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

Scholarships, you mean

[Geoffrey.landis]

The phrase he seems to be looking for is "we need scholarships for engineering students".

Re:Scholarships, you mean

[ebno-10db]

You would need to prove yourself worthy of the scholarship

Academic requirements for a scholarship? What a clever idea. I wonder why no one else has thought of that.

Re: Scholarships, you mean

[CheeseTroll]

If Chewbacca lived on Endor, he could easily get a basketball scholarship.

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.

Re:How about paying students after graduation?

[JWW]

This is why we're failing. Money as a concept is designed to be an engine that runs the economy.

But to run that economy we need bankers and traders that help us run the mechanisms that promote business and commerce. These people, who are supposed to be making the system work for all of us and taking a profit on the providing of their services, have used their proximity to the money to, well, steal and skim money off the system to make themselves rich. They make themselves rich beyond reason. The system is no longer about the economy at large and about promoting business, its about banking and about the market.

The market starts prompting companies to do make bad and destructive decisions in order to make the banks and markets more money. Eventually they create perverse "instruments" for making money. When I first heard credit default swaps being defined, I couldn't believe that the people who created them weren't in jail for perpetrating fraud, it was so fucking blatant.

So our economic system will fall apart and burn to the ground because it no longer serves the purpose it was created for, it is corrupted beyond repair.

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.

Re:Worker shortage in 2014

[ngibbins]

Dyson's talking about the UK, where over the last decade and a half we've moved from a higher education system funded from general taxation, to one in which teaching is funded almost entirely through tuition fees. A student studying for a four-year undergraduate masters (typical for engineering subjects in the UK) now faces a debt of £36,000 (US$60,000) for their tuition alone; living expenses (rent, food) will typically add upwards of £20,000 to the overal cost. By contrast, when I graduated with BSc Computer Science in 1994, I did so without debt; my tuition and living expenses were paid for by my local education authority, as was then the norm. As a result, we're seeing a decline in admissions across science engineering as a whole, and a very pronounced shift from four year MEng degrees to three year BSc/BEng. The decline varies from discipline to discipline; computer science so far seems to have got off quite lightly, but others have been hit much harder (materials science, for example). It's very touching that you believe that the invisible hand is going to make everything better, but the reality is that any correction in engineering salaries is likely to take decades (if not longer), and the shortage of STEM graduates is rather more immediate. Dyson's arguments are sensible, and effectively take us back to the situation of the early 90s: tuition fees would be paid by the state. He also makes reference to the decline of the post-study work permit system that used to exist in the UK; it used to be the case that overseas students at UK universities would get a two year work permit. This was a boon for UK engineering employers - I've employed several such graduates on my projects. The decisions made by the current UK government (and to a lesser extent to the previous Labour government, for they introduced tuition fees, albeit at a lower level) have been harmful to both UK higher education and to UK science and engineering. (an explanatory note to the above: I'm a lecturer (US professor) at a research-led UK university, and the coordinator for an undergraduate computer science degree programme - I know what I'm talking about)

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."

Re:No, Salaries

[bzipitidoo]

But there are many science and engineering jobs with poor pay. Pay for postdocs is low, and shamefully low for grad students taking on teaching fellowships. Internships are another. New or near grads who may already be burdened with massive student loan debt are sold a bill of goods, told that part of their pay is the "valuable" experience they gain, and this justifies paying them a pittance, or even nothing at all-- the infamous unpaid internship.

And if that isn't enough, what about employers who cheat their regular employees, not just the poor interns? One of the biggest problems with joining some small edgy startup, being mesmerized with the potential, suckered into dreams of great success, wealth, and fame, is that the odds of success are much poorer than they want to believe or admit. The finance folks tend to keep the engineers in the dark about the company's finances, until they can't make payroll. They borrow their engineer's time, knowing full well that if sales continue at the same level this month as in the previous 6 plus months, they will not be able to pay, but wishfully hoping that this month will be different. So the poor engineer wasn't told, and doesn't find out until they've taken a month of work that they can't pay for. Indeed management tends to view engineers as chumps too dumb and narrow to see the larger picture, and also as arrogant about their intelligence, so why not take them to the cleaners and get a little kick out of putting one over on those smarty pants? Helps soothe the sting of failure to screw over a bunch of arrogant engineers they've been jealous of since grade school math class. Then they usually have the cheek to say that the situation will surely improve shortly, the corner will be turned any day now, and ask that the engineers now volunteer further time and effort for free, to be paid back later only if the company succeeds of course. Show your commitment and passion, yeah!

The 1099 can be another way to cheat the engineer. The engineer is once again suckered with visions of glorious independence and freedom while the "contractee" (*cough* employer *cough*) gets out of all kinds of pesky labor regulations and overhead pay like contributing to unemployment and retirement funds.

There are some head hunting agencies that are positively predatory. One that I recall insisted that job seekers sign a contract that stated that the employer will pay the agency 1/3 of the new employee's first year of pay, and that if the employer fails to pay this money, then the employee is on the hook for it! I had visions of this being turned into a little scam. Get hired by an employer in cahoots with the agency and who never intended to keep you but instead plans to come up with an excuse to fire you in 91 days. Earn 3 months of pay, owe 4 months of pay. Profit!

And where is the government while employees are being fleeced? In the employers' corner, having been bought off with generous campaign donations. Might even send the police in to do some union busting.

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.

Too few or too many, which is myth?

[Theovon]

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.