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."

Comments

How about paying students after graduation?

[Opportunist]

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.

Worker shortage in 2014

[bluegutang]

...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.

nonsense

[onyxruby]

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.

No, Salaries

[Roger W Moore]

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?

Re:No, Salaries

[dontbemad]

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. Sure, management generally makes higher than the average engineer, but the average engineer has a pretty high salary as well.

Re:No, Salaries

[JoeMerchant]

I like to believe that effective management does contribute value to an organization, perhaps even in proportion to what higher level managers are paid.

The problems with this are manifold: starting with too many Chiefs and not enough Indians - the unwillingness of higher management to keep lower performing managers at lower levels / pay-grades means you get a bunch of people "up there" who really don't belong, but have managed to not get fired for long enough that they are raised up just based on longevity, or maybe a few rare good performance quarters. Not that there's not value in longevity, loyalty, and deep knowledge of an organization that comes from years of experience, just that longevity by itself isn't valuable.

Another problem is simple, short time horizon metrics that reward "making it happen NOW" with no regard for long term damage. Constantly moving goal posts that erase long term mistakes from the incentive structure - and higher level management that just doesn't care about the 5 or 10 year horizon.

Then you've got the ever expanding golden hiring carrots. In order to get talent in the door, inflated positions are offered, sometimes beyond the value of the position to the company, just to win a valuable player away from the competition. This, of course, reaches epically absurd proportions at the CEO level, but I found myself "in line" for a promotion from top-of-the-technical-ladder to a management spot that was open and advertised, but really just a placeholder for someone the company wanted to snag away from a competitor. In theory, there was no top-of-the-technical ladder, but in practice, at that company of 1000 employees, there were roughly 6 engineers at my level, one at the next level up (who was given that spot as a hiring incentive), and no promotions at or above that level in the company history - contrast this with dozens upon dozens of management track promotions, that, regardless of title, were making 10-20% higher base salary and 30% bonuses instead of 10% - just at the next level up, and the bonuses continued to climb to 100% of salary and beyond for the higher levels - which again outnumbered the top-of-the-technical-ladder people by a significant multiple. Except in ethically dubious fields (automated securities trading, anyone?) nobody seems to feel the need to offer large compensation incentives for technical work, but it's out there for management.

And, thus, even an incompetent manager bringing home $170K/year can be passed off as "Well, at least we're not paying him $300K like that last jerk." but an engineer who makes $125K is "oh my god, we can get 2, maybe 3 good kids from the University for that money."

Free education

[jones_supa]

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.

delayed gratification was the original model.

[nimbius]

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.