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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!!
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.
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.
Because I don't enjoy living on 400 bucks a month in a neighborhood where I fear those 400 bucks ain't gonna be mine for long?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
As someone who has had a DC14 for 8 years now, I call bullshit on that. There are no replaceable filters. Well, there are two filters, total. One is a lifetime HEPA filter that I've replaced 4 years ago methinks, simply out of boredom. It didn't have to be replaced. There is a washable foam filter that you're supposed to wash and dry every few weeks or so. No big deal. You don't replace it, you just wash it, dry it, and put it back. So yeah - it's replaceable if by "replace" you mean "put it back where you took it from".
Dumping the canister into a plastic bag, when done properly, produces no big dust clouds. It takes a bit of dexterity and skill to do it that way, but again, it's something you learn if only you care to learn, that is.
This vacuum dumps out air that's cleaner than the air it sucks in, even if you ran it standing on your desk instead of your floor. It's an absolutely brilliant design when it comes to the air path. It has some usability bugs when it comes to the hose and cord retention area, but those are things you can live with. They are secondary to the primary function: that of, you know, vacuuming.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
Why not provide college education for free, like we do with high school education? Are we so afraid that will breed irresponsibility and entitlement?
One weird thing about the way education works in the US is the transition from high school to college. High school is free to the students, because education is seen as necessary for a democratic society to function somewhat intelligently. But college should be paid for, because education is valuable. High school students are still children in the care of their elders, college students are suddenly now adults, responsible for themselves, and expected to pay their own way and to be grateful for whatever help their parents give them, because parents don't have to help their adult children. The goal of high school is to educate everyone, in public universities, the goal in the first year is to "weed out" the "weak" students. When I was an undergrad, the graduation rate of the College of Engineering was a dismal 20%, and this was thought normal.
What other business could possibly do such a poor job of serving its customers and survive? We even have this whole student loan system designed to enable penniless students to pay the massive costs of education later, with a generous premium to the financiers for taking such heinous risks on people with no credit histories. It amazes me the extent to which this abrupt transition is so meekly accepted. To compund matters, we've been dismantling our support for college education so that public schools have had little choice but to make huge hikes in tuition. We've been exploring alternative ideas such as MOOCs, and this is good, but so far not enough, not yet a serious threat to the traditional lecture class. They've also sought more dubious sources of money. There's the textbook scam, in which publishers have been given way too much power. And then there's college football, the very sort of thing that promotes partying and undermines the main point of school. Whie I find college football mildly interesting, and want there to be opportunities to relax and enjoy life a little, I wouldn't mind in the least if the NCAA shut down and every school in the nation ended their football program, and worked on making math and chess competitions and such cerebral sports more telegenic and popular.
The government budget must be balanced-- on the backs of the poor and the young! Then, after gutting public university funding, they scream that we have a shortage of STEM workers?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
...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.
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.