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The Science Education Myth
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 26, 2007 09:56 AM
from the we-still-have-some-skills dept.
from the we-still-have-some-skills dept.
xzvf writes "BusinessWeek says that you should not listen to the conventional wisdom. According to a new report, US schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support. 'The authors of the report, the Urban Institute's Hal Salzman and Georgetown University professor Lindsay Lowell, show that math, science, and reading test scores at the primary and secondary level have increased over the past two decades, and U.S. students are now close to the top of international rankings. Perhaps just as surprising, the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.'"
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Supply and Demand. (Score:5, Interesting)
Additonally, once you get out in the field, you start getting a sense of what people make, and what you can do and would like to make, and if you figure you could make more money as an engineer, you go back to school and pick up the degree...None of this stuff is set in stone in high school, or even undergrad level college.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who remembers the glut of 30-somethings going back to school to get their CS degree in the 90's. If there is demand, people will try to fill that demand, because doing so will profit them personally. Conversely, people who try and fill a non-existent demand will be punished by the market, shuffled into a crappy job.
And for the inevitable people who're going to say, "All the US demand for engineers is being filled by H1-B types" I say good! More engineers in this country means more engineering work has to come to this country, because that's where the engineers are, and that's where the work will be done best. More work for engineers means more demand for engineers, and more engineers with jobs HERE means countless other jobs will be created by the money they'll be spending. Would you rather they stayed where they are already, and brought the work to their country? We can afford to do that for running shoes, but if we start exporting tech industries, that's a bad thing.
Using government funding to force produce a glut of science-types is silly. Better to use the money to kick off industries that require them, and let the rest take care of itself.
Re:Supply and Demand. (Score:4, Interesting)
On another note, I wish I'd been more like you as an undergrad. I managed a BS in physics, and have barely even cracked a physics book since then. Hell, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with myself in terms of a "career".
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Re:Supply and Demand. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Supply and Demand. (Score:4, Insightful)
Conservatives will always say "Man, nothing stimulates the economy like a war." I'll amend that to be "Like a war that doesn't occur on your own soil." But there is a truth to that, massive government spending on goods, services and R&D will stimulate the hell out of an economy. But what if we didn't put it towards war? What if we said we're putting a WWII level of effort into developing a new green economy and fixing our infrastructure? That's a task easily the equal of WWII or the following Marshall Plan. That's investing in the future. What are we getting for pissing away $2.8 trillion in Iraq? Might as well gone to Vegas and had the mother of all parties, you'll have as much good to show for it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We need to kick off some sexy new stuff; especially the DoE ought to have a bunch o
Re:Supply and Demand. (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing saving the US is the H1B program!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Because central planning really really works. And because PARC didn't discover anything of use, and all those Intel and Microsoft research labs popping up like mushrooms after a heavy rain don't exist, and the numerous research universities throughout the nation, w
Re:Supply and Demand. (Score:5, Insightful)
A private company creating some interesting things does not invalidate the argument that academia researches things that aren't profitable. It's a complete tangential straw man. To summarize all academic research into a bland sentence about a particular area of physics is deceitful. Industry is good at bridging the last gap between an idea and a product. usually things that are within 5 years of being useful. Academia is better at doing basic research, research with no immediate profitability, and research that industry simply doesn't have a desire to fund. Laser's, the computer, algorithms, genetics etc... were all at one time just random academic ideas with no profit in sight. Once it hit a certain point industry took up that research and made products out of them. Basics research is high risk, you get results but the results are rarely usable in a product. Thus governments usually fund it as Industry is often extremely risk adverse.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What private company is going to be investing in string theory research?
Fundamental science research is important, whereas it is stupid for a company to invest in this research unless they think there will be profitable applications. Science is much more than just finding useful or profitable applications.
Re:Government sponsored, uh, no. (Score:4, Insightful)
True basic research doesn't have a goal. It has a question. If you already know your goal, you're not doing basic research.
So (a) the government is setting the goal and (b) it's providing (some) funding on the back end rather than the front end. This is not research.
Research is when a scientist has an interesting question, hypothesizes an answer, and then goes about trying to (frequently dis-)prove it. A typical grant proposal has to lay out those three items, with the last part (the experimental method) in some detail, including materials and timelines ("deadlines"). Most grants I know of are for specific time periods, and you're not going to get any kind of renewal without showing progress (one way or another).
Often, one project will spawn many new questions ("uesless side items"), which should be the only "goal" of pure research. Each would, of course, require approval of a new grant application.
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freak? (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of people do that. It is actually quite common.
I am inclined to think that this observation about having too many educated people suggests a couple of things:
1) The oft-repeated corporate line that outsourcing is needed because American talent is unavailable is pure bunk (though we all knew this already).
2) The government could use this as justification for a re
Re:freak? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry to rain on your parade, but doing CS is not by a long way assured to make you lots of money. I did it too, and loved it, and while I do have a higher earning potential, it's quite clear that to get at it I would have to do some pretty dull jobs where other people decide my tasks. My main interest is research, and I am considering starting my own software house, but I do not assume this wi
Re:Supply and Demand. (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
This shows that 42% of people earn less than 25K a year.
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The problems with their numbers (Score:5, Funny)
But no one is taking the graduates (Score:5, Insightful)
Those doing MBAs.. please consider the benefits of graduate staff. Yes they cannot do anything useful the day they get out into the real world. But in the long run technology companies will need experience or end up paying dearly for it.
A country cannot do badly by having too many educated people.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Anecdotal (Score:4, Interesting)
This post is anecdotal of course, but so is yours. A lot of it depends on what field you are talking about. Enginners tend to get hired right out of school though.
As a hiring manager in the IT field I've hired quite a few 'kids' right out of school. Did they need 're-education'? You betcha. Did they rapidly develop into valuable employees? Most of them, in time. Not all schools of management theory agree with your broad brush strokes.
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Tests are getting easier (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was at university I was talking to an old engineering lecturer and he was complaining that they had to lessen the difficulty levels of the courses even more because students were getting dumber.
It's not that scores are getting better, it's that the tests are getting easier. Also there is still a very high demand for genuinely smart people, but not so great science grads are being churned out at a higher rate than what is required.
Re:Tests are getting easier (Score:4, Funny)
We now get CS masters who cannot tell a PE header from an ELF header, know next to nothing about assembler, and couldn't even build a simple board to power and run some programmable IC like an Atmel or PIC because they know jack about electronic engineering.
We have some sort of watered down colleges here now that churn out "IT masters" in a 4 years fast breeder way. You will pass, somehow. I recently had the "joy" of sitting in an interview with a candidate who was the perfect example of what's wrong with those fast breeder tech schools. When I talk to someone with a masters in CS, I do expect him to know what happens when I do a
pop ebx
inc ebx
push ebx
retn
I do at the very least expect him to start pondering. He just stared blankly at me, he has never even seen any assembler. Hello? How's this guy supposed to write a compiler? How is he going to debug assembly? PE header? What's a PE header?
We're talking someone here who has a masters degree in CS. Not acc or bacc, where I could somehow at least excuse it. I'd question it, but it's excusable.
That's why our grades get better. Not because people get smarter, we just dumb and water down the tests until the results are what we want. I'm fairly sure we'll soon see college who can't read hexadecimal. We already arrived where they can't add them anymore.
Parent
Re:Tests are getting easier (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
We need sci education for EVERYBODY (Score:5, Insightful)
I have heard parent's point repeatedly - that we're making tests easier.
I can attest that in recent years it has become administratively inappropriate to give negative comments to or flunk students, so we continually pass students who haven't really learned along to be with their peers. That they didn't really learn isn't THEIR fault, but until someone can figure out a way to teach them, moving them up to the next set of material isn't helping them at all.
However, when I think about the impact of the trends I see, it isn't "there's no one left to do research" it's how big and poorly trained everybody else is.
I'm consistently amazed by how they let anyone who ISN'T in a hard science/math program get away without really ever understanding anything about science or math. A huge number of people don't have enough backing in the scientific method to have a basic sense of what is or isn't a fact - even in simple real world cases they can physically deal with. (Like how to fix household items, how to tell if a circuit is blown, how to debug RCA connections to their TV, etc.) And don't have enough backing in math to convert measurement units or tell if they got the right change.
The entire idea that anything could possibly have or not have empirical verification is lost on a very, very large number of people...
And to be clear, while I think higher education ought to take some responsibility for ensuring that the graduates have at least a small degree of well roundedness, I think the main problem in US education is much, much earlier.
Parent
Re:Tests are getting easier (Score:5, Insightful)
It's possible the lecturer has been in the field so long he doesn't remember how much a new engineer simply hasn't had the opportunity to learn.
We sometimes see this phenomenon in industry when interviewing new college grads
(Somewhere else in the thread someone was complaining about CS grads not knowing x86 assembly. Is that really a surprise? If they've done assembly for any architecture, and are reasonably intelligent as more CS grads probably are, they'll pick up x86 just fine. But to expect that they've been exposed to x86 assembly specifically seems a little unrealistic, especially given that most CS grads will never use any assembly language after graduation)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
really??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also their English is atrocious. It's like they teach in communication classes to talk like a street person. you do not submit a proposal to a customer with the words "plug up" when regarding their networking equipment...
and I quote... " We will plug up your networking gear for performance." WTF??? this is a college grad!
Re:really??? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:really??? (Score:5, Funny)
I believe the correct usage in that case would be, "We will pimp out your networking gear," etc.
Alternatively, one could use "trick out," "style," or "smack that bitch up."
Werd.
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Re:really??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Pay more? That's like soooo 70's
Re:really??? (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't even say "only do it until X". Until when? Junior high? Then we'll have a lot of people with a junior degree, which is worthless because even their dog could get one. High school? Then you have worthless high school diploma. College? Then we get college ones worthy of being toilet paper.
You can't hand out degrees like candy and then expect them to be recognized by the economy. If everything you have to do to get your college degree is to sit there and keep the chair from flying away, it becomes worthless.
And that in turn is dangerous for the workforce and the economy. It means essentially that companies are better off hiring from abroad where there are schools whose degree actually means something, that foreign engineers are on average better (because out of 100 engineers, you have 100 people who actually know their stuff instead of 50, and 50 who just have a degree meaning jack), and that thus foreign technology and products are better.
This will in the long run hurt the US economy.
Parent
Re:really??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Right, and I once knew an electrical engineer with a PhD who didn't know the color code for resistors! The shame.
Seriously, the purpose of a university education is to teach deep fundamental concepts, not trade skills. Now not knowing CIDR notation (RFC 1519) may be an arguable deficiency, but it is simply a notational device that may or may not be covered in the network theory courses he took, or may have been presented with an alternate notation (netmasks or even IP ranges).
The important thing is, did he understand the concept of what CIDR notation means and represents, once it is explained? Similarly, it's more important for an EE to understand the concept of resistance than to know the color code. A soldering tech, OTOH, could have the color code down cold without having the slightest notion of how electricity works.
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No one's arguing... (Score:5, Funny)
Sheesh! I thought everybody knew that.
The Downside (Score:5, Funny)
Foreshadowing a critical shortage of French Lit. majors.
Almighty Market (Score:3, Insightful)
Where's the report? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure this study comes as no surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that MOST of slashdotters working in tech have known this. It's all about the MONEY. Studies have shown time and time again that the reason businesses are bringing H1-Bs over here by the boatload is not about lack of qualified US graduates--it's about $$$. Only a couple of month's back the Programmer's Guild [programmersguild.org] exposed a video [youtube.com] that advertised a class on how to weed out qualified Americans so your company can employ cheaper H1-B workers.
Unfortunately, as long as US workers don't see it happening in THEIR field (or are blissfully unaware), they do nothing. I'm afraid when Americans DO stand up, it will be too late.
I like this article. (Score:5, Interesting)
Often people boil things down to a single number, and then misinterprete what it means.
The 'education' studies usually do things like compare US % of High School graduates going on to get a College degree with another country. Sounds like we are doing pretty bad, until you do a little bit more reasearch and find out that 85% of US citizens graduate high school, while only 30% of the other countries citizens get that far. Big surprise, there. They picked their richest and smartest 30% of the population and compared it to our "everyone except the worst 15%".
Then there are studies that show things like "US has worst prenatal care records in the world". But they leave out the obviously imporant fact that it is almost entirely caused by teenage mothers. If you ignore teenage mothers, the US has one of the best prenatal care records in the world. Our problem is entirely in the fact that we treat pregnant teenagers like scum instead of doing our best to help them.
You need to look beyond a single number, they are not helpfull.
All in the spin... (Score:3, Informative)
For example, 20+ years ago, the U.S. was a significant exporter of technology (right? This is what my elders tell me). Now China and Japan design our cell phones and motherboards. So if we the number of scientists and engineers has increased again, then we should start to gain back those engineering and manufacturing facilities.
As always, look at the bottom line... (Score:3, Informative)
Absolutely true. One of the beautiful things about the free market economy is you can differentiate between what people *claim* vs what people actually do. People claim that the US is facing massive shortages in the sciences, but all you have to do is look at the salaries. There's only a "shortage" if businesses wish to pay minimum wage.
It's also interesting how Business Week's research shows the U.S. near the top of lists in science and literacy when others claim we're falling back into the stone age. BW notes the cause of this discrepency:
*Interpretation* and *validity* of testing data is almost always flawed on some level. That's why my cynicism gene kicks into overdrive when I hear of Brand New Research demonstrating...anything. If someone has an agenda, any data can be *made* to say whatever they want.No shortage until salaries go up. (Score:4, Insightful)
As the IEEE frequently points out, if there were a shortage of engineers, salaries would be going up.
Reduced demand is the reason. (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes a while for the information feed back to the corporate honchos to percolate through. Engineer salaries alone can't be compared. For example in India, to support one engineer, you probably need 0.1 cook, 0.1 diesel mechanic, 0.05 secretaries, 0.333 peons/errand boys ... Most of what you get from the existing infrastructure in USA, like reliable
grid electricity, commuting infrastructure, lunch provides, etc are all provided by the companies themselves. It is possible that at the present levels of productivity and infrastructure cost, it could be profitable to out source. But dollar is falling against euro, rupee etc. The salaries overseas are increasing at a faster rate. The breakeven point is quite close and the trend towards outsourcing is going to reverse. At that point, it is doubtful if we will have enough qualified engg grads.
This may be true, but it doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
The report fails to mention that... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like bunk to me... (Score:3)
I never read the actual study--just the article, but it does not sound compelling to me. A credit in country A is comparable to a credit in country B? And simply because scores in country A increase doesn't mean that suddenly A competence > B competence.
From the article:
"As far as our workforce is concerned, the new report showed that from 1985 to 2000 about 435,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents a year graduated with bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in science and engineering. Over the same period, there were about 150,000 jobs added annually to the science and engineering workforce."
Now if we assume that the number of people turning 65 (and retiring from a successful career in the IT industry) roughly equals the number of people turning 22 with a BSc,MSc etc.
Wouldn't 150 000 new jobs added now imply a shortage of 150K? The numbers don't mean much unless you look at the number of people leaving the industry.
spin, spin, spin (Score:3, Insightful)
i'm talking about the other slashdot posters below!
hey, slashdot, here's a newsflash: you just don't need that many engineers and scientists in society. you don't. you need 10 guys to design the trains, 100 guys to build them, and 1,000 guys to run them
you just don't need that many at the top, at the creation of technology. you need plenty to build and maintain technology
by saying this, i expect this relevation to go over like a ton of bricks. i expect to be modded down
some people here apparently believe the point of life is to create some sort of utopia that resembles a college campus: everyone in research. or some sort of scientific monastic life
no, that's not a human society, and never will be, sorry
This is no mystery to me. (Score:3, Insightful)
The lack of education argument is nothing but a smoke screen just as it always has been. It's just way of shifting the blame for poor employment prospects away from major corporations and the government policies they've landed in place through the aid of their Republicrat benefactors and onto the middle class.
If you go back and watch Milton Friedman's series called "Free to Choose" you can see some choice examples of where this lie cum mantra originates. In episode three you'll see none other than a young Donald Rumsfeld talking about the new service based economy in which the emerging software industry is going to employ fifty percent of the population and he'll tell you how magically only the US will be able to participate in this market because only Americans can comprehend something so technically advanced as this newfangled software thing. Really an amazing performance. The shocking thing is that such a clearly moronic figure eventually made his way so far up the ladder of power.
But of course the catch to this magical trickle down service economy voodoo was that we're going to need everybody to get re-educated to participate. If you can't do Powerpoint and Visio, how can you expect to reap the rewards of this magic new ago. And hence the argument persists to this day that all the laid off GM workers will get new jobs when they learn how to use Excel and do Word macros etc. Yeah fucking right.
The problem with the economy is not a lack of education, it is a lack of leadership and a lack of responsibility on the part of the electorate that has bought into the greedy lies that will never benefit the majority of population.
U.S. Schools are turning out more business majors (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WHich market (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really no different from the claims in the hospitality and service industry that seek to keep employees there cheap.
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Re:Oh really (Score:4, Insightful)
At 10-20K per year, you can only go to school so long before you're too broke to continue.
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