other terminology rich and study intensive fields.
Take the Red Pill.
College is where you move from practical, demonstrable stuff to abstract theoretical stuff, like Newton's laws of motion to quantum mechanics,etc
While that's true, a lot of students wash out before reaching quantum or similar topics. I'd say the problem is more that college is where you move from qualitative descriptions of physical processes (i.e. the calculus-free physics courses so popular in high school today) to quantitative descriptions, that demand you to actually know the math and do the work.
We've dumbed down high school too much already. The article's solution of dumbing down college to match would be disastrous.
Crab fishing? Ice road trucking? Paranormal investigation?
I started college as a pre-med biology and chemistry double major. I got through two years of undergrad and just got burned out. Lots of hours in the classroom, laboratory and studying. I dropped the chemistry major but my GPA already got hurt so the med school thing was a long shot. By the time I graduated with my B.S. in biology I had no desire (at the time) for graduate or professional school. I took a job as an analytical chemist and did that for nearly ten years working my way up to a PhD equivalent type of position (Principal Investigator and Study Director type of roles).
Something that people who are not in the sciences do not seem to realize is that science jobs really suck, for lack of a better term. The locations are very fragmented (I had to move halfway across the country to move up the industry ladder), if you don't have a PhD you are capped, and even at that many - if not most - PhDs in the industry are doing basic bench-work alongside folks with their B.S. The pay is just terrible as well. So you work your ass off in school taking difficult and time-consuming classes to make crap money in an industry that lays off tens of thousands of people each year (just look at the M&A in pharma and industrial chemicals). And people wonder why students don't want to go into science.
Chemical engineering is another story - that is what I should have gone into if I knew then what I know now.
My 3 children each did fine in college, in prominent engineering schools, while watching the students around them drop like flies in Calc 2 and 3, not dropping out so much as switching majors to something without the calculus.
The difference, in my children's own words, is they knew the Calculus going in, having taught themselves the calculus in our home-school before college.
Their advice to high school students: "Get a book and study like I did."
Most students today have a cakewalk in high school even with AP classes and are not prepared for success in college.
it's not that classroom-learnin' ain't no good -- that's also true -- but it's simply that suhc environments are insufficient by themselves.
I know what you're thinking, "but that's why we have labs!" And that's my point. Have you seen the STEM labs assignments? These "practicals" are so very academic that they might as well be more classroom lectures. Pouring one chemical into another chemical isn't the practical application of anything -- unless you designed the spout on the first beaker, or the splash guard on the second.
Look at the practicums in arts, or in psychology. Being a subject/participant/donkey in someone else's psych experiment is actually real. Painting a painting for a crummy art gallery is real.
4+ years of labs counts for nothing.
I'm a huge proponent of the scientific method, am completely pro-science, especially against psuedoscience... but I completely understand why simple logic would prevent most folks from entering a proper science degree, once they've gotten a chance to digest the extent what lies before them.
It's not the math. It's not the science. It's not the hard work.
It's the fact that they will have no control over their life, in the field that has precious few opportunities, and seems to amount to grueling busywork 90+% of the time.
Either that, or end up as an industry scientist, with some rather nasty ethical consequences in many cases.
In many cases, it would be the love of science that would keep many from rationally choosing to bet their lives in the very limited and dwindling pool of opportunities available in the field(s) now. Not that there isn't research that desperately needs to be done - it just isn't economically feasible to do big things, so you'd just end up a researcher performing tasks for people unable to really progress science much. You'd be wasting your limited existence serving goals that don't help.
At least that's how it looks from the outside.
Get industry to fund real research again, shift university funding to actual general research, and clean up the "Intellectual Property" mess that stifles research, and there would be a rational path to more progress of the sciences - until then, it really does seem a poor wager to bet your life on.
Ryan Fenton
1) engineering is hard. We had a student who was missing 1 class to graduate, took the class 3 times and just couldn't get his head around it and ended up changing majors.- Most actual engineering companies have smart/technical engineers and less smart or less technical engineers as a mix and there are roles for both to play so maybe if you went for engineering and couldn't pass they could change the major to applied engineering or something and you could still get a job but everyone would know you couldn't quite handle the harder material.
2) engineering is important to companies so engineers are not. If apple or some other mass production company is late 10 days to deliver a product they lose millions of dollars. So the manager who really isn't important needs to work his workers so that they achieve this goal. The workers can't take vacations during this crunch time. If an individual worker causes the schedule to slip the manager will say is this worker worth 10 million dollars? And then fire them. Meanwhile the managers higher up who are not actually essential to the company are able to take vacations whenever, are seen as essential to the board and are paid serious money. Fix this and you won't have bright engineers ending up bankers to rob you of your retirement benefits.- The fix is to alloy engineers to work for more than one company like doctors work for more than one hospital at a time. This would totally change the balance of power and make engineers far more likely to start their own companies and make even more money that way.
3) At the college level the schools are run by people who think that english and art are equal to engineering in terms of importance. On a national GDP competitiveness this is sheer BS but go talk to the faculty in schools and they are making engineers take poetry classes and a bunch of other BS. Engineers are different in how they think, the sheer brutality of facing reality in the form of equations removes forever the ability to live in make believe that most people enjoy. The first time I saw a James Bond movies after receiving my education I realized I lost forever the ability to enjoy the idea of giant space lasers that don't follow real world physics etc. You can't try and force these people back into a world of fairies and belief that every opinion on things is equally valid. Until you treat engineers and scientists as doctors and lawyers and bankers you won't compete with the chinese, japanese and other countries that do.
Students ARE interested in stuff like science and engineering. It seems to me that part of the problem is when they start examining what they will actually do once they get the degree, the outlook doesn't appear very promising. Entry-level jobs (especially in IT) are scarce and the constant drumbeat of overseas outsourcing is driving many people to change their major to a subject where they're more likely to make a living. I'm working on a computer science/software engineering degree and I'm very nervous about what my prospects will be when I graduate with $50k in debt. My passion for the subject matter drives me though. I actually love practicing what I'm learning.
The problem is simple: STEM is hard!
How you structure the education almost doesn't matter: 1/10 graduates, at most, will have really mastered the basics of their field; Magna cum laude hardly means anything in terms of the graduate being effective.
After interviewing junior STEM hires for 25 years, I can see almost no correlation between education and effectiveness. That's no saying there is none (obviously, we don't see many high-school only types,) but, of the pool we do see, philosophy majors, college drop-outs, etc, seem to do pretty well. A PhD in CS seems to actually be a negative predictor of effectiveness.
All the education in the world simply will not turn an average intelligence person into a great engineer.
Huh? Quantum mechanics are quite practical and demonstrable, it's just that you need to know a lot of theory to begin applying them at all.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Mandatory attendance? Gee whiz, when I went to grad school there wasn't a single course where attendance counted for anything. There were a couple courses where I skipped most of lectures, and there were some where lectures were so good that I didn't have to do any extra learning at home besides solving assignments.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I have a PhD in Chemistry, I love science, I love engineering, but the first 2 years of chemistry, maths, physics at university (in the UK) was probably the most boring and uninspiring period of my science/engineering life (I'm now 41) (biology was actually okay due to the lecturer). I found myself being entertained by pool and beer in the students union more than the class and am surprised that I made it through. It they want success rates to go up, they really need to figure out how to get the education across in a more accessible way, I don't mean easier, I actually mean accessible. Yes I can read the book chapter and work through board problems, and in the lab I can follow a set of instructions, but the more entertaining lessons actually followed through with practical examples and relevant demonstrations, where those demonstrations actually linked into the lesson, and weren't just for fun.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
What high school does not teach is a self work ethic. This leaves the student totally unprepared for college where they are not even punished for not showing up at class. Miss a class or two, skip doing the required reading and suddenly they are totally lost and way to far behind.
It is sink or swim in the sense of being self-responsible for attending class and doing the required out of class work.
University means 15 hours of classes and 30 hours of self motivated work a week. Most are not going to do that. Especially when you add in being away from home for the first time.
-- see this policy -- that is not preparation for university
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2010/09/29/teaching-plagiarism/
"Under a new evaluation method for report cards, Saskatoon public high school students will no longer face penalties for handing assignments in late or trying to pass off someone else’s work as their own. The idea, according to the board, is to shift focus from behaviour to learning. “We’re trying to keep the emphasis on the learning, not on the penalty,” "
When I was a freshman (majoring in physics with a math minor) at the University of Arizona, there was ~180 freshman who had declared their major as "astronomy".
When I graduated four years later, only 8 astro majors graduated.
Why? Probably because it's really hard. It's definitely not the idealized scenario that many new students think it might be.
Astronomy isn't just taking pretty pictures of space -- it involves a huge amount of theory and advanced mathematics.
Chemistry isn't all explosions and making visually-interesting reactions in test tubes -- again, there's a lot of theory, scary classes (see organic chemistry), and advanced mathematics.
Physics isn't just rolling balls down inclines and swinging pendulums -- lots of theory, advanced mathematics, and mind-warpingly weird stuff.
Even then, once one graduates, there's more of the same through graduate school. If one is lucky enough to get an academic position, there's intra- and inter-departmental politics and drama, budget and resource issues, and a zillion other things that "interactive teaching techniques" aren't going to help alleviate.
In short, science involves an enormous amount of work for remarkably little personal gain. The pay isn't that great, there's little chances for public recognition or fame, and the vast majority of other people will no have no idea what one does for a living. One has to really love it to succeed at it.
Not everyone is cut out to be a scientist, doctor, or engineer*. Having better teaching techniques will probably help keep some borderline students in the program, at least at the undergraduate level, but what about after that?
* That's not a bad thing. A lot of scientists, doctors, and engineers would make terrible high school teachers, lawyers, policemen, plumbers, astronauts, etc.
Just guessing... Because Science is actually hard and many of today's students are lazy, self-entitled, undereducated and unmotivated to actually learn anything?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Back in the day (I graduated in 1976 (BS)) it was a mix of people who really wanted to be engineers (mech/civil/hydraulic/electric/etc) and people who thought they would make a lot of money. Honestly, I think the curriculum was hard enough at my mid-level state U that if you weren't dedicated and involved, you'd not finish your degree. The geeks did well, the money seekers changed majors (mostly to business).
I hadn't thought about career prospects, just knew I wanted to be an engineer.
I did go back to grad school 2 decades later for "fun" and got a "hobby PhD" in CS doing computational microbiology from a top 20 University. Not using it, still nursing the bruises, maybe don't regret it - learned a ton, and it does help in day-to-day work, but ...
Because there is little downside anymore to going through life ignorant.
I was working as an engineer with a Masters' and about 8 years in the field, the company was hitting some hard times and I was looking around at what I could do. There was a post-doc position in a sister organization that I talked about doing temporarily... thing was, it only paid 1/3 what I was making as an engineer, and these guys were 3 to 5 years past getting their PhD. I'm not too good to work for less money, but I did have a mortgage to pay and that just wasn't going to cut it.
Similar story for an ME I knew, he had a post-doc doppelganger at his old job, ME had a wife, new baby, house, etc. Postdoc had a bicycle, judging from his website he liked his bicycle a lot.
Look at the emphasis on sports in high school and college. And no one is talking much about the "attrition" rate where high school / college athletes don't make pro.
How about a science program with the same model?
Kids are identified in high school and they take extra classes after school and in the summer so that when they do get to college they've already completed the 1st year classes in their last year of high school.
With scholarships pretty much guaranteed for the kids in the program.
The colleges and universities won't let helicopter parents write their exams for their precious little wuggums. Too bad so sad, should have thought about that when self esteem trumped your kids ability to actually think and do for themselves. But if you disagree, continue putting your kids in your minivan and driving them one block to school every day.
So now it's time for your precious wuggums to take a fine arts degree. Or if they are even less intelligent or more incapable of doing thing for themselves without expecting praise every two minutes, a business or the old stand-bye, psychology degree (at least fine arts students understand that they will need to face some disappointment in life).
Mind you it doesn't speak to others' intelligence when they let people with business degrees actually run things. According to Jennings (Pg 13), the highest performing CEOs usually have engineering degrees. (Hit the Ground Running; Jennings, Jason; Penguin Group; 2009).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Since math, science, and engineering students are more likely than other students to be men, it seems reasonable that the University environment's hostility to men is an important factor in math, science, and engineering students dropping out.
When I went to college, it was a depressing place filled with extremely narcissistic, hateful people. It didn't seem like an experience worth paying for. Meanwhile, at the office, people are happy I'm there. They thank me for my help and pay me.
"and 100,000 new teachers with majors in science, technology, engineering and math"
Good luck with that. A large majority with the skills to learn said fields is probably going to laugh at a teacher's salary.
Intro to quantum mechanics was in my 1st semester itself
Engineers and scientists are underpaid and overworked as it is. Seriously...this is true all over the country.
Teachers, same deal.
Adding more of them to the labor market will make these problems worse. Higher supply of workers pulls wages down, as a matter of simple economics.
People drop out because the subjects are hard, sure. Making them fun won't make them less hard, so that won't address the problem. Asking colleges to churn out more graduates won't increase the incentives that people have to go into the field, let alone to stay in it.
If you want more engineers, then pay them. If you want more teachers, PAY THEM. People will follow the money. It is as simple as that.
calculus-free physics courses so popular in high school today
I have a feeling this is more of a 1st world problem.
There is plenty of calculus in high school physics here
I sincerely doubt that. What school did you go to? It should be trivial to verify your statement.
Take a weekend and re-read the book from last semester then. If you've sold it already, check it out of the library.
You need to learn how to STUDY. This is a problem with kids who were too smart in high school. They never learned to study because all the material was too simple to stress them. Once they hit harder subjects, they flounder.
I'm still doing this with material I learn for work. I'll re-read material over and over until I know it automatically. And then I'll re-read it every year or so just so I don't forget it. Once you understand it, re-reading it takes very little time.
Oh well, on the other hand one that I really hated in college/uni is all the non science requirements. I mean it was in subjects I wasn't interested before I took them, I wasn't interested in them afterwards and I'm not interested now. (They were a complete waste of time and after being out of school for over 15 years no, they haven't turned out to be useful.) I of course have a special hatred for the foreign language requirement but that's a story for another time. (IE oh how I wish I could have taken nothing but science courses. I didn't even get to take bio or chem when I was first in college/uni because of those requirements.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Why? There are vast numbers of qualified, unemployed teachers in every state. When districts are actively laying off teachers and have been for many years, the only thing more teaching degrees would cause is more unemployed teachers. Besides, I don't think a teaching degree is much of an indication that a person is a particularly talented teacher.
There may be a bit more of a need for engineers, but I suspect the real need is in more scientific and rational trained people in all fields.
I hope the irony of posting about the practicality of quantum mechanics while using what is almost certainly a solid state based device is not lost on other readers of your comment.
We really need to kill this attitude of "Nobody Fails" before it completely destroys the value of getting an education.
I didn't study in high school; I learned how to do that in University, because high school wasn't challenging.
As a result, I did barely pass one class and had to drop out of another to avoid a failing grade. So I took an extra semester to make up those lost courses and complete my degree.
But I'd rather have to take an extra semester and end up with a degree that means something than be passed on because the school wants to maintain some arbitrary stats on how many students pass.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I sometimes wonder if I'm the stupid one for sticking with it, when I could have just said, "Fuck it," and coasted through a business major without even trying like several of my peers ended up doing.
How comfortable are you repeating the phrase "you want fries with that?" several hundred times a day? Not so much? Then you did the right thing.
As a student at an engineering college I've found the number of job fairs, company meetings, and jobs available to be staggering for the STEM related majors. Then I had to remind myself that the U.S. is supposedly in a recession/depression and I don't quite believe it. And how is government trying to destroy STEM fields exactly...?
Manipal Institute of technology, India
The syllabus isnt online, but here is a photo os PHY101
http://imgur.com/TmiCo
Other engineering disciplines are different I know, but in CS, I'd argue opportunity cost is a big factor. Myself and 2 of my classmates dropped out when after our sophomore years we were offered full time positions making real money (well... we were 20, 55k/yr sounded like a lot). This was in post bust 2001, and the three of us had conversations about it and all thought it was crazy to keep paying 10k/year for the next 2 years (or 3 depending on how courses were offered) when we could make 110 or 165k over the same time span... Since then 2 of us have completed our degrees (myself 8 years after dropping out), but I for one don't regret dropping out in the least. I got a lot of experience in those couple years, I learned way more about real software development than I was learning in college, and I've never spent a minute unemployed. My employer luckily has tuition reimbursement, so when I did finish my degree it didn't cost me anything.
Maybe I've been passed over for jobs/promotions over the years because of my lack of degree, but I've enjoyed my career so far, I love what I'm doing now, and I don't feel like I've been slighted in the least.
Using something and understanding it are 2 very different things
example:
When I am driving a car, I dont care about much more than being in the correct gear,direction and applying the accellerator as needed.
I dont really look at how the fuel injection is happening, or how the ECU is changing various parameters,etc
Our system seems to have the belief that we should FORCE more STEM students in order to juice the economy, even if it means a dead-end career for many.
Maybe STEM is just not America's comparative advantage, at least economically. Brains are plentiful and cheaper in Asia and we can't easily change that. Academics is a cultural obsession with them. We can't do the same just by passing legislation.
America's comparative advantage is marketing, for good or bad. We are experts at suckering consumers and corporate buyers purchasing outside their area of expertise. As Dick Cheney said, "America's business is business". (Not that I always agree with him, but he was right on that one.)
Table-ized A.I.
'Treating the freshman year as a "sink or swim" experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,' says a report by the National Academy of Engineering, 'is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.'
Not if you do it right.
I went to a private university in Germany, which - contrary to almost all other universities here - intentionally uses the first semester to weed out its students. Not by attrition, the way the article suggests, but by way of a test that you have to pass in order to continue.
The vital differences were that
a) everyone knew up front this was coming, the entire process is transparent
b) actual knowledge was tested, not the ability to withstand the horrors of crowded lectures
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Oh, sure, every Phys 101 course will talk about quantum a bit. I though you were talking about a dedicated quantum course. Solving the classic "electron in an infinite square well" is only like week 1 in an actual quantum course. It doesn't get hard until you start digging deep into bra-ket notation and Hilbert spaces.
My first several semesters as an undergrad were brutal. The assignments were very abstract, the courses hard, and some of the computer science classes were clearly designed to fail half the students at mid-semester, or so it seemed to me.
And I'm glad.
Being an adult and having a career is often full of hard work, most thankless, and sometimes tedious. I'm glad that my professors in college didn't coddle me, or try to spare my feelings. Adjusting to work life was hard enough, but it would have been doubly difficult if I had been under the mistaken impression that the purpose of work was to entertain me.
So, I'm all for adjusting coursework to make it more engaging and for capturing the imagination of young students and keeping them interested. But, when I put on my old man hat, I also want to make sure that students understand that there will also be a lot of hard work that will be terribly important and will be terribly boring.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Here is an alternative perspective.
In the US, there seems to be a very strong connection between universities and vocational education. I never really grokked that. I grew up thinking that universities is where people who loved to learning gathered to learn, share ideas, and advance knowledge. Education was its own reward. If one wanted to learned something practical, like something for a job, one attended a vocational school, training course, or the employer took responsibility to train their employees. I think it used to be that way.
Somewhere along the line that seems to have changed. A four year degree has become the minimum entry criteria for a desk job. Over the last twenty years, I've had nothing but desk jobs. I've been a software developer, a business analyst and a solution architect. None of these jobs required anything more than a two year vocational degree-- 90% a motivated high school grad could have learned to do the job.
Why is there such emphasis on university degrees in the job market? I understood that employers liked to hire university grads for certain jobs because employes knew these people could learn things on their own, enjoyed learning, and in general wanted to do a good work. I later realized that a university education had class implications and employers often want employees from certain social classes. But there is nothing wrong with vocational school, training courses, or even learning on the job. Why try to pump a quarter of your population through the university system when the needs of many of the students (and their future employers,) would be as well or better served by other avenues of learning?
It saddens me when I see people with master's degrees in computer science spending their days executing test cases for point-of-sale systems or Web shopping carts. It saddens me when I see chemistry majors running the same water quality tests five days a week. It saddens me when I see people with advanced degrees in economics spend their working years fiddling with Excel spreadsheets to balance project budgets.
From my perspective the system we have created is a tragic waste human capital and other resources. The indebtedness it is creating threatens to turn the next generation into indentured servants with white collars. Meanwhile, the university system continues to water down its curricula and loose its vitality.
How did it come to this?
I think by "practical" the OP meant that the basic stuff is more hands-on and observable. Basic electric circuits are easy to explain with the popular "water flowing in pipes" analogies. Once you start talking about solid state physics, all of those analogies break down, and it becomes harder to wrap your mind around.
The generally *horrid* quality of math education makes it impossible for students in STEM majors with little to no need for calc to get through the required math classes.
The US does need more engineers. Engineering work is going to be done. It's going to be done at a competitive cost. The only question is whether it's done in the US or other countries. Don't look for salaries to go up when there's someone who can do your job a lot cheaper in another country.
The solutions to stagnating salaries in the US:
- better K-12 education,
- make the US an attractive place for employers to employ engineers (and other employees)
- control the artificial increases in the cost of living to be more competitive with the rest of the world.
In the US, a lot of schools offer students the choice of whether they want to take physics with or without calc. Most students, predictably, take the easy option. Those students end up being woefully unprepared. Some smaller schools (such as my old high school) don't even offer the calc option, because not enough students sign up for it.
In my case, my graduating class had 80-something students, and only five of us signed up for calc-based physics. I lucked out in that our physics teacher took the time to tutor us in calc during study halls, so we weren't completely unprepared.
I'm not sure if I should feel lucky that I got the basics done in school or unlucky that I didnt have the choice of taking the easier route
We had a lot of dropouts too in Germany. Then they reformed the study system and made it a little bit easier and updated the curricula (which was definitely the right thing to do). In ancient times we had math together with the mathematicians, which resulted in 50% drop outs before the first 2 years, as so many students didn't get the math thing or CS theory done.
Nowadays, they drop out because of Java and or Scheme. However, we managed to teach them to give up after the first year if possible instead of trying to get it done for years and then fail. A lot of male students start CS for the wrong causes, and they learn now very quickly that they are not made for CS. this does not increase the output, but it reduces the frustration of the students. And obviously there is no way to increase the students fit for CS, as most people are not suited for that study. I doubt that you can improve that be changing high school curricula. BTW female students mostly do not drop out, because they really try to find out what CS is before they start it.
So the only thing we can do now: Tell them what CS is. So they can go and find another topic. For example: economics and engineering.
President Obama and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers
That just sounds so good, until you realize that all they are doing is lowering the bar once again. Idiocracy here we come.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I took both, first the algebra based one and then the calculus based on. That seemed like the logical approach to me. Did well in both.
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Blaming lack of employment on immigrants is just about the oldest and most pernicious trick in the book. What you're not mentioning is that someone willing to survive a tougher education system than the US's, learn a new language, and fly half way around the world to a land of people utterly hostile towards them--just to find work--is probably also going to be a more productive and better-motivated employee than someone who just breezes through the US education system and expects to be fellated by a harem of employers at the end. This is still a country where you can get a job based on merit, believe it or not, and to tell your kids or anyone else that it's the immigrants' fault is not doing them a service at all.
Crab fishing? Ice road trucking? Paranormal investigation?
You left off UFOs ... and by the way, that sounds like the history channel. The science channel is still pretty much science. At least for the channels coming from my cable provider.
I teach physics at a community college in California, so I'm one of the gatekeepers who washes out STEM majors. It's my job to do that. Society can't afford to have anesthesiologists who can't convert grams to milligrams, or civil engineers who can't add force vectors. A lot of the people who don't succeed in my class are very nice, sincere people. It's just that their talent lies somewhere else than in math and science. The sooner they find that out, the sooner they can find a more appropriate major.
In addition to the good but untalented students described above, there are many who don't succeed for other reasons. There's a book called Academically Adrift, by Arum and Roksa, which is summarized here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand . One of their findings is that the average time studying has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years. The average number of hours per week was 25 in 1961, 20 in 1981, and 13 in 2003. This drop is still present when you control for the fact that different people go to college now than in 1961.
Another finding, which has been replicated by others, is that students' critical thinking and writing skills show extremely small improvements over the course of a college education. The improvements are so small that they are undetectable on the individual level, and still quite small even when you average over a large number of students. Well, maybe we shouldn't expect critical thinking and writing skills to increase so much. Maybe they're innate talents, or maybe they're fixed at an earlier age. But if you get a degree in a field like English or philosophy, essentially the only thing the school *claims* you're getting out of it is critical thinking and writing skills. And greater improvement in these areas is found to be correlated with faculty's high expectations, high standards, and approachability; the fact that there is so little improvement on average suggests that the lack of improvement is caused by faculty's low expectations, low standards, and lack of approachability. For example, a third of college students report that by the time they graduate, they have *never* taken a course that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week.
The thing is, in STEM, you can't just BS your way through your term paper. There are right and wrong answers. We can't just lower standards the way the humanities have done.
A lot of students are urged by their parents to go into STEM because they think the kids will make a lot of money. Once the kids are in college, they often realize that if their only goal is to make a lot of money, they are much better off getting an undergraduate degree in business. Unless you're in particular subfields such as finance, business is by far the easiest major.
Find free books.
Yo! B.O.!
I have an even better idea: Abolish the "visa" system that allows businesses to import foreigners willing to work for starvation wages. While you're at it, overhaul the tax code so corporations aren't effectively rewarded for exporting those same jobs to a clump of mud hits on the lee side of the Hindu Kush.
Regards;
I read this and thought W T F. Can you document this with a link? I can't for the life of me see what the point of sitting in a physics class is if you aren't going to look at some calculus.
While studying engineering, I did however often think that along with the equations should go some qualitative description. That would help a lot. But it can surely only be an aide.
Also, interestingly, I always found US textbooks to be simpler to understand than the ones written by British authors. Lots of pictures and step-by-step logic, which is not a bad thing.
I mean think about it, in Star Trek, engineering officers had the most demanding work keeping the ships in one piece, and none of them ever made captain.
That's because Star Trek is a communist utopia. You get promoted through connections, not competence.
The problem is not the curriculum, but the realization that engineering and science requires a mountain of work up front for a rapidly diminishing after graduation. Why put in all that time and effort if one can make several times more money doing less up-front work (indeed, less work overall) as an MBA or attorney? Engineering and sciences have been under-valued in the USA for ages, and with all of the good manufacturing jobs shipped overseas, and engineering jobs following suit, and science having been under-appreciated since at least the late 1960s (before most of us were born) what the hell is the point of making the huge investment in time, money, and hard work studying for a field where one's livelihood is questionable?
Sure, I know some of you idealists will say "Well, you do it for the love of the job" but you're wrong. You work to pay your mortgage, for your cars, your XBox Live subscription, and if you're married, to support your family. You don't work for the love of it, and if you say you do, the only one you are fooling is yourself.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I have a different theory than the author's "death march" one: Public school is a hidebound, bureaucratic, union-strangled monstrosity that does little to nothing to prepare people for the real world. As a result, when these same students hit college and the "hard" sciences, the result is the same as a tomato hitting a brick wall at speed.
I used to be an engineering instructor, and I saw it all the time. It's one of the primary reasons that many colleges require freshman "remedial" courses upon entry, to get the students caught-up on subjects the students should have learned in public school.
Regards;
Medicine is not a science, at least not the way it is taught now. Science requires critical thinking, medicine is taught with the aim of producing automatons. The whole process of creating a physician is structured that way from the MCAT to the day they take the oath and beyond. We are not producing scientists or engineers in our medical schools, we are making robots who go through paces and follow programs. Even more so, we are producing people who are paid to memorize text books and regurgitate on command. >99% of med students in this country can't tell you how most of what the learned in school works, they only know if it works.
It is no small wonder there are so many health care applications of IBM's Watson...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Public high school STEM classes are nowhere near sufficient as far as preparing students for a university-level STEM courseload is concerned.
While I agree with that to a degree I also believe working harder in college than one did in high school can go a long way to overcoming that. I think a major variable not being considered is how to balance work and fun. I recall far more guys dropping/flunking out of college because they were partying too much than because they were hopelessly unprepared.
Except that route doesn't exist anymore since there's a glut of people knowing PHP/Java/Javascript, and also most worthy candidates already have a degree, or substantial experience.
one has been at the top of it forever it seems
The student isn't paid to learn, the teacher is paid to teach. You have it backwards.
Most science subjects are boring subjects that no one (except for a few with a genuine interest) find it interesting enough to study on your own time. Who would actually sit at home being excited about some economic math problem, except for a few that are genuinely into math. More and more people are studying because of money, since they want well paid jobs in the future (in the year 2000). The 40% that drop out maybe are smart enough to realize that money does not equal happiness, and there are more interesting ways to make money than to study something you do not have a genuine interest in.
AP Physics comes in three flavors: A, B, and C. Type A is really, really basic and rarely offered. Type B is the most commonly offered one, intended to replace Phys 101 at college, and is calculus-free. Type C uses calculus, but it's divided into two halves (EM and Mechanics) making it more expensive to teach, plus it's obviously harder, so few students are offered it, and even fewer take it.
In ST:TNG "Relics" it was revealed that Scotty made captain before going to retirement. But that might be an isolated incident.
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People drop out because the subjects are hard, sure. Making them fun won't make them less hard, so that won't address the problem.
No, students do not drop subject just because they are hard. They drop them because they are hard AND they have never been academically challenged ever before. I've seen this happen numerous times with smart first year students. They are completely used to coasting through school with one cylinder firing because there is no challenge at all for them. Then, when they get to university, they are suddenly faced with material that they cannot master with a quick read through and they literally do not know how to cope.
If we challenge even the brightest students at the school level then they will be used to having to think things through carefully and then, when they do finally understand it, they will get the sense of achievement which comes with that. Some of my colleagues who have a reputation for teaching very challenging, senior undergrad courses have some of the best student feedback because, by that point, the students like to be challenged and to succeed. Sadly though we lose a lot of students before we get there just because they are completely unprepared for university and don't know how to cope.
For the most part, I don't think the introductions we can teach in HS can prepare students to face the difficulties of these fields. What can you teach a kid in high school to prepare him for Quantum Mechanics or Complex Calculus?
You feed them the strongest material they can handle in HS, and in college you expose them to the material and give them chances to change course when they find they are in the wrong field,
What disappointed me is that college didn't address what working in a field is like when you're choosing your life's work. I had no idea when I chose to be an engineer what crunch time would be like.
Maybe if colleges understood that, going in, many students aren't really understanding what they're getting into. Maybe that would help.
You have that the wrong way around. It would help FAR more is schools understood that they are preparing students for university. We already understand that it takes a while for a student to adjust to a university environment and that their choices may change once they take stock of the situation. This is why we start with "easy" introductory courses that let students get their bearings. The problem is that these are becoming more and more challenging due to falling academic standards at schools.
If we were to redesign the course curriculum from scratch; if we were to design a program that turned out talented engineers or scientists and the program we designed had to work in 97% of the cases, how would we do it?
I would want a program that ensured that every talented person applying for the program was successfull. (In industrial terms: No scrap.)
Would we design a computer program the way the universities have "designed" academic programs? Isn't it possible that things have changes somewhat since the Middle Ages and new processes and technology could improve the throughput of the University?
Would a University course pass a TQM survey? Why not?
Is it any wonder that practical people exit a broken system?
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
President Obama and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year
Well, when "industry groups" are allowed to flood American markets with outsourcing, and manufactured products; one can only assume that the learning centers will be in places outside of the U.S.
When your choices are to slip by with C's in an engineering/hard science degree while studying constantly, or to get straight A's in a social science/liberal arts/business degree while doing almost zero studying and partying every night, which one are you going to pick?
But help is on the way. In September, the Association of American Universities announced a five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM fields to use more interactive teaching techniques
The problem is not a delivery problem at the college level, but insufficient schooling from elementary to HS. You don't see this kind of drop out rates in Germany or Japan, do you? We should be copying what they do right (their pre-university education system) as opposed to putting interactive media lipstick on a pig.
So there is more time for the material that is better then art history or music
1. Students coming to freshman chemistry are totally unprepared to carry out the simplest algebra calculations. General chemistry does not require complicated math (calculus) such is required for sophomore engineering physics taken by chem, physics, and engineering majors. Talking to a high school math teacher, he noted that high school algebra and calculus involved teaching 5th grade math, and virtually no math appropriate to the courses' titles could be taught. Talking to my son's 5th grade teacher, I asked when he would begin learning about fractions, and was told that no one uses fractions anymore, so they are no longer taught. I remember that every time I use a ruler or tape measure calibrated in English units. No wonder high school students are not prepared for college.
2. My physics colleagues have stopped using calculus in their calculus base physics courses. The students couldn't handle it even after taking two or three semesters of college calculus. But then, the engineering students would get C's and D's in physics and A's in engineering. The chemistry faculty found the problem with math's teaching calculus: no equation/formula manipulations/calculations were ever required in these courses. The teaching and text were simple visual presentations of the "concepts" of the subject. The action of finding and evaluating a derivative or integral of a function was never covered but there were a lot of pretty pictures in the text and classroom presentations. No wonder I couldn't understand why they couldn't do this in their senior chemistry courses when it was required for manipulating laboratory data. How stupid of me to expect students do do this.
3. In my state the requirements for teachers to be licensed in their subject were substantially reduced several years ago. No longer are teachers required to obtain a degree with a major in their teaching subject. No wonder we have folks with a general education major (psych, sociology, phys ed., education) teaching chemistry, math, physics in high school. The education establishment believes if you understand the principles of how to teach, one can teach anything. Obviously the difficult combination of subject expertise and teaching ability are required of our high school teachers, but too often one or both of these are missing. Teachers find early that if they have STEM expertise they can make a great deal more money in one of those professions and leave teaching as well as not putting up with the incompetent education administration. What's left in the schools are teachers not being able to move. Thus the average teaching career is something like five years. My wife had to take a couple of education courses to update her teaching certificate when we moved to our new state. She has a chemistry degree and needed to take a science ed course. Students had to give numerous presentations basic to their teaching subject. The prof had absolutely no idea what my wife would present, yet this was basic high school chemistry stuff. How could this guy provide advice about how to improve such presentations if he had no idea what the subject matter was about. I suspect this situation is rampant in the higher-education establishment. The solution is pretty obvious.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Financial incentives are important, but we need more than a higher number of engineering graduates. We need a legion of enthusiastic experts who live and breathe it. Who love it to the point they're almost willing to do it for free. We need something to truly inspire them. Something to challenge them to change our world as we know it.
There was a time when a President stood and said, in this decade we will put a man on the moon. This ushered in an unprecedented leap forward in technology, and at the heart of it were a wave of engineers who were given a concrete goal they could achieve.
It's time for a new mission. The next leap forward.
CS is to much theory / high level stuff for a lot of IT work.
Now some theory is good but 4 years?
Tech school gets some stuff right but it can be better in some ways.
So we should Mix some theory, Tech school like classes and some kind of IT apprenticeship / hands on class work.
Also keep the older theory loaded CS for people who want get to the high level stuff but even them some hands on classes / apprenticeship can help them as well.
Also let people take the Mixed theory, Tech school like classes and some kind of IT apprenticeship / hands on class work and later after doing real work and working with systems come back and go to the higher level stuff with the backing of real uses then just the theory.
My wife and I drive old cars so we can afford to send our kids to private school. It is worth it. The oldest is now a in his second year at one of the hardest colleges in the country, studying physics, and doing well. He was very well prepared by his high school.
My SIG is a P226
I mean think about it, in Star Trek, engineering officers had the most demanding work keeping the ships in one piece, and none of them ever made captain.
Since when is a star trek reference substitutable for actual evidence?!
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I read this and thought W T F. Can you document this with a link? I can't for the life of me see what the point of sitting in a physics class is if you aren't going to look at some calculus.
Yup, it's true, and it's completely worthless. I took a calculus-free physic class, which ended up being "memorize a bunch of equations, and don't ask how they work".
America's comparative advantage is marketing, for good or bad.
Nonsense. Economies don't and can't grow on the back of marketing - not for any meaningful length of time. You have to have a valuable product to market or it isn't sustainable. You are just being cynical.
As Dick Cheney said, "America's business is business
That was said by President Calvin Coolidge. If fact it is his most famous quote in all likelihood. Cheney may have repeated it but he is most definitely not the originator.
So there is more time for the material that is better then art history or music
In the case of the program I went through, at least, that won't do it. We had 4xxx level courses required for graduation that had as prerequisites full-year 3xxx-level course, which themselves had full-year 2xxx-level courses as prereqs, which themselves has full-year 1xxx-level courses as prereqs. Hence no matter how many liberal arts requirements you drop, you still can't get through the program in less than four years. Most of the required full-year courses could only be started in the fall and finished in the spring, so even taking summer courses wasn't going to get around the fact that the program was impossible to finish in less than four years (though summer courses were helpful to reduce the load a bit for the fall and spring semesters).
And for the record I never took an art history or music course. I fulfilled my history requirement with "history of science" courses. The easiest course I ever took was a PhyEd course, but it was only for one credit. Even the electives I took through the geology dept were 2xxx level or above and had significant enough writing requirements to be certified by the school as "writing intensive".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
the question is how employable are you right now? You need to be working EVERY SUMMER in either the field you're studying, or a closely related one. Then, when you go to get hired and are competing against the hundreds of people who graduated in your class, YOU'LL have work experience and they won't. The 4 months between semesters you do stuff on a job, even tedious, boring stuff, is very very important. go out and get a job.
That has makeing if you pass the class all on the finale is bad and leads to smart people failing if they are bad taking tests while people who are good at creaming pass.
Now technology and engineering tested should be based on class work and hands on projects not just the test. Now a hands on test with reference guides is a good idea as well.
Also essays based tests should be cut down as well do you want to fail a smart person just because they are not good at witting? Why is it that there are so many essays writing services out there?
Part of the essays are from filler class and people use the essays writing services to save time but other times in business they have people who are writes doing the big documenting work. Lab reports are one thing but 5-10+ page essays may be over kill.
50% of the Freshmen don't understand that before signing up to the frigging course.
I was a freshman in 1972. I kenw I wanted to be an Engineer. 50% of my class were like me. The other 50% didn't have a clue. They all either dropped out or failed the exams at the end of the 1st year.
All those who passed the 1st year graduated 2yrs later.
I didn't go to school in the US but the UK. I didn't go to University but to Polytechnic. I'd already completed a 4yr apprenticeship in Mech Eng before going to study for my degree. So yes I knew what I wanted to do. Most undergrads these days don't.
When I graduated, I got a job designing Aircraft Autopilots. (I did Control Eng). A graduate of today couldn't do that. The courses have been dumded down so much that they don't have a clue what a Characteristic Equation or a Root Locus Diagram or a Lapalace Transform is.
So when I retire in a few years, my experience will be lost. Sadly the crop of current gradiates are totally lacking in problem solving techniques. You can't learn that from lectures. Only pratical experiences will help. Classes of 100+ students won't give you that.
When I interview Grads, I find them totally lacking in really key skills. Skills that are needed to make them employable.
Engineering is Frigging Hard!
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
That we did math, physics and chemistry in high school. Yes, I went to a college preparatory academy, Catholic too. You may have heard of it, LaSalle Academy.
My first pass at college I was bored to tears. You can only walk me through algebra, linear systems and BASIC so many times before I revolt and I did. I wrote a CCL script on the DEC PDP-11/70 that utilized the ability to intercept terminal I/O. You thought you were logging on to the system but you were first giving me your userID and password which I'd then pass to system via CCL facilities.
All because I wanted to be able to view systat. Yes, I knew RSTS/E already when I hit college because I had all the systems manuals complements of my aunt who was administering a PDP-11/34 running RSTS/E.
But our public schools are doing a horrible job of educating our young. It's not necessarily the fault of the educators per se, they're still educating to a 19th century model. What we need is a 21st century model, and that includes serious vocational training too.
its impossible for a school to teach self work ethic. only parents can do that, and they have to start earlier than high school. the weakening 'no one left behind' shit in high school certainly doesn't help.
No matter how many you end up with some suck, most are ok and some are good. Math, calculus, algebra they are all tools to be used in science. THIS IS RARELY SAID OR EXPLAINED TO KIDS!! When I gave a lecture on sound to a 4th grade class and told them that everything they see, do and hear in the room can be modeled by math they looked at me funny. One kid asked "even a fart". I quickly explained the basics of how a fart could be shown with math and I had their attention thru the 30 minutes. Engineering is solving problems. Maybe starting with the big picture and working down can spawn and sustain interest and understanding. Making a gauntlet and failing out the 'weak' seems to be the only way we do it, but is it the only way to create great thinkers and do'ers? Try explaining what these tools are used for by example and then it is not some complicated useless problem that gives stress and headaches. These classes don't have to be eliminated, just moved to a place where the application is more clearly shown. I feel the goal should be to create a system that is solution solving and idea creating. We all know smart, common sense friends that for one reason or another did not make it thru college for what ever reason. Could they have created something outstanding or solved an engineering problem. The answer likely is yes.
From the summary: 'is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.' Wasting what faculty time? Many freshman year classes are taught by functionally illiterate grad students who have a tenuous grasp on the subject matter and are more involved with their graduate work than they are with teaching. The faculty is off doing "publish or perish" research. Several years ago I read blog post by someone who started out as an Engineering major who switched to pre-law because of this very problem. These colleges and universities need to stop measuring the quality of their faculty by the number of papers they publish and instead measure the quality of the deliverable by another metric such as the number of papers that their graduates publish.
I've seen plenty of pinheads graduate with engineering degrees; it seems like the weed-out courses aren't actually doing their jobs. Sure they learn how to work the problems, but they really don't understand shit.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Ridiculous. In some ways that's even harder than learning things the hard way...
Engineering Prof? He is half a MBA ;)
The issue with the hard subject matters is that while routine calculation can be delegated to a 3rd world country, you still need to grasp the limits. And for an university level education you should be able to explain why some random parameter can be from 10 to 150, not just know the limits. Knowing just the limits is more of a vocational training. Understanding why it's 10-150 is master-level (for some stuff bachelor level) knowledge, and researching how to increase the known limit might be PhD level stuff.
The issue at hand is political correctness. I mean gender equality is political correct. Despite the fact that it's obvious that the gender do not share the same plumbing system, nor the same hormone system, which is rather an important part of "us". There is also presumption that all students if they just want, can study math. Or CS. Or some other form of engineering. The issue is that probably (that's just an educated guesstimate) 10% or so of the population that have the mental requirements (e.g. 3D visualization, abstract thinking, ...). That's why putting unemployed in programming courses don't yield you programmers, it yields quite a bit of people that know how to use an editor, understand the syntax of some programming language, but still cannot grasp the concept of nested loops. Other victims, the ones with the required level of abstract planning capability and some experience, take years to understand the point of UML (it's what people that cannot keep complex systems in the head use to notate the stuff you do without further thought).
So the first issue is, that only part of the population has the required mental capabilities.
The next issue is, well, quality evaluation in schooling. Basically if you stuff the courses with many many people that have troubles to grasp even the basics, and you still expect certain grade statistics, you basically lower the requirements. This and a number of other tiny things tend to water down, especially high school level maths, physics, chemistry iteratively. During my grammar school days, I've noticed that every generation of math books had less content, displayed in more colorful and kiddy way. E.g. around my age, proof via induction was dropped, and quadratic equations was moved down one year.
Now, after high school, at university, in technical courses, the profs are forced to expect a certain level of math knowledge. And don't take it wrong, all of these fields have more or even more intimate relations with maths. If you are lucky, there is one class that basically repeats the stuff your high school should have thought you. And because all the stuff somehow relies on the older stuff, you start to get in troubles when you try understand the later stuff without having understood the older stuff. So many of the tech students are basically dropping out as a side effect because your high school teachers wanted to have the right results for the school board.
The second item is that high school education (and other stuff, but high school is certainly the big item) is being watered down. You can either teach your student, which is hard work, or you can give out an A+ for the same level that gave you a B- a decade ago.
The third item is that it makes no economical sense to do the hard stuff. In the usual corporate setup a business degree might get you started at a lower income level than say an engineer, but you'll overtake him rather fast. As I mentioned the best tech students usually are quite capable of basic maths and especially are capable of analyzing their earning potential.
So, if politicians (did you notice that high level politicians tend to be lawyers?) want more engineers, they need to make it more attractive to be an engineer, they need to offer high school students, at least the interested one, to learn higher level maths.
Some books are stuck in the 50s, literally (differential equations). Some are stuck in the 60s (Physics). A few cosmetic changes - here and there asking students to solve a problem with Maple - do not make for any real change.
Differential equation is kinda of a bad joke, and the joke is on the students: no one will come up with cute analytical solutions in real life - and they will in fact work *backwards* from the way their classes are taught. Books from the 50s or 60s are just the same as the best-selling author's of today. BTW, if anyone's looking for a book that's done away with the cruft, I suggest Florin Diacu's book.
Today's students have bigger curriculum then their teachers had (sometimes increased by as much as a 40%) and are expected to handle nothing less than a CAS software for analytics (e.g. Maple); something for their number-crunching needs (MATLAB, Scilab, etc.); CAD software; and be reasonably proficient in some programming language (that's adequate for number-crunching - C, C++ or Fortran), which entails a data structure course, and maybe later an algorithm analysis class...then a computational algebra class...a linear/non-linear optimization class...etc. For their teacher's generation, some of this stuff was presented in a graduate setting. Today, it's for undergraduates. Cool, but students have their hands full.
To add insult to injury, because of this non-optimized curriculum, faculty has to squeeze class material - which results in students being thrown a brutal quantity of math mumbo jumbo (Statistics, Fourier transform comes to mind...) for which very little basis is provided - so it's just sink or swim, where "swim" means "learn to apply patterns mindlessly without knowing what the hell you're doing *at all* to your problem sets, and be confident that the exam will be just more of the same". The successful student in these classes has basically the mindset of a high-school student - approaching math as if it were a constellation of cookie recipes - the only difference is that this iteration is way harder. Stop to actually read a book and dig deeper, and that might cost you your approval grade (better luck next time, and do remember to read less theorems). One whiz kid I knew simply never read a book. He only used class notes and a huge pile of previous exams. I think that's awful...
I think the only way to fix this situation is adding a year or two to the engineering (etc.) curricula.
BTW, what does the future hold? Will we all have strong analytical skills, or will we have to leave that to number-crunching software specialists? And will math software still be done like today - hand-crafted, a model from the 50s, too - or will this stuff be handled like all other engineering things are - pluggable and standardized? Will formal analysis and automated theorem-proving software (Isabelle, ACL2, HOL, Maude, etc.) make inroads and become mainstream? Nothing today seems to *scale*. Or scales in a crazy, exponential way... Just look at the size a nuclear physics experiment is today - particle accelerators, with more than a thousand-strong team to handle it.
What's the skill set for the future? Is it like today's - mechanical thought-steps? Or will it be "creative thinking" (whatever that means...the catch-phrase sounds like a huge ball of superficial knowledge to me...what marketers tried to label as "Gen Y" thinking)? Just "thinking"? Or thinking *about* thinking - "meta thinking"?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Hopefully future people graduating high school will learn the appeal of getting an A.S. or A.A. degree in their field of interest
They then have a 'real' college degree in 2 years, and the 2year system tends to be a bit friendlier, classes not as impacted.
Also, if they find they can get rewarding and high-enough paying work with their A.S/A.A., then no need for the extra expense and stress of getting a 4yr degree.
Finally, and this is something most people do not realize: A person applying for a 4year school, that already has a 2yr degree, has _higher_ priority to getting accepted than a high school student.
- but -
None of this may make a difference, if once a graduate starts working in a technical job, comes to find they do not appreciate the workload, lack of family time, or hostile work environment some technical professions have.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
because they aren't fun majors. duh.
F science, I want to be a sculptor.
There's a surplus of STEM graduates anyway. Filtering the freshman is a good thing. If they want to do something meaningful have them join the Peace Corp them move into the non-profit sector or gov't policy.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm friends with various academics who feel students could all be coddled into success. They are wrong.
I've taught courses four different countries and groked the educational system in another two. There is only one educational strategy that works present opportunities and expect results. It's fine if people fail, just give them a chance to try again later.
In Europe & elsewhere, there isn't this bullshit idea that students are 'education consumers', no, students are the product, society is the consumer. We present the educational opportunities for free and the students attempt them.
You know what? American medical schools determine who become a doctor during their admissions phase. European medical school determine that by failing people out.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
This is exactly it. Wish I had mod points.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
From the synopsis: "...the Association of American Universities announced a five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM fields to use more interactive teaching techniques."
How about encouraging students to study more?
The family owns a Plumbing/HVAC company so I'll say you're kind of right. I have worked in it frequently before jumping into the IT world. The main reasoning was my father has always said he didn't want his kids getting into the industry. He's 3rd generation master plumber and I took his advice. Skilled trades are often overlooked at being just that, highly skilled. But the job can be physically demanding and if you're in a cold climate and furnaces go down it can be a time sensitive job. Hernias, back surgeries, and other physical problems can be par for the course. It can be a good career just know what you're getting into.
Further competition is growing in new ways. The box stores (Home Depot, Lowes, Sears) are already into the service offering. The contracts with those stores give laughably small margins. But those stores can find people willing to work for that. If you're in an area and have loyal customers it can be profitable, yes. But it's not a guarantee of constant work and profit.
And with birth rates falling, there is no need for 100,000 new teachers either. What there is a need for is teachers qualified in subjects: just getting a teaching diploma is useless to the kids if you don't know anything about the subjects you are supposed to teach. Teachers without a subject qualification need to be taken off the job until they get one (and if the government has the money, put it towards getting those teachers properly trained).
'Treating the freshman year as a "sink or swim" experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,' says a report by the National Academy of Engineering, 'is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.'
What would really help is admission to college on the basis of merit alone, rather than fulfilment of "social" quotas, or how much Daddy has paid the college for a new facility, or how fast you can run or throw a ball. If you continue to fill up the classes with people incapable of coping with the subject matter, you are depriving others who would be able to benefit.
a five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM fields to use more interactive teaching techniques
Which will achieve nothing. Providing students with buttons to press instead of questions to ask will simply teach students how to press buttons. We already have monkeys who can do this.
If that in fact is the plan, then the noble professors might wanna take some classes in Business school. It's an absolute waste of: physical space, faculty time and human resources. It also means their recruiting methods are completely out of sync with the school's profile when, one supposes and is told, top-notch schools recruit only top-notch human material.
Meaning that: if business ran like engineering schools they would fail...miserably.
The facts point something else entirely different: complete and utter incompetence to teach; widespread laziness in preparing adequate class material (which explains why I used basically the same book my civil engineer uncle did decades earlier - only slightly better and now in full color!); a total indolence in what regards adequate self-evaluation.
What does class give you these days, anyways? Better explanation than books? Nope, no way - there's simply not enough time to explain thoroughly the material. Books are *much* better. If only they would leave students alone and let them study, instead of going to classes where the guy basically repeats what's written in the book, anyways. Maybe, attending class gives you a cozy, comfy feeling, all that human heat only overcrowded rooms can give? Or the knowledge - that only your physical presence can give you - that you just gotta hit-dat-ass? Yes!
Seriously, the only thing the first 2 or 3 years the current undergraduate curricula in maths/engineering/computer science will give you is bring you closer to your diploma. It's a red tape thing. Gonna dance to the music, even though your party sucks, Professor.
Most teachers today are non-productive obsolete pieces in the system.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Yeah, right. Most engineering students don't understand the first thing about why their doing this or that. They throw too much at them too fast.
Take Physics. You must take a Physics class whose treatment of mechanics is so poor as to be nearly useless (no vectors or tensors, no proper notation for handling coordinate systems, etc.) ? You can't even describe the wheel of a train with that.
And then, what do you do? You take another Mechanics; this time, it's better but wait...Nope, the Lagrange and Hamilton's treatment will have to wait. In some schools, it's graduate-only.
So, in fact, Physics and/or Engineering students might go through 3 Mechanics iteration before they have a minimum grasp of it.
Why waste so much time? Because the professors are too lazy to reformulate the curriculum. To streamline Mechanics, they would have to redo everything, and they would bother the Math department in the process. So what they do is recommend gigantic overpriced textbooks that will grant them rights to a database of exam questions, to they can do what they do best...work in the lab. Students be damned.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Well, I'm sure industry would love to flood the market with newly minted scientists and engineers. But it's not like there are tons of open positions. If they succeed it will simply mean salaries and the older guys will need to change careers to support their families.
I used to be frustrated that government and academia buy into this BS, but the reality is they want to buy into it. The government would love to be able do draw on an army of unemployed technical people who were born in the US and can easily get security clearances. The colleges just want money to support their bloated bureaucracies. Everyone's happy except the guys who sweated through four years of science classes only to make less money than people who partied through school and got a 4.0 in BusEcon.
XKCD has already pinned blame for this trend. http://xkcd.com/683/
I don't mind competing against a foreign national on even footing. What I don't like is competing against an indentured servant, where they are unable to climb to their level of competence. Back in the 90's I was working with an Iraqi, great guy, engineer in with a bunch of math and programming experience. He was a junior technician making $5 per hour less than I was, it became a sticking point while we (full technicians) were negotiating raises.
I found a way to get him quickly transferred into another position (data reporting), getting him a $3 raise..
Probably bringing up my salary ~$.75 more than if he had stayed; though this may be a dubious guess.
My manager saw the wisdom in being able to hold an indentured servant over our heads, so he hired another H1-B. We found her a transfer in under a month. Since the H1-B fees were coming out of our department the manager didn't try again. I'm pretty sure he would have gone ballistic if he found out that we had done the legwork for the transfers to happen.
There is a problem with the immigration system, but it isn't the immigrant.. I'd love to have a bunch more highly skilled immigrants over here, just not with the existing H1-B system.
I can't speak to scientists, but everyone I know who is an engineer is compensated very well. It's probably one of the best-compensated careers I can think of short of management, law, and doctors. And being a doctor requires quite the investment.
And while there are certainly underpaid teachers, there are also a whole lot of overpaid teachers out there. In fact, teaching is probably one of the most widely overpaid professions there is, especially in certain situations.
Teaching is, in fact, a magnet for the unqualified. No one agrees how to figure out if a teacher is good or not, you can't fire them, and they all get paid the same. That's the slacker dream job! And it's one of the reasons you can't pay teachers a lot - since you have to pay them all the same, and you have no way to figure out who the good ones are even if you could pay them differently, and you can't pay them all a lot, then they all get not much.
And since they all get not much, the kinds of people who really would make great teachers tend to get other jobs where they can be compensated for being better than others.
paintball
In U.S.A the engineering jobs do not pay well. If you are smart, really smart, top 1% smart, 2380 out of 2400 in SAT smart, would you choose engineering? We pay hedge fund managers, sales jocks, second and third tier attorneys, marketing personnel more money than engineers. They keep the engineering pay low by importing them wholesale from India and also from Taiwan and China.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Oh, ok. I thought that was kinda of what I said, but I guess not :-)
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Yeah there hard too but many drop these classes because it wrecks their GPA which hurts their post graduation job chances as well as their scholarships.
Drop grades. Pass or Fail. You can set Fail to below a C. Get them to take the hard courses but don't punish their entire college education with GPA races.
Teachers are not overpaid, obviously some have not been looking at the salaries and benefits that they receive. In some school districts there is a pay problem but not in most. If anything its getting rid of the overpaid ones who are protected from and criticism that hurts. Combine that with a 3x as many non teaching jobs being added to the system and its easy to see where the money has gone
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
digging deep into bra-ket notation
Now THAT I remember:
"Now, this is called a 'bra' "
[sniggers from back of lecture theatre]
FGD 135
After reading most of the comments. I had a random thought:
How do the rewards of the top performers compare, say between Law, Medicine, Science, Finance, Business. He might be a bit of a nerd, but someone like Bill Gates is definitely a business man.
So compare him (or Buffet, Elison, Koch, Soros) with the top in Science, say a Nobel Prize winner. Then at least the potential in monetary reward seems to be very different. As a CEO you might end up a billionaire, as a scientist a millionaire. Money isn't everything, but the difference is very big and it's not just the top.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
With a math background any STEM area you stick your nose in will be - well, not easy - but you won't sweat the math like Physics and Engineering majors do. You'll just concentrate on the subject, the math part is already out of your way.
I would never major in Computer Science. The curriculum looks like a bunch of things you can just google for. And they're weak in math. I guess that's why we see so many web programmers theses days.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Eh, there are the idiots who flunked out because they were incapable. They're flipping burgers now.
Then there are the smart ones who did a cost/benefit analysis. Even the Engineering professors told us straight up in Intro to Engineering, management is where the money is. They split off into things like MIS, did about a tenth of the work the Engineers do, and have job prospects nearly as good as we do.
It's economic realities like that drawing a lot of the best and brightest away from Engineering.
I think there is a lot of weird thoughts on this topic. Yes the tough subjects are tough. Yes there are weed out courses. Yes you have to work harder in STEM classes than underwater basket weaving. I went to a college prep high school and I was totally not ready for the type of work I was presented in EE. I knew circuitry (analog and digital) and understood most of the technical courses, but when I got to college level Calculus and Physics and Chemistry, I was screwed. Oh don't get me wrong, I am damn good at those subjects, just not at what the university coursework deemed required for it. I got 100% on all of my homework in each of those classes, but failed every test. Why? Because the University made the choice to make those classes exams all theory and nothing having to do with the practical application (and by extension, what the homework was over). When you get every homework assignment right, but your first exam is one question "Prove this using Chevychev's (sp?) theorem" and you look at the test like "What?" That has nothing to do with practical application of the work, and what they were going for.
I decided then I was not going to be a EE or a CS major. I went into a degree that was IT Technology which was the practical application of IT concepts. I could do programming (and took several courses) but ended up with a Telecom concentration (and a MS in it as well). I am now an IT architect and provide large scale solutions for my customers. I never have to prove a Calculus theorem, while taking 3 semesters of Calculus for Technologists (getting an A in each one) as they were "here is a problem, solve it" and nothing to do with proofs or any of that other stuff which makes no difference to me.
At the end of the day, there are two different style of concepts. There are technologists, and those that are true engineers. My hats off to those people who could make it through all those classes, but not me. I know how to implement and make things work, and that is better than 98% of the people in the US. I am just not in that extra 1% that knows exactly how the digital circuit in the CPU works (well I might, but that is not my point). According to what the president wants, he is looking for people to get into technology and engineering. I think they need to classify what they are looking for as if they want pure engineering, they have to figure out how to get more people to pass those courses (not lower the bar, just make the education system better), or they have to accept those that can do (those of us with technology degrees).
...things like MIS, did about a tenth of the work the Engineers do, and have job prospects nearly as good as we do.
It's economic realities like that drawing a lot of the best and brightest away from Engineering.
If that's the case, companies must be profiting from putting these bodies, at great expense, into things like MIS.
There's a particular tech field, MRI pulse sequence programming, that's very high end technical - mostly post-doc Physics majors doing the work there... they're a dime a dozen, supply and demand - sure it's harder to learn than being a Pharmacist, but for whatever reason, lots of people learn it, so they're competing themselves out of a decent living - Pharmacists not so much.
I have a friend who used to drive a truck, good honest work, problem is, in his words "Truck drivers are all idiots." They compete each other down until all they can afford is to live in a trailer in BFE with their wife working at the diner to make ends meet. If half the truck drivers in this country suddenly went back to school and learned to do anything else, the remaining half could demand much better compensation.
What I have noticed in engineering is an oversupply of engineering degrees attached to people who can't do the work very well, if at all. Companies are willing to pay for talented engineers, if you can somehow demonstrate that you are one, and negotiate your way out of the peon pay that, frankly, so many "engineers" deserve. Not saying all these people are a waste of good breathing air, but many of them would be better utilized in sales, "application engineering," or even project management, instead of trying to write software, design circuits, mechanical parts, or industrial processes.
Agreed. Calculus-based physics is much easier.
Sorry, but the sink or swim way of doing things means that only the people that actually have the intelligence and work ethic make it through to the degree. Changing that means that unqualified people will be getting degrees and industry, and to a much greater extent, Academia will suffer. A society that doesn't want to crumble doesn't want that.
In other words, it isn't a waste of resources. It's the only way to sort the wheat from the chaff.
IT and apprenticeship are antithesis to each other. That's because technology is the fastest moving target in any industry. Apprenticeships rely on solid skills that don't change much and can thus be passed down from generation to generation.
Life is not for the lazy.
Liberal arts programs are strangling the future of this country.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Average Salary for a Janitor : $24000 per annnum
Average Salary for a Post-doc scientist with a Ph.D+1 year experience: $27000 per annum
Average Salary for a Assistant Store Manager at McDonalds : $29,382
Do you see the problem?
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Where does all the top earners come from? And to ask anyone to study the hard sciences and maths, and to earn peanuts upon graduation? You are recruiting fools for your universities.
It's the professor's job to certify that you can learn and do things like a functional human being.
Otherwise your degree is worthless.
Unfortunately, your misconception is so prevalent that degrees are becoming... worthless.
That's funny, over there in China, professors and scientists are overpaid and overworked (they are eager to work for long time). Years ago, a research department head asked me for help with his resume as he would like to send a resume to an American university. I looked up the salary of a researcher in his field and was dismayed to see that any potential job in here would have a salary much lower than his salary in China. So, I discouraged him from applying for a job in America. But anyway, he found an alternative way to work/research in America temporarily. A temporary research position is better than a permanent research position as there isn't much financial incentive to stay in America.
A generation or two of MBAs trying to outsource/offshore anything they don't understand even as Hollywood was bombarding American youth with "nerd" movie after "nerd" movie. I.e. our kids have got peer pressure when they're young saying "Don't be a nerd!" backed up by their high school guidance counselor saying "Well, pay and job security in those fields is declining..." - all backed up by real-world knowledge of this, that, or the other kid's parent who was in science/engineering/technology and go laid off for their investment in those "difficult" university courses....
It isn't that our kids are dumb; they're smart enough to see when a game is rigged against..."nerds".
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
It makes sense. Might as well get them ready for what they'll get after coming out...
That is all.
Why study science / engineering with the US economy being exported overseas? All we are going to have left is MBA's in hi-rise buildings directing the work of the work-for-peanuts engineers in India and China. The degree to have is business, not engineering / science. This situation will continue until it becomes profitable to manufacture in the USA again, which will not happen as long as we have income taxes. We cannot absorb income tax expense to industry while supporting the highest wage scale on the planet. Keep the high wage scale, dump the income taxes. How to dump the income taxes? Pass the Fair Tax, a consumption tax. www.fairtax.org. Read all about it. It is the ONLY thing that will save our industry from gutting and our middle class from being moved to extreme poverty.
I have PhD in physics and mathematics. In a utopian USA, the idea of educating more scientists and engineers might be workable. In the current political climate, are you kidding me? Science is a dirty word for half the politicians in Washington, DC. I'm all for better science education. I'm not so sure the majority of my fellow citizens want that, though.
I am typing this in Shanghai. My company is a microcosm of what is wrong with the USA. We're selling high technology to a Chinese company, and we've been hiring high school grads in our US location to do work that previously required a college degree. I've been watching americans and europeans selling their souls to Chinese businessman in the hotel lobby for two months now. This is where the action is. The US is a fading light. China is a pollution-spewing industrial juggernaut.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
Because that shit is hard and Humanities, Philosophy and Liberal Arts are easy to fake your way through a 4-year degree.
When all you need is a piece of paper with BA or BS written on it to be above the unemployment problem in the US, why study something hard? Although the unemployment rate in the US hovers around 9%, it's 20% for those without a college degree, and something like 3% for those with a degree.
Now some theory is good but 4 years?
CS theory taught in 1970 is still relevant today. The languages and hardware change, but the theories remain pretty standard.
Institutions of higher learning in the United States are about making money, not graduating people. Everyone who has been there knows this.
I thought about quitting because I was expecting an image based from movies. I was expecting:
a hotbed of political action,
groundbreaking discoveries everywhere,
playing with fantastic equipment!
mature and exciting debate,
everybody inventing new things all the time,
industry buying up graduates before they've even finished
When I got to University I found it was much the same as school only with harder grind study and less study support. I found the more serious the science, the less fun and the more grind. Also, less women. My course was a meld of a less seriously percieved science with one that seemed to be stricter than I expected. I had a choice of choosing interesting modules turned into hard grind which would cost me lower marks, or choosing the easier option and actually passing, and screwing some hot chicks along the way. For integrity I chose a balance and it took another year to graduate. I only chose to continue to mature my investment. If I had relised it was a scam earlier I would have dropped out.
Then there's academic culture. Locking out others with jargon. Elitism. Corruption. Academia has it's own funny little world and being a student I felt locked out of that. I never felt included in University as a student. There's a hardcore of phd students and lab assistants and lecturers because Universities have become so massive. If you've slept into this bunch you get a very different view.
I'd like to add that there is no vocational training for many types of science! If this changes please let me know; I'd be interested in applying.
The US government wants more science education because it's trying to shape society. The people who actually do the work to make this change will pay for this throughout their lives.
A blog I run for the wealth
Hello! University drop out here. Specifically Maths/Science/Engineering dropout from Canada circa '89... Posting in agreement.
My personal experience is quite the opposite. I'm still relatively young (late 20s) so the market hasn't evolved *that* much since I entered into it. I did like everyone else and took a low paying job to get my first 3 years of experience then jumped ship. In years 4-6 between switching jobs and getting promoted I doubled my income. Between this year and next I'm expecting another ~40% increase in income. If you're good you'll find high paying work regardless of your degree. The only real limitation I've faced is that I can't work for government or government contractors.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Because College has become a REQUIREMENT rather than an option for the inclined?
Laziness and entitlement?
I apparently wasn't smart enough to be accepted into college in the first place. So, I too went off to industry. Now I get to play lead on some pretty amazing projects and am paid quite well to do it.
There are a couple of common problems I see that are related to this.
1) A lot of people are lazy. Once they find out that math/science/cs/whatever is not just blowing stuff up and playing video games, but actually takes thinking, they get bored. I've known a lot of people who had this happen.
2) In my own experience the attributes that commonly lead to someone being good in these sorts of fields lead to being bored out of your mind in school and frequently not learning the way school is frequently taught. Most good engineers, cs guys, scientists, etc that I have met like a challenge, like exploring and figuring things out, and like hands on work ("hands on" includes working out math problems or the like). Sitting around in lectures memorizing trivia and hoping you remember it leads to boredom or even frustration if you just don't learn well that way.
The last line of the summary is right in line with point #2 there, although it seems to just focus on teaching STEM stuff in that way, and not making the other subjects more interesting as well.
Hasn't everyone here had one or more of them; esp. in the public colleges, where they are required to admit easily (or everyone)? The class that's always a lecture class, with one or three hundred students, that is designed to take your money, and flunk you out?
The one I had that comes to mind (I did pass) around '91 or '92 was at UT at Austin, where I was required to take a course in formal logic. Part way through the term, I caught the professor after class, and was told, and I quote, not paraphrase, "Don't try to understand it, just figure out how to crank out the answers".
I nearly - maybe I should have - called him out on that. Certainly, what ran through my mind was that I was paying *my* money for an education, not for "figure out how to pass your tests". It is still my opinion that I was defrauded, that I did *not* get what I was paying for.
mark
You know, you could change major without dropping out? I have a friend to completed CS undergrad and then went to med school. Now with the drop out on your permanent record good luck getting through any competitive admissions.
I completed my BA in Physics at Columbia, but dropped out of grad school at Berkeley. It was less that I was badly prepared, and more that I was just... young, immature, scared, and lonely. My academics were good, but I was badly prepared socially, and I didn't know how, or who, to ask for help with emotional issues. I don't know if it's the proper purview of school to help with that sort of thing, but it would have helped me a lot.
Labs are a serious issue in my mind. Not for engineers, but for science majors. They break the entire credit hour concept of college. If a normal class is 3-4 credit hours, labs are always 1, but then often require a 5-10 page paper every week, plus the 3 hour lab period. Schools normally require just enough lab classes so that you have 1 per semester, but then with scheduling difficulties, students inevitably have to take multiple labs in the same semester at least once if they want to finish in 4 years. Most students have a part time job, which means this just is not feasible.
I know several people who have gone through this process only to either:
A) Find that they could not get student loans for a 5th year which they would need to get the degree. or
B) Simply dropout or change majors to complete in 4 years.
These people are genuinely interested in science. When did science become exclusively about writing papers?
So you started before the crisis. That's a pretty huge difference.
What crisis? IT unemployment is like 2%. We have a bunch of open positions we can't fill.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Western education is a broken system. It's methods are based on centuries old techniques, but the modern twist is that education is now sidelined by testing. It is testing, and grades and trying to cram a large syllabus into an inappropriately short time frame that is creating pressure on stundents, and ultimately, going 'against the grain' of the concept of education.
If you deviate from the 'norm' of how a student is expected to digest the information that is taught, then you're a lost cause. As for myself, at 38 and having "gone back to school" via the Khan Academy, I finally realise that I have a short attention span and my mind wanders quite easily (now identified as a healthy condition and proven to be beneficial), so I now understand why I did so poorly in college when my mind wandered for 5 minutes and I completely missed an important piece of information that led to me misunderstanding a large swathe of the syllabus. And it happened often :)
I admire Khan Academy for making learning fun again. For explaining things in an idiot proof fashion without being condescending, and for provding videos so that when my mind does wander, I can just hit the replay button. I'm not really a big fan of technology in education, but KA's methods have me excited for the future of education.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
yes, it is relevant that I read the book in Russian, not in English, because I don't know what the English variant sounds like. Yes, English is not my first language. However I don't have to apologize to anybody for my spelling and grammar, buddy.
You can't handle the truth.
That's half of my point, being a Mindless Drone at a sufficiently high level pays the rent. Your choice on what you make mindless, but that's what it becomes, the same 22 tasks done every month "forever" until you quit/get downsized/company folds/power politics bite you/etc.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't know where you live but in my country HR won't even call you back if you don't have a degree. And call center work around here is dead end, no chanche to move to sysadmin position, as you need a degree for that as well.