Why then the school price/salary correlation ? Surely a candidate will seize the unique opportunity of learning vast amounts of useful stuff in his future career, as opposed to say, skimming along a cheap PhD ?
I honestly didn't see the school price/salary correlation anywhere but in the summary, but I didn't delve deeply into Georgetown's actual report. I'd be happy to have a look if you'd like to point it out to me. One might reasonably expect an ivy league "business" major to do considerably better than a heavy drinking state school fratboy "business" major.
Regarding learning "useful stuff" during a career, allow me to use anecdotal evidence. The statistical evidence seems to be entirely in my favor (that high education leads to higher pay) which seems to be distasteful to a number of/.'ers with mod points to spare on me, so I think anecdotes might be appropriate.
Take my friends that ended their engineering education at a BS. They generally got around $50-$60k starting pay, scattered around the country, with benefits one expects in professional jobs. Over the past 4 years, the vast majority of them have been doing fairly mundane tasks. Lots of them simply sitting in front of CAD programs doing repetitive, technical tasks. I'd agree, that many of these skills they could've learned in trade school. A much smaller handful of more talented, more motivated friends are moving up their company ladders, and doing correspondingly more interesting work for more pay, but they're naturally the exception in the pyramid of a corporation. Thing is, these entry-level people aren't learning a whole bunch of interesting, varied things. They're paid a salary to do one job, not learn to do others.
Now, take those who did an MS after their BS. They spent two years getting a much more broad yet in-depth education. They learned far more in two years than those who went straight to industry, no matter how passionate they were. A for-profit industry can never provide the kind of variety that academia can. In the words of a government researcher PhD friend, "it's the industry's job to train, and academia's job to educate." Those MS people were able to take much more interesting, challenging, better paying jobs that gave them more fulfillment, and it's based entirely on the considerable technical skills they acquired.
And then, the PhD is a different ballgame altogether. Suggesting that you can accumulate the kind of technical knowledge learned in an engineering/science PhD program by "skimming over the course of a career" is quite simply wrong and naive. There's a damn good reason why fresh PhD grads are hired for technical research positions at major companies for twice the pay, and not some 50 year old hobbyist.
If you are there for the right reasons, you're not even going to care if you end up working at McDonalds in the end. You are pursuing your passions and that is what matters.
Sigh. I sure hate that sensationalist line.
It turns out that if your passion isn't being a McDonalds fry cook, then you're going to care if you end up working at McDonalds. Working 40+ hours a week at a mind-numbing, low-skilled job basically incapable of supporting a family or any kind of comfortable life just so you can put time into your "passion" for a few hours on weekends isn't exactly "pursuing your passion."
Let me guess, all your friends have a PhD thesis in the exact domain their employer is active ?
Let me stop you there. I explicitly said at all of BS, MS, and PhD levels, not just PhD. "Engineering" degrees are by their nature quite widely applicable.
It surely couldn't be cherry-picking by the employers in a high unemployment situation where workers desperately try to signal their higher commitment to the profession and ability to follow instructions,
As wrong as the rest is, I'm a bit baffled why you think "signaling higher commitment" is some kind of silly thing. If I were an employer in a particular discipline, I think I'd prefer a candidate with greater interest in the discipline, wouldn't you?
with only marginal improvement in their skills from said degrees ?
Now this is really wrong, possibly trollish, and likely intended to be insulting. Maybe one could say this about an MBA, but the people completing MS and PhD degrees in engineering are almost across-the-board vastly more capable than their BS counterparts. And it's not strictly a matter of them already being more capable/dedicated in order to be accepted to very selective graduate programs, but the vast amount of learning that occurs in the process of doing independent study and research.
your friends would have good paying stable jobs with or without their education.
TFA, and non-sensationalist common sense, says the exact opposite. I assure you that these friends in their mid-20s would not, could not, and should not be in positions of technical engineering applications in industries where failures can be fatal without a college education.
You cannot buy your way into a good job.
Right. You don't buy degrees (in engineering); it's an investment in your future. If it were as easy as "buying your way in," the rate of attrition in engineering departments across the country wouldn't be so high.
if your only concern is future profitability, you are wasting your time.
Again, TFA and common sense says exactly the opposite. We're not in it strictly for the money, but to suggest it would be just as likely for any of us to have a 6-figure median career pay without a college degree is simply silly.
As a grad student in engineering that has seen nearly all his friends at the BS, MS, and PhD levels all able to find good paying, stable jobs, I had grown pretty tired of the stream of/. articles from Ivy League tenured professors of religion ranting about how our education system is all wrong.
Large portions of the world hate America because of our intervention in foreign countries, and large portions insist WE have to be the ones to solve all the world's problems. And those populations even overlap!
It's no wonder that a professor of religion sees the job prospects of PhD students as being so grim. In engineering and physical sciences, PhDs are simply not even remotely close to struggling to find work. Sure, the academic job market is oversaturated, but unlike our counterparts pursuing philosophical degrees, we can apply our work in profitable industries.
I find it bizarre that/. will post stories about how too many math/science PhDs are running off the finance positions, while also bemoaning that PhDs are too highly specialized.
Which is it?/. seems to be alternating between posts bemoaning technical-field PhD's from going into quant positions, and these, saying we have too many PhDs.
TFA operates under the incorrect assumption that all "successful science" jobs are postdocs followed by tenured professorships at major universities... and even that "successful scientist" means having a PhD. With that kind of myopic definition of success, it's no wonder he comes to the conclusion he does. Professorships are naturally few and far between for PhD grads, when one considers that a single professor often graduates dozens of PhDs over their career. I know many "successful scientists" that are quite well paid away from academia, but he gives them no mention.
Talk about apples and oranges... he's comparing "academic scientsts" to "industry businessmen." An apt comparison would be "industry scientists" vs "industry businessmen," or science professors vs business school professors.
First off, Computer Science is not a "programming" degree.
I'm very much aware! But as there are no graduate degrees in software development that I'm aware of, that's where our comparisons must lie. If there's a single postgrad discipline where one should reasonably expect the highest average of development skills, it's CS. Being a professional researcher in any capacity is never an excuse to lack the fundamental skills in your field. A PhD in EE should be able to wire up a breadboard, an architecture PhD should be able to draft, a biology PhD should be able to operate a microscope.
Insisting that biologists need better programming skills and excusing the lack of them in CS majors is flawed logic at best.
The other nice part about computational research is the ability to pretty much do your work anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection.
Absolutely. And the simple fact that properly implemented, I can conduct more research simply by increasing my computational resources, i.e. submitting more/larger jobs to the clusters. Biologists, and experimentalists in general, have no such capability to accelerate their research.
I'm a present PhD student in Aerospace Engineering (miserable at times, ecstatic in others,) and I can attest to the weakness of other courses in computer programming. Most notably is that of the computer scientists. Taking software-production oriented courses with them, it's hard not to notice just how abysmal they can be.
I'll take issue with your generalization of university students though. As someone in an area dominated by numerical simulations, I know the value of writing high quality software and automation extremely well. Properly structured, I can automate my research for a week at a time and check the results later, while my miserable friends in biology tend to be forced into long hours in labs with microscopes.
Good software to me is the difference between spending 100 hours a week in a lab to spending 40 hours a week in a lab, and the rest of the time being human.
I don't want to come off like a tea partier here, but come on. Research into wi-fi technologies? Private industry hasn't exactly ignored this technology. I don't think the governments needs to throw money at it.
As an engineering PhD student in a computational math-heavy discipline at a non-MIT but nevertheless highly-respected institution that gets approached by these financial recruiters that also just happens to originally be from "flyover territory," I can safely tell you to shove it. You bash a generic "America" for greed and resources and desiring a better life, but suggest an individual pursuing high income over scientific and technological advancement is ethically superior?
We do face serious dilemmas with job offers; most everyone I'm involved with wants to apply their skills to the world's engineering problems, with energy being at the top of that list. The choice would be easy if the payscales were similar, but they're not. Academic jobs we qualify for are mediocre (but increasing) pay, engineering industry jobs carry considerably more pay, but financial engineering jobs are so far above in terms of compensation that we can't simply cast them out of mind.
Exactly this. I'm a mid-20s academic researcher (aka not a dinosaur) and I use TeX for essentially all my writing. Why would I ask the IT guy to give me free software? The types of people comfortable with LaTeX are generally also comfortable installing software themselves.
... very trustworthy. 10,000 not-yet-fabricated CPUs are going to be powering a 1 petaflop supercomputer in less than a year? Color me skeptical.... and anyone want to fill me in why 10,000 8-core MIPS chips at 1ghz can be expected to outperform 12,000 12-core x86 chips at 2.1ghz?
The "first computer" is debatable, and is debated, as the definition is vague. The "first electronic digital computing device" goes to the American ABC. But really, it's not relevant. The US has poured far more funding into developing the digital age than every other nation on the earth combined, and the thanks we get for it is trendy hipster US-haters pointing out a Chinese blip on top500 (using American-designed technology) as somehow being indicative of the technological inferiority of the US.
I bet that most emerging countries don't have this problem! Truly pathetic! I often tell my friends in Europe that the US is a weird mix between a 1st and a 3rd world country.
This isn't modded troll yet?
You're praising "emerging countries" for building superior rail lines by appropriating real estate and otherwise building where there is no existing infrastructure while the starvation and famine of their population takes a back seat?
>"I'm also cautious because they use an approximation algorithm (that is what the " epilon" is about)"
The iterative methods normally used for linear systems that this could possibly replace all have epsilon (error) terms as well. I do work on the applied numerical methods side, so it's going to take me a bit to parse through the graph-theory heavy stuff here, but it is potentially very exciting.
Are there actually large-scale applications where gaussian elimination is actually used that makes this a valid comparison? It's my understanding that the roundoff error accumulated for systems of millions of unknowns in the "exact" direct gaussian method can even be worse than the far far faster methods for sparse iterative solvers.
Slashdot Mirror
Why then the school price/salary correlation ? Surely a candidate will seize the unique opportunity of learning vast amounts of useful stuff in his future career, as opposed to say, skimming along a cheap PhD ?
I honestly didn't see the school price/salary correlation anywhere but in the summary, but I didn't delve deeply into Georgetown's actual report. I'd be happy to have a look if you'd like to point it out to me. One might reasonably expect an ivy league "business" major to do considerably better than a heavy drinking state school fratboy "business" major.
Regarding learning "useful stuff" during a career, allow me to use anecdotal evidence. The statistical evidence seems to be entirely in my favor (that high education leads to higher pay) which seems to be distasteful to a number of /.'ers with mod points to spare on me, so I think anecdotes might be appropriate.
Take my friends that ended their engineering education at a BS. They generally got around $50-$60k starting pay, scattered around the country, with benefits one expects in professional jobs. Over the past 4 years, the vast majority of them have been doing fairly mundane tasks. Lots of them simply sitting in front of CAD programs doing repetitive, technical tasks. I'd agree, that many of these skills they could've learned in trade school. A much smaller handful of more talented, more motivated friends are moving up their company ladders, and doing correspondingly more interesting work for more pay, but they're naturally the exception in the pyramid of a corporation. Thing is, these entry-level people aren't learning a whole bunch of interesting, varied things. They're paid a salary to do one job, not learn to do others.
Now, take those who did an MS after their BS. They spent two years getting a much more broad yet in-depth education. They learned far more in two years than those who went straight to industry, no matter how passionate they were. A for-profit industry can never provide the kind of variety that academia can. In the words of a government researcher PhD friend, "it's the industry's job to train, and academia's job to educate." Those MS people were able to take much more interesting, challenging, better paying jobs that gave them more fulfillment, and it's based entirely on the considerable technical skills they acquired.
And then, the PhD is a different ballgame altogether. Suggesting that you can accumulate the kind of technical knowledge learned in an engineering/science PhD program by "skimming over the course of a career" is quite simply wrong and naive. There's a damn good reason why fresh PhD grads are hired for technical research positions at major companies for twice the pay, and not some 50 year old hobbyist.
If you are there for the right reasons, you're not even going to care if you end up working at McDonalds in the end. You are pursuing your passions and that is what matters.
Sigh. I sure hate that sensationalist line.
It turns out that if your passion isn't being a McDonalds fry cook, then you're going to care if you end up working at McDonalds. Working 40+ hours a week at a mind-numbing, low-skilled job basically incapable of supporting a family or any kind of comfortable life just so you can put time into your "passion" for a few hours on weekends isn't exactly "pursuing your passion."
Let me guess, all your friends have a PhD thesis in the exact domain their employer is active ?
Let me stop you there. I explicitly said at all of BS, MS, and PhD levels, not just PhD. "Engineering" degrees are by their nature quite widely applicable.
It surely couldn't be cherry-picking by the employers in a high unemployment situation where workers desperately try to signal their higher commitment to the profession and ability to follow instructions,
As wrong as the rest is, I'm a bit baffled why you think "signaling higher commitment" is some kind of silly thing. If I were an employer in a particular discipline, I think I'd prefer a candidate with greater interest in the discipline, wouldn't you?
with only marginal improvement in their skills from said degrees ?
Now this is really wrong, possibly trollish, and likely intended to be insulting. Maybe one could say this about an MBA, but the people completing MS and PhD degrees in engineering are almost across-the-board vastly more capable than their BS counterparts. And it's not strictly a matter of them already being more capable/dedicated in order to be accepted to very selective graduate programs, but the vast amount of learning that occurs in the process of doing independent study and research.
your friends would have good paying stable jobs with or without their education.
TFA, and non-sensationalist common sense, says the exact opposite. I assure you that these friends in their mid-20s would not, could not, and should not be in positions of technical engineering applications in industries where failures can be fatal without a college education.
You cannot buy your way into a good job.
Right. You don't buy degrees (in engineering); it's an investment in your future. If it were as easy as "buying your way in," the rate of attrition in engineering departments across the country wouldn't be so high.
if your only concern is future profitability, you are wasting your time.
Again, TFA and common sense says exactly the opposite. We're not in it strictly for the money, but to suggest it would be just as likely for any of us to have a 6-figure median career pay without a college degree is simply silly.
As a grad student in engineering that has seen nearly all his friends at the BS, MS, and PhD levels all able to find good paying, stable jobs, I had grown pretty tired of the stream of /. articles from Ivy League tenured professors of religion ranting about how our education system is all wrong.
can you be guaranteed that illegal and full-on crazy actions by a sysadmin be ignored in place of ranting against his employer.
If I had mod points, they'd be yours.
Large portions of the world hate America because of our intervention in foreign countries, and large portions insist WE have to be the ones to solve all the world's problems. And those populations even overlap!
Strongly seconded.
It's no wonder that a professor of religion sees the job prospects of PhD students as being so grim. In engineering and physical sciences, PhDs are simply not even remotely close to struggling to find work. Sure, the academic job market is oversaturated, but unlike our counterparts pursuing philosophical degrees, we can apply our work in profitable industries.
I find it bizarre that /. will post stories about how too many math/science PhDs are running off the finance positions, while also bemoaning that PhDs are too highly specialized.
Today: not enough jobs for PhDs.
Which is it? /. seems to be alternating between posts bemoaning technical-field PhD's from going into quant positions, and these, saying we have too many PhDs.
TFA operates under the incorrect assumption that all "successful science" jobs are postdocs followed by tenured professorships at major universities... and even that "successful scientist" means having a PhD. With that kind of myopic definition of success, it's no wonder he comes to the conclusion he does. Professorships are naturally few and far between for PhD grads, when one considers that a single professor often graduates dozens of PhDs over their career. I know many "successful scientists" that are quite well paid away from academia, but he gives them no mention.
Talk about apples and oranges... he's comparing "academic scientsts" to "industry businessmen." An apt comparison would be "industry scientists" vs "industry businessmen," or science professors vs business school professors.
First off, Computer Science is not a "programming" degree.
I'm very much aware! But as there are no graduate degrees in software development that I'm aware of, that's where our comparisons must lie. If there's a single postgrad discipline where one should reasonably expect the highest average of development skills, it's CS. Being a professional researcher in any capacity is never an excuse to lack the fundamental skills in your field. A PhD in EE should be able to wire up a breadboard, an architecture PhD should be able to draft, a biology PhD should be able to operate a microscope.
Insisting that biologists need better programming skills and excusing the lack of them in CS majors is flawed logic at best.
The other nice part about computational research is the ability to pretty much do your work anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection.
Absolutely. And the simple fact that properly implemented, I can conduct more research simply by increasing my computational resources, i.e. submitting more/larger jobs to the clusters. Biologists, and experimentalists in general, have no such capability to accelerate their research.
I'm a present PhD student in Aerospace Engineering (miserable at times, ecstatic in others,) and I can attest to the weakness of other courses in computer programming. Most notably is that of the computer scientists. Taking software-production oriented courses with them, it's hard not to notice just how abysmal they can be.
I'll take issue with your generalization of university students though. As someone in an area dominated by numerical simulations, I know the value of writing high quality software and automation extremely well. Properly structured, I can automate my research for a week at a time and check the results later, while my miserable friends in biology tend to be forced into long hours in labs with microscopes.
Good software to me is the difference between spending 100 hours a week in a lab to spending 40 hours a week in a lab, and the rest of the time being human.
I don't want to come off like a tea partier here, but come on. Research into wi-fi technologies? Private industry hasn't exactly ignored this technology. I don't think the governments needs to throw money at it.
As an engineering PhD student in a computational math-heavy discipline at a non-MIT but nevertheless highly-respected institution that gets approached by these financial recruiters that also just happens to originally be from "flyover territory," I can safely tell you to shove it. You bash a generic "America" for greed and resources and desiring a better life, but suggest an individual pursuing high income over scientific and technological advancement is ethically superior?
We do face serious dilemmas with job offers; most everyone I'm involved with wants to apply their skills to the world's engineering problems, with energy being at the top of that list. The choice would be easy if the payscales were similar, but they're not. Academic jobs we qualify for are mediocre (but increasing) pay, engineering industry jobs carry considerably more pay, but financial engineering jobs are so far above in terms of compensation that we can't simply cast them out of mind.
Exactly this. I'm a mid-20s academic researcher (aka not a dinosaur) and I use TeX for essentially all my writing. Why would I ask the IT guy to give me free software? The types of people comfortable with LaTeX are generally also comfortable installing software themselves.
... very trustworthy. 10,000 not-yet-fabricated CPUs are going to be powering a 1 petaflop supercomputer in less than a year? Color me skeptical. ... and anyone want to fill me in why 10,000 8-core MIPS chips at 1ghz can be expected to outperform 12,000 12-core x86 chips at 2.1ghz?
Sorry, we're going to spend money on other things.
Enough to explore the idea of a sort of launch loop?
No.
Sincerely, Engineers.
The "first computer" is debatable, and is debated, as the definition is vague. The "first electronic digital computing device" goes to the American ABC. But really, it's not relevant. The US has poured far more funding into developing the digital age than every other nation on the earth combined, and the thanks we get for it is trendy hipster US-haters pointing out a Chinese blip on top500 (using American-designed technology) as somehow being indicative of the technological inferiority of the US.
I bet that most emerging countries don't have this problem! Truly pathetic! I often tell my friends in Europe that the US is a weird mix between a 1st and a 3rd world country.
This isn't modded troll yet?
You're praising "emerging countries" for building superior rail lines by appropriating real estate and otherwise building where there is no existing infrastructure while the starvation and famine of their population takes a back seat?
Invented computer? USA. First transcontinental railroad? USA. Invented internet? USA.
Yeah, sounds like "catching up" to me.
boo this man!
(i lol'd)
"it's almost inevitable that a computer will one day outdrive the best of our species, and it may be sooner than you think."
Sounds like the author has never seen a WRC race.
>"I'm also cautious because they use an approximation algorithm (that is what the " epilon" is about)"
The iterative methods normally used for linear systems that this could possibly replace all have epsilon (error) terms as well. I do work on the applied numerical methods side, so it's going to take me a bit to parse through the graph-theory heavy stuff here, but it is potentially very exciting.
Are there actually large-scale applications where gaussian elimination is actually used that makes this a valid comparison? It's my understanding that the roundoff error accumulated for systems of millions of unknowns in the "exact" direct gaussian method can even be worse than the far far faster methods for sparse iterative solvers.