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US Losing R&D Dominance To Asia?
bednarz writes "U.S. companies are locating more of their R&D operations overseas, and Asian countries are rapidly increasing investments in their own science and technology economies, the National Science Board said in a report released this week. The number of overseas researchers employed by U.S. multinationals nearly doubled from 138,000 in 2004 to 267,000 in 2009, for example. On the education front, the U.S. accounts for just 4% of undergraduate engineering degrees awarded globally, compared to China (34%), Japan (5%), and India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand (17% collectively). 'The low U.S. share of global engineering degrees in recent years is striking; well above half of all such degrees are awarded in Asia,' NSB said in its report."
China and India have had massive, massive pushes to educate engineers, medical workers, technology workers, etc. The shift is the pay off.
A couple decades ago my brother, an engineer with Dow Chemical related the project he was managing - an project would be begun in North America, passed to a team in Japan or Oceana, then passed to India, before passing along to Europe and back to North America - each location meeting its objectives as part of the project. That was two decades back. So you can see there are people capable of engineering, research, medical discoveries and such in abundance by now. No doubt someone in Thailand is waking up about now and will correct any spelling errors I have made in this post.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In my recent (and extensive) experience with interviewing people who are recent graduates, I am finding a very large percentage of people with bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science who can't write even the most simple scripts in any language... people with "expert in TCP/IP networking" in their qualifications, or who have three years testing routers and switches listed as experience who don't know what NAT means or what a MAC address is... people who don't know how to list running processes on any platform. These are people who are graduates. They have their degree. And those degrees are worthless. We've had half a dozen positions open where I work for a long while, the bar just isn't set that high, but we're not finding qualified applicants.
It doesn't matter what nationality the school or the "graduate" is. Poorly-prepared graduates are a world-wide phenomenon. Sure, Asia is producing a large number of graduates, but the majority of them aren't going to be very useful. The U.S. is producing fewer engineering graduates, but they're just as useless.
Yes, the universities are to blame. I don't know what they're teaching but it has little to do with reality and doesn't prepare the students to be employable. But the students are also to blame. Surveys show that between 75 and 98% of students admit to cheating, and don't feel particularly bad about it; the universities also don't seem to think that cheating is anything to get worked up over either. No wonder nobody is learning anything.
All of this is why I don't think that it's a big deal that the US produces only 4% of engineering degrees; 4% of "nothing useful" is no worse than "35% of nothing useful". If those degrees actually meant something, or correlated in any meaningful way to success (both for the individual and for the employer), I'd be more concerned. My real worry is that Westerners aren't even interested in engineering any more; they all want to be in sales and marketing and other nontechnical fields (or "soft" majors like political science or humanities, followed by whining about how nobody will pay six figure salaries for their chosen field). I'm not sure why this is,,, given how little tech work someone with a tech degree seems to actually be required to do, it can't be because of academic workload. Mind you, the profound anti-intellectualism that is still the rule in Western society may have something to do with it.
-sigh- Kids these days.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
That would make some sense if "our own" actually wanted to be trained for technical careers. Very few of them do; you can see this by walking into any American university's engineering classes.
Of course, we can debate the causes for this (is it the jobs are unpopular because kids aren't interested in "hard" subjects? or is it that the jobs don't pay enough relative to the time and effort required and age discrimination is too common, so smart kids are avoiding these careers because the American companies have made them bad jobs, and they're going into finance and law positions instead?), but whether the cause is from the bottom or the top, or a combination of the two, it is what it is: Americans aren't interested in technical careers, while Asians are. The Asians aren't taking away anyone's jobs.
For the most part, I don't think American students shy away from engineering degrees because it's hard. The students are just going to where the jobs are. When they hear about companies outsourcing engineering jobs to Asia and bringing in H1B visa holders by the boatload, it's no wonder they persue a different career path. Look at all the women going into nursing. There's a big demand for nurses and it pays very well. Nursing school isn't easy, either. But they're in demand, and that's the key.
In a weird twist, I'm working for a company in China as an engineer. They couldn't find the talent there. Chinese engineers are missing a critical talent: the ability to fail.
It works like this: in China, you are taught there is a correct answer for each problem. If A then B. If C then D. If E then F. Always deterministic. You never fail because there is always a tried and true path.
Works great for copying, but not in improving or creating products. That takes going down unexplored paths. And failing. And recovering. And failing. And recovering.
When starting a new project with my team, I was asked "What is the method for creating a new product?" They fully expected me to give them a recipe. Something deterministic.
I'm underwhelmed by their engineering skills too. They jump on the first method/equation/model they find and refuse to budge even when I present them with physical evidence that their model is flat out wrong.
Sorry for venting. I shouldn't complain. I'm getting very well paid to do something an entire department of 50 other engineers can't do: go out on a limb.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
No, absolutely not. Not until all American graduates in STEM actually receive good faith treatment by US employers, instead of having their resumes ignored. I'm a 2002, top quartile graduate of a top 20 school, in EE/CS. Sent out thousands of customized cover letters and resumes, only to receive, at best, a dozen responses over the years, and many of the phone interviews/inquiries weren't even in good faith (ie: it was obvious that at least a few were only intended to disqualify me). H-1B and guest workers have destroyed the industry, destroyed the job prospects of people in the industry, and destroyed lives like mine.