"Why are they struggling financially? Could it be they are not fiscally responsible? Could it be that they continuously, year after year, overspend their budgets and justify this by actions such as raising tuition by 12-15% to pay off debt they accumulated because they couldn't stay in budget?"
Because the state governments had been outright cutting the budgets or at least reducing the growth rate of the state university budgets for something like a decade, so it is not fair to claim that research universities were overspending their budgets. The universities have serious and growing responsibilities (e.g. the enrollment growth requirements).
"on pork projects"
What pork projects are you talking about? Please provide a reference, and also an estimate of how much of university budgets these "pork projects" constitute. I have been involved in the academia for like a decade, and I think you're just talking out of your a**. The universities are probably the most efficient money spenders among the state money receivers. Unionization is minimal (except for a few pitiful graduate student unions) and they always had to run a tight ship because the state funds were never enough to cover their needs.
"Many universities sit on huge sums of money and still get government help so I'm not losing sleep over that one either. "
Where did you get this idea? This is a complete utter B.S. Most large state research universities are struggling financially right now. Many have a hiring freeze already. Some had been seeing their state funded budgets erode forever. As for private schools with large endowments, most of those too are having serious financing issues right now. WUSTL, Harvard, etc. Many have instituted faculty and staff hiring freeze as well. What large sums of money are you talking about? Their endowments? They already lost 30 to 50% of value in just one year, and schools generally use the earnings generated by those endowments to beef up their budgets. It is plain stupid to spend the endowment itself because this will seriously compromise the future financial positions of many universities. Based on experiences of many people I know, the freshly minted PhDs in any field are facing the worst job market of the decade.
Not really. In classical economic theory: the market price can be one of the following:
1. Essentially the cost of making the product (firm's economic profits are 0). This arises in the model of perfect competition only. 2. Each consumer pays the highest price this person can afford. This arises only in the model of monopoly with a perfect price discrimination. 3. Everyone pays a single price, but the price is set by the single producer for the purpose of maximizing this producers profits. This is the model of monopoly with no price discrimination. 4. Anything in between. Various models of oligopoly will render the equilibrium prices that are anything in between (1) and (3). There is no single model of oligopoly. So, each setting has to be analyzed separately (usually with the tools of game theory) based on the relevant assumptions.
The stuff you're mentioning could still be done with a fraction of NASA's budget that would remain after ending the funding to wasteful (and resultless) human space exploration programs.
Most of NASA's useful results were produced the with the help of 10% or so of its budget that is spent on unmanned space exploration (telescopes, probes, etc). The rest of NASA's money is spent on manned space exploration which results in almost no scientific contributions. The papers generated by research done on the ISS is laughable compared to even the most insignificant unmanned NASA projects. Manned space exploration is a huge waste of resources and I have no reservations with delaying or even canceling such programs. Obama's administration is right on on this one.
All this talk about biofuel from this and a biodiesel from that leads me to wonder whether some day our cars and homes will be equipped with mini power plants that process organic material, kind of what we saw in the Back to the Future's modified DeLorean from the future..
Every once in a while I try to look up a known concept on wikipedia, and I am simply shocked by the lack of any sort of useful information provided on some of wikipedia's articles on econometrics and statistics with the former being usually much much worse or often non-existent. (for example try to look up "GMM". Surely what's written there does not give the subject the justice, even by encyclopedic standards).
Most economists DO NOT get to teach because the number of PhDs produced exceeds the available academic positions. However, the non-academic market for them is indeed very rich and often lucrative. Besides the private finance industry, they get employment in central banks (the FED, etc), think tanks, consulting companies (marketing research, transfer pricing research, etc), international organizations (IMF, World Bank, etc), insurance companies, elsewhere in government (Treasury, FTC, etc.) Even the finance industry slump is a one off kind of thing. I wouldn't worry about it if I was entering the graduate program just now.
Graduate level economics is almost indistinguishable from graduate level math (or physics)
This is not true (and fortunately, thank god, functional analysis while applicable in theory, has little to say about relevant real world economics). People who say econ is no different from math, obviously haven't taken a serious pure math course. Graduate economics is somewhat technical and quantitative but is not rigorous or formal enough to be confused with a branch of mathematics (unless you take an advanced theory course, which is not representative of the field as a whole). At the same time, there is not enough dynamical systems in it to be confused with physics (I took a bunch of econ courses, and didn't have to solve one differential equation). But yes, econ a very quantitative, and so math,stat, or physics majors could feel at very comfortable in an econ program.
You're screwed if you're majoring in a _useless_ liberal arts majors.
Math, Economics, Statistics, CS, and sciences are liberal arts specialties at most universities as well. A lot of these majors have placement/salary success comparable to or better than say business school majors at the same university.
So, your going to vote for another socialist - hoping he's less of one?!?! Republicans are big oil, pro corp, and now socialist and big government.
Except for socialism, that is EXACTLY what being republican means based on the last three republican administrations going back to 1980! Add to that pro-imperialism, pro-theocracy, anti-environmentalism, covert racism, and anti-intellectualism.
My understanding is that the big four schools for CS are MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and CMU. This is usually considered tier one. Though, I can't imagine the CS education one can get from Harvard or Princeton being mediocre.. perhaps they're not big research powerhouses in CS but I'd hope they know how to put a competent undergraduate curriculum together and attract some good students and faculty.
IT spending (this includes spending on software and services) tends to be strongly correlated with the performance of the aggregate economy except that it tends to be more volatile than the economy. Based on this observation, if we are indeed heading into a recession, there will be less jobs for CS people in the coming years. Therefore, while possibly more employable than say junior finance people, finding good jobs in CS still might get tough. Nonetheless, IMHO, you will always be better off studying a major that you feel passionate about. Short term market volatility should not affect one's career choice. A career spans 40-50 years. Market downturns and upturns last only a few years. If you do what you care most about, you will usually have a strong motivation to stay on the top of the subject and this will help you get the jobs even at the time when not everyone can get one.
What are you talking about? most of my friends who studies CS had jobs lined up before they even finished school. All sorts of jobs: traditional software businesses, google, web businesses, web stores, sysadmin jobs, etc. Just enroll at a quality institution and do your best job. You'll find employment.
Why should a computer science major study operating systems, when scant few of them will actually work on an operating system?
I think your analogy makes sense overall but there is a better example for CS. Every once in a while someone asks on Slashdot "Why should CS undergrads be required to study calculus/discrete math/etc."
I am not sure what you mean by "more stable". I rarely used AMD products but managed hundreds of computers with other CPUs. I have never had any stability problems due specifically to Intel processors (something I can't say about older Sun products).
Can someone please remind me why we have elected a Democrat-led congress? My goal for this November election will be to vote out every single incumbent congressman regardless of party affiliation.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we cutting sciences yet throwing hundreds of billions of dollars towards the military still
Because much of American (conservative) politics are based on anti-intellectualism. See
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=154008&bolum=109
"Why are they struggling financially? Could it be they are not fiscally responsible? Could it be that they continuously, year after year, overspend their budgets and justify this by actions such as raising tuition by 12-15% to pay off debt they accumulated because they couldn't stay in budget?"
Because the state governments had been outright cutting the budgets or at least reducing the growth rate of the state university budgets for something like a decade, so it is not fair to claim that research universities were overspending their budgets. The universities have serious and growing responsibilities (e.g. the enrollment growth requirements).
"on pork projects"
What pork projects are you talking about? Please provide a reference, and also an estimate of how much of university budgets these "pork projects" constitute. I have been involved in the academia for like a decade, and I think you're just talking out of your a**. The universities are probably the most efficient money spenders among the state money receivers. Unionization is minimal (except for a few pitiful graduate student unions) and they always had to run a tight ship because the state funds were never enough to cover their needs.
"Many universities sit on huge sums of money and still get government help so I'm not losing sleep over that one either. "
Where did you get this idea? This is a complete utter B.S. Most large state research universities are struggling financially right now. Many have a hiring freeze already. Some had been seeing their state funded budgets erode forever. As for private schools with large endowments, most of those too are having serious financing issues right now. WUSTL, Harvard, etc. Many have instituted faculty and staff hiring freeze as well. What large sums of money are you talking about? Their endowments? They already lost 30 to 50% of value in just one year, and schools generally use the earnings generated by those endowments to beef up their budgets. It is plain stupid to spend the endowment itself because this will seriously compromise the future financial positions of many universities. Based on experiences of many people I know, the freshly minted PhDs in any field are facing the worst job market of the decade.
Not really. In classical economic theory: the market price can be one of the following:
1. Essentially the cost of making the product (firm's economic profits are 0). This arises in the model of perfect competition only.
2. Each consumer pays the highest price this person can afford. This arises only in the model of monopoly with a perfect price discrimination.
3. Everyone pays a single price, but the price is set by the single producer for the purpose of maximizing this producers profits. This is the model of monopoly with no price discrimination.
4. Anything in between. Various models of oligopoly will render the equilibrium prices that are anything in between (1) and (3). There is no single model of oligopoly. So, each setting has to be analyzed separately (usually with the tools of game theory) based on the relevant assumptions.
I thought it was against slashdot's policy to make porn posts.
The stuff you're mentioning could still be done with a fraction of NASA's budget that would remain after ending the funding to wasteful (and resultless) human space exploration programs.
Most of NASA's useful results were produced the with the help of 10% or so of its budget that is spent on unmanned space exploration (telescopes, probes, etc). The rest of NASA's money is spent on manned space exploration which results in almost no scientific contributions. The papers generated by research done on the ISS is laughable compared to even the most insignificant unmanned NASA projects. Manned space exploration is a huge waste of resources and I have no reservations with delaying or even canceling such programs. Obama's administration is right on on this one.
All this talk about biofuel from this and a biodiesel from that leads me to wonder whether some day our cars and homes will be equipped with mini power plants that process organic material, kind of what we saw in the Back to the Future's modified DeLorean from the future..
Every once in a while I try to look up a known concept on wikipedia, and I am simply shocked by the lack of any sort of useful information provided on some of wikipedia's articles on econometrics and statistics with the former being usually much much worse or often non-existent. (for example try to look up "GMM". Surely what's written there does not give the subject the justice, even by encyclopedic standards).
Most economists DO NOT get to teach because the number of PhDs produced exceeds the available academic positions. However, the non-academic market for them is indeed very rich and often lucrative. Besides the private finance industry, they get employment in central banks (the FED, etc), think tanks, consulting companies (marketing research, transfer pricing research, etc), international organizations (IMF, World Bank, etc), insurance companies, elsewhere in government (Treasury, FTC, etc.) Even the finance industry slump is a one off kind of thing. I wouldn't worry about it if I was entering the graduate program just now.
Graduate level economics is almost indistinguishable from graduate level math (or physics)
This is not true (and fortunately, thank god, functional analysis while applicable in theory, has little to say about relevant real world economics). People who say econ is no different from math, obviously haven't taken a serious pure math course. Graduate economics is somewhat technical and quantitative but is not rigorous or formal enough to be confused with a branch of mathematics (unless you take an advanced theory course, which is not representative of the field as a whole). At the same time, there is not enough dynamical systems in it to be confused with physics (I took a bunch of econ courses, and didn't have to solve one differential equation). But yes, econ a very quantitative, and so math,stat, or physics majors could feel at very comfortable in an econ program.
Some of the fairly lucrative occupations for quantitative people are:
actuarial science
anything involving statistical inference
quantitative finance
You're screwed if you're majoring in a _useless_ liberal arts majors.
Math, Economics, Statistics, CS, and sciences are liberal arts specialties at most universities as well. A lot of these majors have placement/salary success comparable to or better than say business school majors at the same university.
So, your going to vote for another socialist - hoping he's less of one?!?! Republicans are big oil, pro corp, and now socialist and big government.
Except for socialism, that is EXACTLY what being republican means based on the last three republican administrations going back to 1980! Add to that pro-imperialism, pro-theocracy, anti-environmentalism, covert racism, and anti-intellectualism.
Just a wild guess, probably the mechanical parts. (oiling, etc)
After man less aircraft, laser weapons, sound wave weapons, and microwave weapons, this one at least does not sound as strange.
My understanding is that the big four schools for CS are MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and CMU. This is usually considered tier one. Though, I can't imagine the CS education one can get from Harvard or Princeton being mediocre.. perhaps they're not big research powerhouses in CS but I'd hope they know how to put a competent undergraduate curriculum together and attract some good students and faculty.
IT spending (this includes spending on software and services) tends to be strongly correlated with the performance of the aggregate economy except that it tends to be more volatile than the economy. Based on this observation, if we are indeed heading into a recession, there will be less jobs for CS people in the coming years. Therefore, while possibly more employable than say junior finance people, finding good jobs in CS still might get tough. Nonetheless, IMHO, you will always be better off studying a major that you feel passionate about. Short term market volatility should not affect one's career choice. A career spans 40-50 years. Market downturns and upturns last only a few years. If you do what you care most about, you will usually have a strong motivation to stay on the top of the subject and this will help you get the jobs even at the time when not everyone can get one.
What are you talking about? most of my friends who studies CS had jobs lined up before they even finished school. All sorts of jobs: traditional software businesses, google, web businesses, web stores, sysadmin jobs, etc. Just enroll at a quality institution and do your best job. You'll find employment.
Oh man, check the other street names on that picture. They include
"Soviet Street", "Kirov Street", and "Revolution Plaza".
Why should a computer science major study operating systems, when scant few of them will actually work on an operating system?
I think your analogy makes sense overall but there is a better example for CS. Every once in a while someone asks on Slashdot "Why should CS undergrads be required to study calculus/discrete math/etc."
Still, this is not a terribly fool proof idea. The kidnappers could throw the device into a passing freight train to confuse law enforcement.
I am not sure what you mean by "more stable". I rarely used AMD products but managed hundreds of computers with other CPUs. I have never had any stability problems due specifically to Intel processors (something I can't say about older Sun products).
Can someone please remind me why we have elected a Democrat-led congress? My goal for this November election will be to vote out every single incumbent congressman regardless of party affiliation.
Obviously, system administration is a viable alternative as well. Pay is on par with programming salaries, and you may even get to program sometimes.