Slashdot Mirror
James Dyson: We Should Pay Students To Study Engineering
DavidGilbert99 writes "The inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner believes there is an engineering crisis in the UK and that 61,000 vacancies in the area will go unfilled in 2014. To address this Dyson believes says he wants the UK government to offer monetary incentives to students with an interest and aptitude in science — as well as changing the current visa system to make it easier for foreign students to remain in the country and get work once they have completed their education in the UK."
The phrase he seems to be looking for is "we need scholarships for engineering students".
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
As an engineer, I think this is a bad idea. Cause you know, they tirrrkk errrr JERRRBBSS!!
If you don't bring fresh slaves from abroad, I'll need to increase wages.
Paying students is a nice idea, but won't change a thing.
Face it, the only jobs that pay money are jobs that deal with money. Being productive is simply not something you get paid for, pushing money about is where the money is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...so we need to fund education for students who won't hit the job market until several years later?
Give me a break.
And trust the free market for once. If there's a worker shortage, then wages will rise until demand and supply equalize and there is no more shortage.
All the whining about a shortage of engineers is simply a trick by employers to increase supply and decrease the wages they have to pay.
Lawyers guarantee future employment by making the legal system more and more complex every year. Engineering guarantees outsourcing by getting rid of ways of doing things.
If you live in a country that provides all your basic needs without having to work, why would you put yourself through the stress and effort of an engineering degree, and why would you bother working at a job that is used to fund the basic needs of people who didn't and don't?
We increase scholarships for ALL students pursing fields of job growth, not just engineering
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
We don't need to pay students to study engineering. We have plenty of engineers. We need to stop paying companies (through tax breaks) to out source engineering. There is no STEM shortage, and this myth needs to mercilessly shot down every time a company executive propagates it.
... agrees one Slashdot poster after another.
*Slashdot editor faints*
I have to say that the bagless vacuum cleaner was the stupidest invention of all time. Instead of replacing bags,you have to replace filters. Big fucking whoop. And when you empty the vacuum, you get to breath a giant cloud dust - way to go. The guy is second in my mind to whoever invented those hard plastic cases you have to use a boxcutter to open. That guy deserves the chair for his crimes against humanity.
Paying somebody to study a subject that they haven't chosen themselves is never a good idea. If somebody is interested in studying engineering they'll study it without financial inducement. If somebody is interested in studying law and you pay them to study engineering they probably won't turn out to be particularly useful engineers.
Besides, if Dyson is so convinced it's a good idea why doesn't his company pay students to study engineering? Clearly he wants trained employees but doesn't want to invest anything in training himself.
Perhaps a better solution would be for companies to stop paying all the money to the managers and pay more of it to the people who actually make the company work. That way more people will want to get science and engineering because they lead to a valued and well paid job. Why would someone motivated by money take a few thousand pounds from the government now when they can get hundreds of thousands of pounds more over their career doing a far less challenging degree and setting themselves up to become a manager?
Probably not a good idea. I suspect it will probably attract the students that shouldn't be going into engineering in the first place. I don't know what would be worse, having more subpar engineers or having fewer superb engineers.
Instead, all the focus should be made during childhood education. By either family or schools, preferably families. Along with touting maths and sciences, we should also drill children on how to use and how not to use money while we're at it. But those pesky 20-year-solution-plans are so distasteful, quick useless bandaids sound so much better tasting...
Hey! The outsourcing industry has made STEM a joke! Even scientists fight for funds like wolves over scraps. If you have to pay people to volunteer for evisceration in that gladiatorial arena, then perhaps the answer is in the arena, not the people who don't want to enter it.
Oh, I know, instead of eliminating the corporate ability to cherry pick only research that is immediately profitable, why don't we just pay scientists and engineers adequately for their labor so that the students will have incentive to enter STEM jobs?
Outlaw outsourcing, or at least outlaw patents and copyrights. Then you will have to pay for the labor of research whether or not the research pans out -- No one can know which research will yield profit ahead of time otherwise you would only research profitable subjects. It costs the same labor whether you discover a breakthrough or merely something else that can lead to a breakthrough for someone else later.
Even the so called "free education" is a bit dubious in Finland. In addition to a steady rate of achieving study credits (fair enough) which warrant your student benefit, the new system limits receiving the benefit to 4 years max. If you haven't graduated in that period, it's GTFO unless you have a side job. You cannot even raise more student loan as it is government-backed and tied to the student benefit. Now when you are forced to drop out of school in this situation, you suddenly get luxurious social welfare support which is more than enough money for good living. Studying should be the more attractive deal, not drinking booze at home.
LET THE CIRCLEJERK COMMENCE BITCHES.
And now I have to have some lowercase bullshit downhere.
No, really, start circlejerking. You fucks do realize it's only a matter of time before the software makes engineering a less skilled, low-wage button pushing environment, correct? You think you're going to graduate making 6 figures? Yeah. . . Good luck with that.
i would take anything Dyson says very sceptically, he outsourced his "bagless" cleaners manufacture to China and his taxes offshore
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...
so forgive me if i cant take his word on anything about the UK when he cant even contribute to his countries wellbeing.
Doing something that is similar to the way the military does things. They could offer a bonus to students that enter the engineering field, but they receive only it on certain conditions. The first half of the bonus they get after they graduate and land a job. The rest is paid over a period of time for example. Let’s just say four years in this example. Now only those who are competent and willing to work hard get the bonus. I wonder if this would work well?
I thought his strong suit was in marketing. Selling those crappy looking vacuums and fans for astronomical prices, that at best perform at the level of products 1/4 of their price tag.
After using two bagless vacuums and dealing with the clogged filters and cloud of dust when I have to empty them, I refuse to buy anymore. My $40 Dirt Devil with the traditional bag is cleaner and easier to maintain than any of the expensive bagless I've owned in the past.
This guy is a marketing genius!
His inventiveness and engineering skills are, underwhelming.
His opinion on higher education seems to be uninformed.
Whatever happened to spending the money on educating one's own citizenry? I'm all for spreading the love around, but shouldn't the taxpayers get some at-home problems solved for their dollars, pounds, what have you?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"monetary incentives"
"visas"
These are the stupidest possible solutions to the problem.
The problem belongs to the employers which will have the vacancies, not the government or general population.
These vacancies exist because companies do not offer a fair share of their profits to their employees.
Let these companies die.
Let engineers who can't find jobs die.
Start your own fucking business and learn how to live a free life.
Since only EU citizens can apply for these jobs and there is a EU shortage of said professions. A lot of work was shipped out to "cheap labour" countries but is now coming back because team work and quality control have proven to be too cumbersome to warrant the lower price. The people capable of doing these jobs don't exist in the EU, since these jobs often require experience with new technologies and if there was no work in it, nobody learned or got experience with the new stuff. As far as the free market goes, that means that restricting these jobs to EU only people and the big myth that off shoring would be so much cheaper have killed the market and wages are rising again for certain professions. The price will go up so much, that most companies won't be able to afford it and either they will not hire and struggle, or outsource longer, delaying the economy and not solving anything for the local job market on short term. So, no free market and the EU governments have to step in to fix this.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
these are just the ramblings of an old man, so feel free to skip em but I remember Studying, the academic pursuit of higher education that is, was originally predicated on the ostensible monetary success ones career may bring. Doctors and Engineers were paid much more handsomely for their services than artists and english majors. in return they enjoyed much more demanding work some would argue.
with the encroachment of privatized education this is no longer the case. the monetary shackles of student loans are interminable and ensure that no matter how successful an engineer may be, they are ultimately relegated for a substantial portion of their adult lives to subsistence living. Engineers, like english and philosophy majors, dont just "get a job" after college anymore. In fact many students watching newly minted engineers join the workforce as hamburger cooks and third shift walmart drones would just as soon skip the college experience entirely.
and what about the successful engineers? shops when faced with pressure to make wages more competitive have instead lobbied for more cheap H-1B visas and interns. Code is written in the Phillipines, and hardware assembled in Taiwan. Greybeards like myself sit in cubicles and 'kindly do the needful' to turn a rather mocking phrase while the rank and file, what we hire for simple CAD or EE work, is mandated to start with 5 years experience and an advanced degree. It guarantees we never hire anything that comes out of the alma mater.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Not sure why the article describes this a "controversial proposal". In the 1980s in the UK many (all?) undergraduates got grants (scholarships from the state for living expenses) as well as all their course fees paid.
Perhaps it's an indication of how politics have changed that the proposal to reinstate something the people assumed was a normal expenditure by the government of the day, both left and right wing, for several decades (state support of people undertaking university studies) is now considered "controversial".
Ah happy memories of the grant cheque coming in, bank managers trying to appear down with the kids to get them to sign up for their first bank account with that large cheque and more to follow, financial management learnt by many who hadn't previously had anything more than their weekly income from a paper round striding down the streets of a big new city with three months of bed and board advance payments burning a hole in their pockets...
http://developers.slashdot.org...
The UK is a basket case, it treats the arts in higher esteem than the sciences and engineering (unlike countries like Germany). The general public in the UK don't like people who takes sciences (how popular are science nerds/geeks compared to jocks in school?) Money is thrown at the arts like it's going out of fashion, the scienes however always have funding problems.
When I studied at university, the arts students were the ones who had lots of time to prop up the student bars, and could get any books they wanted very cheaply (say £5), whereas for sciences, it was normal to spend £50+ for just one book.
In the UK, the amount of effort you put into a science degree and pay you get, is inversely proportional to the effort and pay the arts students get (unless you're really really good in your chosen science subject)
So of course, the sciences should have their courses paid for compared to the arts. But I would add to that, to prevent people jumping onto a science course because it's free, they MUST have studied science courses and have good grades in them from lower schools before getting to university. This should prevent students from moving courses.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Uh, we don't even pay students who have already completed their studies in engineering. That's why there are so few students. You want to increase the number of engineers, start hiring them by the boatload and pay a lot of money. That's how supply and demand work.
study is a right, from start to your PhD , at most you pay for the books and a nominal fee (i.e 500 euro/year if your finances/family permits else it's free). Paying tens of thousands or getting debts before you even start working is simply barbaric and the heritage of a classist society. But you know sheeple are good for the ones who controls....
At a net worth of 4.4 billion dollars he should provide some scholarships himself.
...desperately needed in their OWN countries?
I don't know if Dyson's real agenda is to get the UK to import more cheap foreign labor, but even if it is, his accompanying proposal is better than what we get in the US. He's suggesting scholarships, while FWD.US and it's associated propaganda organizations are proposing an hour of code in public school.
If I owned a large company I would much rather bank roll students myself and hand pick the best and brightest. Then offer them a position with a contract requiring a certain minimum years of commitment, with non-compete clauses, and base their pay on performance.
James Dyson: We Should Pay (Black/Muslim/any-non-white) Students To Study Engineering
White Genocide.
We used in the 1960s/1970s to give grants to study at university rather than the USA-style debt/indenture system we have now. At that stage, we had fewer universities, since we hadn't converted our polytechnics, many of which were rubbish, into 'universities'. Also, most of the degree were in actual subjects, science, maths, engineering and english, history, geography, for example.
Now we have media studies, we had kite flying for a while at Thames Valley. In short, the worst of all possible worlds, basically by 'financialising' the system and expanding it in a very thoughtless way. The debt and high fee make it difficult for working class kids too, in my time they would have had a full grant, though they would have probably had to work a little in vacation time. I did.
So I agree somewhat with Dyson. He's a little younger than me and probably remembers the older system.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Absolutely not. Scholarships pay schools, not students. We need to make it so that students who are studying needed professions end up with something in their pockets besides massive debt.
"Scholarships" are just redistributive, upwards. They make sure school administrations are wealthy and corporations have a guaranteed workforce that's so needy they'll work cheap.
Higher education has become another method of exploitation.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It seems to me that salaries should mostly be based on how much work was required and how much skill was demonstrated in gaining whatever accreditation a person has. It sort of is, doctors and lawyers work a long time to get their degrees and usually have to demonstrate fairly high skill in the process.
Gaining an engineering degree requires a lot of work and also a lot of demonstration of what was learned through testing (especially for a PE).
Somehow, though, it doesn't work this way, and even when it does it seems to get corrupted in weird ways.
Ohhh!!! Pay student's! All students in Denmark, get payed, when they attend a state approved education. Highschool, university, u name it. So for me, it's kind of a joke that we are one of the only states in the world, wich are "investing" in the nations future this way.
There is a shortage of experienced engineers and no-one wants to pay to train new engineers or to give untried engineers the proper treatment to keep them from jumping ship when someone else comes along. The energy industry in Houston is a great example. Tons of jobs. Tons of people looking for those jobs, but very little "entry level" hiring occurs outside of the usual college graduation cycle. Even then, most companies will spend years looking for a candidate that already has experience so they wind up sniping talent from the other guy.
Whenever an industry says there is a shortage, you can translate that into. We don't want to pay the going rate. I was suckered into this in the 90s and early 00s. When there was a shortage of accounts people. They just wanted more to suppress wages. Secondly schools (Universities, colleges etc) don't want to teach engineering because it is an expensive course to teach especially if there are practical elements. While teaching a social science requires a few books and a classroom. Quite ironically my local not very highly ranked university specialises in engineering and production processes. They have an excellent department headed by the former head of department of a top university. Because of the bad reputation it attracts few people ad they are thinking of closing it down.
It's really hard to immigrate especially if you are unemployed. You need to have enough money to support yourself for something like 2 years to even get considered for a visa.
If enough Engineers are already studying regardless of this proposed incentive, then it is not necessary. It'd be nice to give free money to all kinds of students, but to pick and choose when they don't need it to sustain employment to begin with is the wrong approach.
Don't pay students to study engineering. Pay them to *be* engineers.
People capable of being engineers are, by definition, smart. They can see the career landscape, and engineers aren't valued or needed. They're being asked to invest four, six, eight, or more years to be trained for a career field that's shrinking. How does subsidizing that training now help them have a career?
And I said nothing because I had tiled floors.
Then he came for the blades on the fans -- and I said nothing because I have centralized air conditioning.
Then he came for the hand towels in public bathrooms -- and I said nothing because I never wash my hands.
Them he came for my jobs with his relaxed visa requirements for foreign nationals --- and DEY TUK ER JURBS!
Maybe if you stopped outsourcing our jobs to Indian, James, then that would go some way to solving the problem.
I keep hearing that we need more STEM students in this country, so why don't our policies (other than increasing H1B visas) reflect that? First, either completely stop loaning money to people to study underwater basket weaving or start charging interest rates that are commensurate with the risk of default. Sure, you can borrow money to study underwater basket weaving- your rate will be 20%. You want to study EE or medicine? Your rate will be 1.5%.
And the goddamned law that prevents escape from student loan debt by anything but death has got to go. It's like we're living in a Dickens novel- except that it is worse because the debt is owed to the US government. Maybe we should start some debtor's prisons for all the people who can't pay their student loans off.
If I were a conspiracy nut I might think that the dramatic increase in student loan debt was intentionally engineered to separate millennials from the money they are soon to inherit from their boomer parents.
Absolutely not. Scholarships pay schools, not students.
Many scholarships pay living expenses.
We need to make it so that students who are studying needed professions end up with something in their pockets besides massive debt.
Huh? They end up with massive debt because of loans to pay tuition, which is expensive. If students had scholarships, they wouldn't need to take out loans to pay tuiton, and wouldn't end up in massive debt.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
As an immigrant in the US I think we should have better scholarships for engineering in the US.
A large number of guys I know here don't even bother with the education because the loan is so large that they think they are better off selling insurance or the first job they can take and baking in the shortage through the way the education system is structured here.
From where I come in the "developing" world, they are forced to offer this style of education as the benefit there of providing it is clearly visible. The cost of education if you do well is really small. Imagine paying way less than a total of $4000 for all your 4 years of education (including fees, boarding, books, food, etc. etc.). That will take care of the worker shortage and also provide jobs and tax payers from the existing tax base rather than importing them from other countries.
I wish the administration did their math and they'd see that an education subsidy would earn much more than that back in taxes and business.
Anyone who had to build 5000 prototype of a vacuum that ended up becoming a production level product that doesn't last very long isn't worthy of taking advise from. Go into any vacuum repair shop and see how many Dysons are sitting there waiting to be repaired or sold as used. James Dyson's call to engineering to pay students to become engineers is akin to him saying that he knows engineering. Fail.
Problem is, if you pay people to study engineering, you'll wind up writing a lot of checks to a lot of people who have nu business in engineering, who will toddle along as long as they can to collect the checks, and who will never ever ever become anything like an "engineer".
I keep hearing two contradictory theories:
(1) There aren’t enough STEM graduates for the jobs available. Crisis for the tech industry!
(2) There are too few job openings for the massive numbers of STEM graduates. Crisis for unemployment!
Are these things really contradictory? Or are both true? For both of them to be true, then what we really have is an education crisis, where we’re putting too many losers on the job market. Businesses get lots of applicants, but most of them are fundamentally unhirable, because they’re morons. So although the number of applicants may well exceed the number of openings, only a small fraction are worth hiring.
There seems to be plenty of hiring for low-pay code monkey and short-term contract jobs, and those seem to dominate the tech industry. So any engineering student who can think his or her way out of a paper bag complains they can’t find work because the jobs that are available are utter shit. So perhaps on that basis, we can rewrite the two hypotheses above:
(1) There aren’t enough REALLY GOOD STEM graduates. In fact, businesses are forced to assume (on the weight of massive statistics) that ALL of them are idiots.
(2) There aren’t enough good-paying tech jobs, because most of the jobs are parceled out to code monkeys by businesses structured around that kind of employee.
It will not work. In Germany, university access is free and you can even get some state money to finance your studies. While this is generally a good idea (and bad implemented in Germany), they have no positive effect on the number of engineering students. Its very simple: You do not study engineering if you do not want be an engineer. Most people are not interested in engineering. If you want to change the number of students, change their interest. Money is not a good motivator for such a university topic.
In Europe, many engineers are paid not all that differently from other professions that are much less demanding and specialized. If they make higher salaries, much of that difference is eaten up by progressive taxation. Socially, many European intellectuals look down their noses at applied disciplines and pride themselves in their inability to comprehend math, physics, and engineering. What motivation do you think people have to acquire highly specialized skills and take on high responsibility if society tells them that their skills and responsibilities aren't valued, either financially or intellectually?
And similar mechanisms are taking hold in the US. Progressives in Silicon Valley have been protesting well-paid software engineers and become downright hostile to technology, Democrats are constantly calling for increasingly higher tax burdens on high income earners, etc. All of those efforts target and discourage successful engineers, who are usually in the top income quintile (and really good ones are 1%-ers, not really a stretch given that their skills easily exceed those of 99% of all Americans).
You want more skilled engineers? Start valuing their contributions, and stop trying to forcibly reduce income inequality.
I don't think he'd get many takers if it meant shipping yourself out to Eastern Europe - no doubt with Eastern European wages - afterwards; Dyson shifted his manufacturing base out of the UK for reasons of tax.
...how about we start asking employers to train their own damned employees for a while? Maybe even invest a little money into acquiring the skills they require? This seemed to work in the past, back before companies decided it was now the governments job to provide fodder for their factories.
"Dean of Engineering School Internet-ted In Engineering Recruitment Scandal" 'Who says nerds don't like weed, beer, hookers, and a free Corvette?' said an anonymous source in the NCAA.
no positive effect on the number of engineering students
How do you know that? I believe Germany has had that system for a long time, so there is no basis for comparison to a situation where the education wasn't tuition free.
You do not study engineering if you do not want be an engineer.
Agreed, but what if you can't afford to study engineering? That does not happen in Germany, since there is no tuition. In the US the situation is awful, with students taking on enormous debt.
Well said.
Now if they wanted to abolish loans, that might make more sense. The real achievers who are likely to truly benefit from higher education will mostly qualify for scholarships, and the ones who would just get a piece of paper and a mountain of debt will be poorer by a piece of paper, and richer by a mountain.
Of course we also need to change the business culture that's started requiring degrees for ditch diggers and fry cooks - yes the degree shows that they can self-manage to some degree, but the education itself is unlikely to benefit you at all, and will tend to make your employees resent what might otherwise be a respectable blue-collar job. Plus the fact that they're working for you despite having a degree shows that their judgement in getting the degree and/or looking for work is heavily suspect. And frankly even among the rank and file, poor judgement is likely to cost you a lot more than the ability to self-manage will gain you.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I seem to recall the UK was a bit like China, calling workers in technical fields that, while well-trained, were *not* Engineering degree-holding individuals from accredited institutions. Whereas in the US, you're not even supposed to use the word 'Engineering' in your company name unless the folks doing actual engineering have actual engineering degrees (though punishments of violations seem rather rare).
I'd argue that starting salaries are high enough, typically $50K to $70K in the USA followed by almost a complete fall off in wage increases with experience/age/responsibility...which is where all the grumbling is coming from.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
1988-1993 - 9 semesters, NOT adjusted for inflation:
* Total scholarships: $13000 and change.
* Total tuition and fees other than room/board/books: About $5700.
* Total books: About $4000
Net leftover to pay rent/food/other costs of living: Over $2000.
Yes, I had to have a part-time job but if I'd lived at home with my parents and used their car I would've been able to graduate debt-free without a job.
I graduated with an Engineering degree from a low-top/high-2nd-tier (by national rankings) Engineering school and went off to get a Masters degree in the same field. I'm also Tau Beta Pi.
Being a National Merit Scholar helped.
Harsh...GTFO unless you have a side job? How do all those slackers that don't graduate on time manage?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
As in, "Commensurate with experience, and aligned with the cost structure of the country in which the engineer lives."
But that's not how capitalism works, is it? Capitalism works like this:
1) A bean counter (i.e. 20-something MBA, whose inherited wealth background means, he/she doesn't know any specific business), comes in and says, "Your department is too expensive. The shareholders must be paid!"
2) The most expensive engineers are laid off. Coincidentally, these are the older, most experienced engineers (i.e. The only ones who are any good).
3) Productivity suffers. Profits go down.
4) Bean counter explains this away as technological change and increased overseas competion. Recommends outsourcing.
5) Outsourcing extends the death throes of the company by 2-5 years.
6) MBA has taken another job elsewhere at a healthy company, not yet infested with newly minted MBAs.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Shocking that an inventor would look to the government to play decider.
More appropriate would be that industry offer students cash to go against their tuition for majoring in a certain field. I would suggest the money only be payable in arrears if a pre-determined average is achieved. One could also prorate, paying more for each year of course work completed.
But as long as education is subsidzd by the taxpayer there is no reason for industry to contribute.
In the US, certain states such as Texas and Georgia offer free University education, and I believe there are other states that do similar. California?
These are socialist governments by any means. They just realize the practical benefits from doing this. I know people who sent their kids to live with relatives in Georgia their last year of HS so they could go on to University for free.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
oops, mean "not socialist"
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
You never hear them talk about all the older engineers, just those fresh out of college.
Just saying.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
See, this is the problem with STEM. Computers, Engineering - they all don't train people anymore.
Just look at the year to year metrics of in-house training that employers used to do in the (more productive) 50s and 60s versus today.
There's your problem.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not as if they're going to find jobs afterwards anyway - and if they haven't retired by 40 they're fucked.
£1250/month for doing engineering if you're a woman:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...
Note to men: It's illegal to discriminate based on actual OR PERCEIVED gender or transgender grounds in the UK. So apply to Brunel, apply for the grant, tell them you're transgendered and whether you are or not they have to treat you as though you are, and therefore qualified for the grant.
If they deny you based on gender sue the sexist cunts.
I've seen the pay scales of engineers in the UK.
No one is being enticed to the engineering field in the UK.
My wife had been wanting to move to the UK "for the experience", and I've been resisting because of the huge hit to our quality of life and more importantly, the huge hit to my income.
Yes, but what's in it for the share holders?
Stick Men
As part of my business I do general and warranty service on many types of tools and equipment, including vacuum cleaners. I cringe whenever a Dyson vacuum comes in for service. Most of the parts are made of the cheapest plastic possible yet are priced ridiculously high (as are the vacuums). In addition, the vacuums are needlessly complicated. For example, a special tool is needed to remove the belt on some models (https://www.google.com/#q=dyson+belt+removal+tool&tbm=shop). I refuse to buy such a tool and just made my own. From what I've seen, this Dyson guy is a kook.
Sure, by all means pay a student of engineering.
Pay them after they have completed their studies and are applying their knowledge.
You could call it, ummmm...... a "job"!
Maybe instead of paying our engineers a living wage, we should provide them with a mattress under every desk, lock the office doors, and dish out bowls of caffeinated gruel every morning. After all, we only want to hire people whose only desire in life is to sit in front of a computer screen doing their 'SCIENCE STUFF' to their nerdy little hearts content, if we let them go home that's all they would do in the evening and weekends anyway.
Yeah, fuck any of those little speccy chumps who ask for more money, as if they have any need to buy nice shit, look good and have a cool life like our lawyers and sales guys.
I don't know how it is in the UK, but as a STEM graduate (and a software engineer), I can't really understand what you're implying about science and engineering not already being well paid jobs.
Take a look outside the UK. I'm a physicist, not an engineer, so with engineering or in industry it might be different. However as a scientist and an academic I had a look at UK based academic jobs after my postdoc and the picture was bleak to say the least. Apart from not being able to afford any sort of decent house (and this was up north just over a decade ago before the bubble) my sister who is 5 years my junior and has no advanced degrees would have been earning practically the same amount as a primary school teacher as I would have as a junior faculty member plus it would have been a slight step down from my US RA salary!
Now compare that to the offer I had from Canada where the salary was about 75% higher (and on a rapidly rising scale), the job had the possibility of tenure (no 5 year renewable contract) and the cost of a house was less than half what it was in the UK. Since I had a wife and kids to support guess which job I took? If the salary situation for scientists is so poor that even a british academic who is not really motivated by money beyond enough for a comfortable life and would have likes to have stayed in the UK is highly motivated to leave what on earth is the point of providing scholarships? It's already cheaper to go to university in Canada from the UK than it is to go to a UK university so why not save the UK some money and let british students come over here earlier because, unless the UK fixes the salary issue, the sad truth is that many of those with families who are willing to look abroad will be leaving in order to be able to support those families - either that or giving up science for management.
Corporations thinks American Engineering students are both stupid, lazy and want to much money. They hire H1B visa. They won't hire Americans. And that is why Americans don't do Engineering.
The reason no one is going into engineering is
a) hard
b) SALARY is low
c) status is low
So first he proposes helping to educate engineers- fine tho not the root problem.
Then he proposes to put them into competition with people willing to work for pennies on the dollar.
And it doesn't really help that much since at this point- everyone is competing against people willing to work for pennies on the dollar. We've reached the point that things won't start to get better until world wide salaries even out. Which I think is going to take another 8 years or so. They won't be totally equal at that point- but I think it will be enough.
Still engineering can be done from anywhere most of the time. No transportation costs.
Only the overhead of a remote office. But many large corporations work remotely anyway these days.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
No, and fuck no to "changing the current visa system to make it easier for foreign students to remain in the country and get work once they have completed their education in the UK." Many people abuse the UK's eagerness to accept foreign students in STEM areas--either by mooching the fact that the UK pays them to study at the post-graduate level--or by using it as a means to get into the country and refuse to leave. If you want people to be involved emotionally, money isn't the answer--in fact, that will have the opposite effect. If you need proof, look at the medical industry.
and banking.
It's just another indication of a failing society. When value is placed on hoarding Aluminum bars in a warehouse and then playing the supply demand game, or starting a business as a dog washer, accountant, solicitor to the detriment of productive capacity and innovation, things are on the way down. This decline started in the '70s and has been puttering along ever since.
Tinkering at the edges with suggestions like Dyson's is no solution at all.
Dyson hasn't invented anything worth a damn. His vacuum cleaner is a pain in the ass, and his bladeless fan things are just $400 gimmicks that don't do anything special. "Choppy Air" has never been an issue for me with my $50 Walmart fan. Not to mention they don't blow very hard. Honestly, why is this even an article on here? If it wasn't for all of the commercials I would have no idea who James Dyson was. He's a master of convincing people his shit is worth large sums of money, not a master engineer.
The conversion of polytechnics to universities wasn't the problem: I was at a polytechnic in the mid 80s and got a grant cheque, as did most (all?) of my friends. Polytechnic students got grants just like university students. Courses were free to students: nobody paid a penny in "course fees".
It sounds like I am about ten years older than you, the generation that looked on in shock as the concept of students paying course fees was introduced. We were upset when grant cheques were gradually reduced to zero before that.
I was from a middle class background with both parents working, so definitely not a poor student. But I got all my course fees paid and some living expenses paid by the government (to cover rent, food, books). I seem to remember it was on a sliding scale at that time (mid 80s) which was a recent change, with less paid to wealthier families and more paid to poorer families. But I am pretty sure I remember it covered all my rent money at least, it was a big enough cheque that my mum worried I was going to blow it all on booze and parties and random nice things and not put it in the bank to cover my rent and food!
Industrial scholarships existed but were a different thing - those guys lived like kings while they were students.
I suspect one of the arguments that might be offered is the increase in the number of students over the period from 80s to present making it more of an expensive proposition to fund. However, I suspect it also might be a political model: the right wing governments in the UK are very keen on a US model of funding, rather than a social democratic European model. I can't say whether a higher percentage of UK 18 year olds go on to study at undergraduate level than those in say the Netherlands or France or Finland, but there's definitely a different funding model between the US (leave college with $100K debt) and some European countries (course fees much lower than the UK, potentially leave with low to zero debt).
Well, I am always in favor for tuition free universities. It would be a move in the right direction anyway.
and have some patient for newly graduated engineers. I doubt there's ever a shortage of STEM workers, just stingy companies/organization just need to hire them.
Well, I am not sure about engineering, but for science related field if you are an American citizen and getting a PhD, you will get paid to go to school.
We should pay students to learn Science and Math, first. They will learn engineering anyway if they want to apply its foundational skills, but it is far more important to teach these than to emphasize their application during their education.
The one thing about Engineers is that they tend to have narrow backgrounds in only a couple of problems, and because they are successful they tend to think that they are competent in more ways than they really are, which shows when they think outside their focus. I have heard or met engineers whose lack of general knowledge results in their advocacy of crackpot ideas, of pseudoscience, or bizarre political or social ideas. This is all related to the narrowness of their disciplines. They often have no business talking about social or biological science unless the education covers enough problems in these fields, and they are not exposed to enough criticism for holding false opinions. Requiring a broader education would solve some of these issues.
William F. Shockley won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1949 for inventing the transistor. He went on to engineer applications in Silicon Valley and was an emeritis professor at Stanford when he got caught in a controversey about race and intelligence. Someone asked him to look at statistics of intelligence scores from the Stanford Binet test and once doing so he came to the conclusion that Black People were less able to score well as a group. He might have gone so far as to suggest the hypothesis that this difference was due to genetics differences, for which he was roundly criticized. The problem with this was the correlation in statistics is not the same as causality, that inference needs more information, a hypothesis to test. What explained the differences were cultural differences that put Black People at a disadvantage for scoring on that test, not race, not genetics, but more likely educational opportunity and vocabulary. This is one of the best stories about people, even someone famous, acting beyond his area of competency. Not only was Shockley out of his realm as to discipline, but he probably misused statistical inference and hypothesis formation as well. So a good background in math and science is important to round out the intellectual tools of people who are going to design our future.
If you meet anybody from India ask him "What Is Your Caste?" If he answers it, then you're doomed. Because he has already injected Cancer into your society. Caste is like Cancer. It cannot be Cured. It has to be Cut-Off.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Casteism
1. Increase pay. I would argue there isn't a shortage of good engineers, there's a shortage of engineering companies willing to pay the salaries required to attract them and so they move industry. It isn't enough to compare salaries within engineering. The skills that very talented engineers have are in high demand in other industries where the pay is better, often significantly.
High pay increases prestige whether that is right or not. Why are the best and brightest attracted to medicine, finance and law ect? The title, the prestige and the perception of a well paid job.
2. Fix the fact that ANYONE can call themselves an engineer and we will begin to see a change in perceptions.
3. Let's educate the public on what engineers do, so they know they are not washing machine fixers or sky dish installers. (Nothing against these jobs they are just not engineers, engineering should be reserved for those who had to slog though 4 years of challenging mathematics)
Why not pay to school artists then? Are we arbitrarily saying that science is inherently the more valuable of the two? Seems to me anyone can make a 600 HP car with the right engine and transmission but isn't the design of the car just as valuable to product sales?