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Obama To Announce $240M In New Pledges For STEM Education
An anonymous reader sends word that President Obama is expected to announce more that $240 million in pledges to boost STEM educations at the White House Science Fair today. "President Barack Obama is highlighting private-sector efforts to encourage more students from underrepresented groups to pursue education in science, technology, engineering and math. At the White House Science Fair on Monday, Obama will announce more than $240 million in pledges to boost the study of those fields, known as STEM. This year's fair is focused on diversity. Obama will say the new commitments have brought total financial and material support for these programs to $1 billion. The pledges the president is announcing include a $150 million philanthropic effort to encourage promising early-career scientists to stay on track and a $90 million campaign to expand STEM opportunities to underrepresented youth, such as minorities and girls."
I am all for greater education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. However when they put it in a group called STEM, that makes me nervous.
Just like in the 1990's when they decided to teach kids how to use computers. They had a watered down process. In the 1980s while I was in elementary school, when they taught how to use computer they showed the class how to program, in the 1990's when they really pushed computer education, the focus was on how to use Windows, Word, and Excel. When you make it a requirement, it means the class needs to be watered down, so the average student can get an A+ in the class, otherwise, they would be making a class that could hurt their GPA. Where before, it was an elective class, where the student can take the class if they knew they could do in it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is that really the first thing you thought of? Is that really how your mind works? "How can I troll today?"
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
With the equality of outcomes and not equality of opportunity
As long as existing programs do not intentionally or through some structural issues, exclude groups, the government should stay the hell out.
If this or that group is under represented in some discipline and the only reason is they choose not to attend, then there is no role for the Government to play.
This applies to Steel Workers or STEM workers.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Nailed it!
Life is not for the lazy.
What we really need is jobs for all of these new trains to fill once they graduate. Talk to any recent PhD in the biomedical sciences, engineering, etc, and ask them what they think of the push for greater STEM education efforts. They'll tell you it's basically BS. We can't place the number of graduates we currently have into even remotely well paying, long term, jobs.
Now, we might need more STEM education and training for more technical, lower level, jobs. But of course that's never how these programs are billed. It's not as sexy of a sell to parents and students! Instead we push people to go to graduate school, get a MS or PhD. Then dump them into a market with slashed education funding, so there are few prospects in the university system. Combine that with a large number of foreign applicants for postdoc and technician positions that are willing to work for MUCH less in terms of wages and you've got a disaster. US citizens do have a slight advantage in that most of the NIH/NSF funded pre and postdoc training fellowships/grants are only open to citizens. But, those are so small in number and highly competitive that it doesn't have a large effect.
We need to face the fact that we're really training WAY too many PhDs and even masters graduates in most of the STEM fields right now. It's a vicious cycle though. Profs want lots of PhD students because they are very inexpensive labor. Likewise with postdocs... for their training and amount of work they are expected to do... they are paid much less than minimum wage. Moreover, most profs will kick out postdocs after 2-3 years because of pay raises that some institutions mandate. It's just easier to dump the experienced person and higher in a new 1st year that gets paid 10k less, pump and dump... factory style.
There have been a number of really excellent articles written about this problem over the last few years. Science and Nature have both dedicate page space to the topic. Some suggest forcing researchers funded by NIH/NSF monies to be required to higher long term technicians to their labs and reduce graduate student/postdoc usage. Such actions would start to limit new graduate number, while at the same time providing employment for scientists that aren't interested or can't get a faculty position in academia or don't want to work for industry. A lot of people also think it would help lab productivity, as you'd retain talent and skill sets that were honed over years of work.
Then I have fantastic news for you: not all that new money is used to boost diversity!
Don't believe me? Just read the summary.
Happy now?
Translation: Sorry poor white boy in Appalachia. Your scholarship is going to a rich girl in Grosse Pointe.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
There are billions poured into STEM, and encouraging early career scientists through programs at NSF, NIH, DARPA, etc. None of that is working (less than 50% of people trained in science stay in science). When I was still training students, the best of them generally ended up working in finance, not physics. An additional $250 million is not going to make a notable difference. We need a cultural and structural change in how we train and retain good scientists and engineers, not a meaningless bandaid.
A lot of people will see this as just a handout or lip service, but realistically, what else is there to do? Automation is going to destroy pretty much every service and office job slowly but surely over the next 40 or 50 years. People coming out of school have to do something. The "default choices" used to be that if you didn't go to college or failed at college, you got a trades or service job, and if you graduated, you got some random corporate job. These are the typical jobs we in IT see our customers doing -- some random reporting job or moving numbers around in Excel and emailing the results around, or middle management. Now, automation will be coming for the corporate jobs, and trades are becoming less and less desirable to work in due to low wages and limited to no union protection. So, what's left?
I doubt everyone can be taught enough to be a good STEM worker, but maybe enough can to sustain the rest of the economy. Even having someone who understands enough logic to troubleshoot things pays off in other fields as well. If you focus on core stuff like that, rather than getting everyone to write "Hello, World!" in Python or Ruby, you may have something. Otherwise, I agree, it'll just be a box to check during your high school career and very few people will be interested in pursuing it further.
My point is correct if you aren't a pendant. But yes absolutely 'every' was an shameless exageration now you can go back to your bit shifting.
Without public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Gotta hire a good, hard-working entrant, train them, educate them, move them up.
With public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Cash crop of cheap labor. Lots of risk on individuals (waste 4 years without job on education, possibly get oversupplied degree), the poor are least able to handle this risk, followed closely by the disenfranchised (anyone often passed over in the local culture, e.g. blacks or women).
Tax-funded college and government-guaranteed student loans benefit hiring businesses at the expense of the individual. This is hard to grasp because it looks like money and education and other tangible goods are being handed to the individual, while the market effects are more abstract and difficult to understand without having a huge amount of knowledge in the area.
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The money will almost invariably not go to help Jim Bob in coal country or Tyrone in the hood get a shot at getting the foundation for a STEM career. Instead, it'll go to Sally Middle Class Smith to cajole her into pursuing a career she'll likely leave for marketing or raising kids.
The President doesn't control the NSA's budget or any other department. Congress does.
The usual around here.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
"expand it to minorities and girls"? Does this mean the program was previously available only to white boys before, or that they simply want to exclude white males now?
Right now STEM is one of the worst career fields to go into in America. At least the science part is. I say this as someone who left a science Ph.D. when I saw that no one around me was getting a decent job after graduation. And I'm glad I did. Everyone I know who stayed on that route is either working a minimum wage job or jobless ("overqualifed" for everything, apparently) and on food stamps or living at home with their parents in their mid-30s.
In general, early career scientists are screwed because all the funding goes to older, more established scientists (who got their start in eras with a better economy and more national and cultural focus on science) as they are seen as less of a gamble. This leaves early career scientists to rot in a perpetual post-doc limbo being paid peanuts, treated more like office supplies than people, and forced to move around the country job hunting every 2-3 years when their contract runs out. On top of that, I've had more than a few professors either openly admit to me, or admit to their peers when they didn't know I was coming to see them and in earshot, that they strongly prefer hiring foreign students to U.S. citizens--primarily because they are easier to control, intimidate, and force into unreasonable demands because the foreigners work under the threat of potential deportation if the professor decides to let them go. This was almost verbatim what one professor told me when he turned me down as a graduate research assistant after I refused to work a constant 120-hour week schedule (on a stipend that would be less that what I would make putting in a normal work week at a fast-food restaurant).
Maybe, just maybe, if they are very, very lucky, a Ph.D scientist can get tenure at somewhere in their mid-to-early forties, so that they can finally approach the standard of living many of their C-student peers in college reached by their mid-to-late twenties.
Now, I know the summary talked about helping early career scientists... well, if this goes anything like the money that was funneled into science in 2008--2009, here's how it will work: There will be a lot of one-time multi-year grants thrown out to whoever can put the most trendy buzzwords into a proposal. Some of the grants will go to legitimately good scientists, and others will go to unproductive hacks who haven't seen grant money in years--and with good reason. But within a decade or less, the money will run out, and the most of the early career scientists will be right back where they started--competing for a small pot of money against older scientists with stronger publication records. I'm not sure retirement will help, either. I've never seen a tenured professor retire until they were physically unable to leave their house. Doesn't matter if they only teach one class (poorly) a year, do no research, and show signs of mental illness--if they got tenure, and especially if they were worth something 20 or 30 years ago, the department will keep them in their slot out of respect or because firing them is too much trouble.
The danger here is that the longer you spend in academia, the less likely you are to be hired outside of it. Outside of the ivory tower, Ph.Ds are seen more as a liability except within a very small number of specialized industrial jobs. Though you would certainly be smart enough to learn another field, many employers aren't going to hire and train you when they can hire someone else younger, cheaper, and already possessing a baseline level of training in the field. The only reason I found decent, stable, career-track employment after years of being a grad student is because I had spent years developing more practical/employable "Plan B" skills on the side as a hobby, and the supply and demand curve worked in my favor when I went looking to get paid for those skills. So I suspect this is going to hurt a lot of scientists by giving them incentive to stay in science, where there are already far more Ph.Ds than available long-term positions, and then leaving them high and dry when they are too old to easily switch to another career path. It would be much better to just let the supply and demand curves work themselves out.
We're getting to a point where, due to both science and communication technologies, everyone's flaws and a fuckton of conflicting "facts" can easily be manufactured and disseminated. Power imbalances that could be hidden in the past are now obvious to anyone and a lot of people are asking "Why?" Why does the world have to be like this? Do we really have the shortage of things that economics talks about, or is it that distribution of these things is fucked up? Are the people who are in power actively encouraging and perpetuating dysfunctional behaviors in an attempt to gain more power? Does technology allow us to distribute government control more broadly and still maintain some semblance of a society? In short, all of the questions that we've allowed "professional pundits" and politicians to answer for us in the past.
Right now, economics focuses on "efficiency" more than any other factor.You've reached a post-"economic" age where businesses that hid their externalities in the past can no longer do so. If these costs of externalities are calculated and charged to the companies, many would no longer be profitable causing huge disruptions in the economy. How corporations should pay for these externalities foisted upon us is the seminal question of the age. We used to think that their tax load and benefit in providing employment was sufficient. But now people who run corporations say "we have to avoid taxes". They say "we have to outsource to be competitive. So they pay less, we pay more. Well, until people see the costs of the externalities well enough and feel the pain of their own payments to the corporate behemoth to understand out that the game is rigged. I dread that day, because those in charge seem to be doing everything in their power to steer towards it.
That is all.
Minus 25% admin fee?
the can't be discharged in Bankruptcy student loans
is being spent to tell white males to go to the back of the bus.
Not saying you cannot get this education, just that we don't want your type up front.
The President doesn't have authority to write immigration laws either, but that hasn't stopped him.
who's going to open up the white boys club?
What "white boys club"? I don't know where you work, but most of my colleagues are Indian or Chinese.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The POTUS approves or disapproves of budgets. Per the US Constitution, it is the responsibility of Congress to create and pass budgets.
This will go nowhere.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
The role of the POTUS is not to create budgets, only to approve or veto. Per the US Constitution, it is the responsibility of Congress to create and pass budgets.
This will go nowhere.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
I agree that if we want more people to train for STEM jobs, we need to focus on jobs in that sector not in education. We already have an education system qualified enough to produce STEM graduates. We just don't have enough quality jobs for those graduates, so many of our best and brightest go into law, medicine, finance, etc. instead of STEM fields.
Take that $240 million, plus another $240 billion, and put it into research. Go to Mars, invent better batteries, create DNA specific medical treatments ... the sky really is the limit. By doing this we won't care about just creating new jobs because we will be creating new industries.
People smart enough to work in STEM are usually smart enough to go where the money is as well.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
We are trying to get more Americans in STEM, but until we have enough, we need more H1Bs.
It works out to $2424 per school, roughly. Might add one faculty member per school system, at least for larger systems.
The supplementary spending bills passed by congress put the cost of one day of war in Iraq to $280 million, and this number does not include the long term costs.
Imagine what we could do if we had a war on ignorance?
I think more financial education would have a bigger impact on people's lives. Personal finance tied in with higher education and career planning. Basic cost/benefit analysis. Also business finance like how corporations work and how to start a company.
All they taught me in high school was how to write a check.
Since the majority of college attendees AND college graduates are women, does that mean they're looking particularly for men?
Somehow, I doubt it.
-Styopa
It's all well and good to talk about supporting STEM education, but that doesn't do much good if everyone who considers investing their time and effort in that direction realizes that they'll be burdening themselves with intolerable debt, and that there's a very good chance they won't be able to get a job which will even let them keep up with accumulating interest.
This smells to me like a pure PR move.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Many graduate programs in STEM waive most of the tuition and pay a monthly stipend to the students in exchange for teaching labs, grading undergraduate coursework, and/or working as a research assistant. It isn't a lot (actually, it's often less than minimum wage if you work out the pay divided by the hours most research advisors will expect of you), but it is enough to live on at a just-above-poverty level. It is entirely possible to get a graduate degree in STEM while incurring little to no additional debt.
The real problem you run into is the years you spend in grad school making dirt nothing and training for jobs that don't exist while everyone else you graduated college with gets real jobs with real money and benefits and starts building job experience that will matter a lot more in future employers' eyes than your or Ph.D. (Although a Masters may have some value, but only in certain fields, and mostly non-STEM fields or engineering). So you leave grad school with the choice of either becoming a post-doc and continuing to make dirt nothing with zero job security, or you switch careers putting you at a disadvantage to all of the new college graduates coming out with degrees and education in whatever field you are trying to get into. And either way, financially speaking, you are about 5-10 years behind all of your peers that didn't go to grad school.
There's no point trying to guess what employers will want by the time you get done spending anywhere from four to ten years chasing down the education they think you need for that job.
You'll never be the Purple Squirrel,
You'll never even see one.
'Cause I can tell you anyhow,
They'd rather H1B one.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.