Obama To Announce $240M In New Pledges For STEM Education 149
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."
It has an acronym , so it will fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
Endless educational financing is already available.
In what universe would that be?
Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail. (Score:4, Insightful)
This one. The U.S. [reason.com] tops the world [wordpress.com] in education spending per student [oecd.org] (p. 4, chart B1.1).
The idea that we're not spending enough on education is a myth, manufactured by those who are sucking up the largest chunk of education dollars. If you ever take the time to dig through a school district's budget, you'll find that the biggest single item is administrative overhead. Basically school payroll is top-heavy with too many administrators and managers.
Every time a budget cut is threatened, they make sure the cuts land squarely on classrooms and teachers, creating an artificial financial crisis. That riles up the teachers' unions and PTAs who broadcast the message that we're not spending enough on education. We really are spending more than enough, but from their perspective we aren't because the administrators aren't passing the money through to them. When the tactic works and public pressure forces legislators to increase school budgets, the administrators divert the bulk of it to fattening up their pay (or hiring more administrators), throwing a few token bones to teachers and classrooms (e.g. an iPad for every child in Los Angeles, which was probably a kickback scheme for the administrators who selected which companies got the contract).
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
This one. The U.S. [reason.com] tops the world [wordpress.com] in education spending per student [oecd.org] (p. 4, chart B1.1).
The idea that we're not spending enough on education is a myth, manufactured by those who are sucking up the largest chunk of education dollars. If you ever take the time to dig through a school district's budget, you'll find that the biggest single item is administrative overhead. Basically school payroll is top-heavy with too many administrators and managers.
Every time a budget cut is threatened, they make sure the cuts land squarely on classrooms and teachers, creating an artificial financial crisis. That riles up the teachers' unions and PTAs who broadcast the message that we're not spending enough on education. We really are spending more than enough, but from their perspective we aren't because the administrators aren't passing the money through to them. When the tactic works and public pressure forces legislators to increase school budgets, the administrators divert the bulk of it to fattening up their pay (or hiring more administrators), throwing a few token bones to teachers and classrooms (e.g. an iPad for every child in Los Angeles, which was probably a kickback scheme for the administrators who selected which companies got the contract).
And that very graph you cite is for primary through tertiary [higher] education, not primary through secondary.
To quote from the paper "On average, OECD countries spend nearly twice as much per student at the tertiary level as
at the primary level."
You can't talk about the figures from that paper and talk about school districts in the next paragraph.
I looked up Texas spending per student for public education (primary and secondary) and it was $6000 per student last year, on the level of Czech Republic (for p
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Endless educational financing is already available.
In what universe would that be?
America spends more per student than any other country in the world, except Norway. Beyond a minimal level, higher spending on education does not deliver better results. Pedagogy (teaching methods) also make little difference. By far the most significant factors are cultural. Regions that do well in educating their children place a high value on education, and set high expectations.
Re: (Score:3)
The US might spend more on education per student than other nations. But how much of that per student spending is actually spent *on* students? And how much is going to pad administrators' salaries, benefits, and offices?
Re: (Score:3)
The US might spend more on education per student than other nations. But how much of that per student spending is actually spent *on* students? And how much is going to pad administrators' salaries, benefits, and offices?
That's easy to figure out. Pull the school system budgets for your town and read them. It's public record and it takes about twenty minutes to get a feel where the money is going. For example my town spends about $1.4 million in central administration salaries, including the IT department and curriculum support services. This is out of total system-wide salaries of $22.5 million. So about 6%. If you go by total expenses central administration takes up about 5.5% of the budget.
Now here's an exercise th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Pedagogy (teaching methods) also make little difference. By far the most significant factors are cultural. Regions that do well in educating their children place a high value on education, and set high expectations.
Give this article a read (re: teaching methods): http://www.theguardian.com/edu... [theguardian.com]
the can't be discharged in Bankruptcy loans (Score:1)
the can't be discharged in Bankruptcy student loans
Re: (Score:1)
It's only $2.5K per school anyway (Score:2)
It works out to $2424 per school, roughly [ed.gov]. Might add one faculty member per school system, at least for larger systems.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Do you consider this amount of money to be so completely unreasonable? To start the discussion, for sure we can agree that this amount is not infinite.
(Also, if you agree with HBI, why would you mod HBI up, and not reverse the mods of the AC?)
ok I'll bite. I won't call any parcitular sum reasonable or unreasonable (mostly because I'm not an analyist and every location is going to have different costs associated with it). That said, there are a lot of situations where school systems pay a very small amount (from memory, isn't utah like 6k per student?), but get significantly better results than places like california and new york that are in the 20k/student range.
Ancidotally, my experience with increased funding to any particular program just
Re:Truth = modded down (Score:4, Informative)
You don't have to be an analyst to figure out that the cost of living in New York City is astronomically higher than it is in Utah. A one bedroom apartment in New York City costs an average $2700/month. That same apartment in Salt Lake City would cost $750. A dozen eggs in NYC cost $3.19; in Salt Lake City it's $2.03. If you want to join a gym in Salt Lake, that's about $29/month. In New York it's $86.
So you're drawing the wrong lesson here. Adjusted for its cost of living, Utah spends slightly less than middle-of-the-pack amounts per student and gets slightly better than middle-of-the-pack results. Clearly Utah deserves praise for financial efficiency, but their results could be better.
Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail. (Score:4, Interesting)
15,000 per student is not "endless resources". To put it in perspective, it's less than half of what is spent on a student at an elite prep school, which I think is a more reasonable model for what cost-is-no-object education would look like.
But let's agree for the moment that not every student needs to have class sizes of four or five with a PhD instructors. I'd be very happy if every a typical student in Baltimore has $15,000 spent on him. But one thing you apparently didn't learn is the difference between "average" and "median". I pulled one of the elementary school budgets for Baltimore, and found that it was spending about 20% of its total budget on special needs personnel -- speech pathologists, psychologists, special ed instructors. Note that this doesn't include the fraction of regular teacher time taken up by this. So it's not unreasonable to assume that per-pupil spending if you discount the mainstreamed special needs kids would look more like $11,000.
I also note that you chose two of the highest cost places in the country to run a school as representative of the whole. Really, it's expensive to educate kids in NYC? Who'd a thunk it? As long as we're cherry picking, let me in the same spirit of fairness reach into the bag of scrabble tiles and "randomly" pick -- Mississippi. Mississippi spends close to the bottom of states on a per pupil basis, and is at the very bottom of the nation in student achievement.
Let's pick another state at "random" -- oh, look I got Massachusetts. Massachusetts perennially tops the list of states by student achievement by nearly every conceivable measure. But at $14k it's in the top quintile for per student spending . To a certain mentality Mississippi is getting a better deal because it gets away with spending only $7.9k/student. Specifically that's the mentality that isn't alarmed by the fact that almost 2/3 of Mississippi's eighth graders fail to meet minimum standards of proficiency and reading and math.
Here's a fun fact. The same percentage of Massachusetts eight graders score "advanced" by national standards for mathematics as Mississippi students score "proficient" -- 18%. How much would it be worth for the 18% advanced score to be *typical* of states rather than twice the national average? How much do you reckon it would be worth to pay on a per-student basis for the impact that would have on America's long-term economic prospects? Well compared to the national average, Massachusetts spend $3000/student more. That seems like a bargain to me.
Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail. (Score:4, Insightful)
15,000 per student is not "endless resources". To put it in perspective, it's less than half of what is spent on a student at an elite prep school, which I think is a more reasonable model for what cost-is-no-object education would look like.
But let's agree for the moment that not every student needs to have class sizes of four or five with a PhD instructors. I'd be very happy if every a typical student in Baltimore has $15,000 spent on him.
There's one big, fat problem with simply saying "OMG we spend $$$$$ on every student!"
Most schools spend that money nowadays on more than just teachers, facilities, and equipment. In fact, those three are usually the categories which get the scraps. The lion's share of the money goes towards administration, counselors, and most of all, to "specialists" - which is another term for a middle-management make-work position.
30 years ago, a typical large-ish high school (let's say ~2000 students) would have 40-60 general teachers, a vice principal, a principal, a couple of janitors, one or two facilities people, and maybe a small handful (around 10) other staff to handle attendance, records, counseling, etc. So you'd have a ratio of 60 teachers to maybe 25 staff for that school.
Nowadays, you still have 60 general teachers, but now you have 20 special education teachers atop that, about 5-10 ESL teachers, 5-10 special education "specialists", 7-10 counseling staff, 3-5 "curriculum specialists", about 3-4 middle managers that act as layers between the teachers and vice principal, 3-4 teacing specialists (for state testing standards, PSATs, etc) a full HR staff of 10-20, a union steward, a certification/CE specialist (for the teachers), an IT department of sorts with 1-2 people in it, etc etc etc... roughly as many (if not more) staff as you have teachers.
Oh, and did I mention that whoever runs the local school board in a larger town can rake in as much as a typical CEO, often more? For example, the Portland School District Manager in Portland, OR shovels in a salary of around $150k/year, and an additional $75k/yr in bonuses and benefits...
Long story short? Until they clean out the $#@%^! cruft, throwing more money at the problem will only mean more make-work jobs that do approximately nothing for the students, the teachers, equipment, or facilities.
Re: (Score:3)
Sorry, I can't argue in the hand waving style of "schools nowadays", I need actual data specific data about real places.
My town administration takes 5.5% of the total budget. In the best performing town in my region, it's about half that, but they pay their teachers 79% more and lay out over $17k/student.
My town's high school has 88 staff positions involved directly with student instruction (teachers, teaching aids, special subject tutors), 2 librarians, 3 janitors, three principals/asisstant principals, 4
Re: (Score:1)
I didn't have time to do full-blown research with cites and datapoints, so I had to rely on relatively recent experience as an actual teacher... but then, you've proven my point admirably - thank you.
As far as special needs, that's a complex subject, but...
There are better ideas, many of which were long-abandoned. However, there is also a need to stop defining every squirming kid who refuses to sit still in kindergarten as a 'special needs' case. Most students that I've seen (secondary level) which were cla
Re: (Score:3)
I'd be very interested to know which city and state you taught in, and whether you were regular faculty. But I think your approach to reasoning about this is misguided. Rather than taking your experiences in dysfunctional school and generalizing from that, you should be looking at how the top performing schools operate.
Special needs isn't just squirming kids. Despite having lackluster marks, our daughter was screened by the school system as gifted, which in my state is considered "special needs". The sc
Re: (Score:2)
So as far as my town is concerned your dystopian scenario is pure fantasy.
But does the school system there work well?
Re: (Score:2)
It could be better. In our state it's considered mediocre among comparable towns, but to give you an example of what that means 86% of students score as "proficient" or "advanced" by national math standards. In most states that'd be accounted as a pretty good school.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. His point is that school systems are spending money badly already, so that giving them more money would necessarily amount to "throwing money at the problem" (his words). For my town's schools that point fails in that we don't spend money the way he claims all schools do; we aren't top-heavy with administrators. And we spend just a tad less than the national average per student.
I suppose what you're saying is that since we get better results than the national average for less-than-average out
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I am not talking about the money. But how such programs are implemented to get it.
Re: (Score:3)
This does very little to put us on a footing for a post-scarcity society. And we are assuredly on that path right now
No we're not. We have to solve the energy crisis first. That requires a dyson sphere, which will provide 13,000 trillion times the energy we use today.
Molybdenum and Cesium are so rare we make them using inefficient, energy-heavy nuclear fusion. We have the ability to literally turn lead into gold, or dog shit into gold, or gold into platinum, or piss into Strontium-90; it's really fucking expensive, more expensive than just mining a brick of gold, so we don't. It's expensive because of the massive a
Re: (Score:2)
This does very little to put us on a footing for a post-scarcity society. And we are assuredly on that path right now
No we're not. We have to solve the energy crisis first. That requires a dyson sphere, which will provide 13,000 trillion times the energy we use today.
That's a pretty bold claim for a vacuum cleaner.
Re: (Score:2)
I think we need to get off this GPA concept.
Right now students with strong in Language skills, get a higher GPA than students who has strong analytical skills.
By keeping the system, such students with stronger analytical skills, will not get credit for what they are good at and will penalized for deficiencies in language skills.
I was able to write code at 6 years of age, I knew more about science than most adults. However in elementary school, I was placed as a troubled student group, because my reading and
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The degree you receive matters. Duh.
If you wanted a 4.0 you should have majored in education (consistently highest GPA from the lowest (SAT score/HS GPA) students on campus). Then again look at the reaction of the clue-full to education degrees.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
6 for AP, 5 for honors. GPAs can't compared across methods.
My point is easy degrees get the respect they deserve. Show up with a 'pot studies' degree from Evergreen state (all degrees from Evergreen State are 'Pot Studies') and see how far it gets you.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The vast majority of students will never need to know how to code. While I don't mind kids learning it I have a problem with kids being told they have to know some basic coding when they don't have the math skills to make something more of it than a glorified version of Hello World.
I'd be much more satisfied with students graduating knowing how to write a formula in Excel with a bit more math behind it then a kid being able to tell me the a bit of syntax of some language that will never be used in t
Re: (Score:2)
The vast majority of students will never need to know how to analyse literature.
The vast majority of students will never need to know about world history.
The vast majority of students will never need to solve algebraic equations.
Learning to code, isn't about knowing the silly commands, but training your mind into solving problems by breaking them down into elementary instructions. It helps you understand the world and trains your mind into different ways of thinking.
Re: (Score:2)
The vast majority of students will never need to know how to analyse literature.
True, which is why we should remove that portion of the curriculum. They do need to know how to think critically about what they've read so as to be able to evaluate things like contracts or marketing materials though so there needs to be something as a replacement.
The vast majority of students will never need to know about world history.
As part of any decent civics program they need enough to knowledge of this subject to be able to vote intelligently. They may not need the intricate details of 12th century Romania, but at least an overview of some of the main civilizations tha
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The trouble is...in HS and below, we pretty much no longer fail or hold kids back if they don't learn their subjects. There is a reason so many colleges have so many remedial classes for incoming freshmen...English being one of them.
The lack of skills of many incoming Freshmen is atrocious.
Re: (Score:2)
The trouble is...in HS and below, we pretty much no longer fail or hold kids back if they don't learn their subjects. There is a reason so many colleges have so many remedial classes for incoming freshmen...English being one of them.
The lack of skills of many incoming Freshmen is atrocious.
A problem here is that the useless English Department administrators somehow managed to make 4 years of English a requirement for graduation. Doesn't matter if you already have skills in English; doesn't matter if you graduate without any skills. You're all getting stuck in the same class, which for lack of anything relevant to learn, ends up being a discussion about whatever fits the fancy of the teacher. Who majored in English for Teachers, so knows nothing useful.
It also doesn't help that a lot of scienc
Re: (Score:3)
Learning to code, isn't about knowing the silly commands, but training your mind into solving problems by breaking them down into elementary instructions.
I've never met a person who learned to think this way, only people who have always thought this way.Most people will at most learn is the concept, but will rarely actually learn how to think that way. Like any artist, programmers see the world differently. Learning to imitate great painters doesn't make you an artist. A photocopier can do that.
I'm not saying people can't learn to think this way, I'm saying that anyone can be an Olympian, but many do not have the determination that it takes. If you're born
Re: (Score:2)
They don't NEED to learn how to code. But the exposure can be transformative. In 1985, my First Grade class was involved in an IBM pilot program where our learning was augmented with computers. I learned how to read from a self-paced reading program on an IBM PCjr. In the span of weeks, I went from "See spot run. Run spot, run." to a sixth grade reading level and YA fiction novels. A rep from the program came in for a special session where we learned how to get into BASIC and do some simple math programs on
No Business of Government (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a hand-out to our slave masters.
The push to educate everyone has come from the Government's great support arm. It uses taxpayer money or Federal guaranteed loans and cultural pressure, both decoupled from risk requirements that stop banks from handing out tons of free money, to get everyone to go to college and get a degree.
This strategy churns out piles of cheap labor, freeing businesses from the social responsibility of building a workforce. Without these public efforts, most students wouldn't b
Re: (Score:1)
I'm sure some will say that spending far less and opening the floodgates for more H-1Bs is cheaper than funding STEM education in the US.
For anything STEM-related, anything is better than nothing. Right now, I know a few high school counselors telling their best and brightest AP students to eschew science/engineering, and go law or business, because "you can be easily replaced by a H-1B in STEM, and law can't be offshored", and "there is no such thing as an unemployed lawyer."
If you walk into any higher ti
Re: (Score:1)
This is not watered down stuff but basics on which if you want to you can build more. Assuming there are still cohding jobs in 20y from now there will be courses doing just that for a minority exac
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Here we go again (Score:1, Insightful)
With the equality of outcomes and not equality of opportunity
Re: (Score:2)
Smoke and water (Score:1)
Mr. President,
How do you take pledges and a philanthropic effort to the bank?
How about taking three days of the money you reportedly send to the NSA (at the low estimate 10.8 billion) then you can actually make a claim of funding, instead blowing of smoke up our rectums.
Re: (Score:2)
The President doesn't control the NSA's budget or any other department. Congress does.
Re: (Score:1)
The President doesn't have authority to write immigration laws either, but that hasn't stopped him.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
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).
jobs for all these new trainees to fill? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Money spent on research Money spent on STEM Ed (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:1)
I believe the prez is making one or more of these mistakes:
1. Mistaking spot shortages for general shortages.
2. He's been bamboozled by visa & outsource lobbyists.
3. He has to blame sluggish wages on something, and lack of STEM workers makes a good scapegoat excuse because it's complicated to verify and has lots of caveats, making plenty of political wiggle room if he needs to walk it back.
I don't ha
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. This is moot if spending on research isn't restored to pre-2000 levels and then increased from there. Add in reforms in the grant funding and renewal process, and then we can talk.
Re: (Score:2)
Money is fungible. All additional spending is printed.
"underrepresented youth" (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: Sorry poor white boy in Appalachia. Your scholarship is going to a rich girl in Grosse Pointe.
Re: (Score:2)
Translation: Trying to disguise the fact that the economy for most of us is imploding due to the social and environmental externalities that corporations are no longer willing to pay for in either taxes or employment opportunity is no longer working. As such, rather than give up our "Kapitalism über Alles" ideology, our only choice is to turn it into class/race warfare.
I know there are a few more words there. Try to follow along.
Re: (Score:1)
doesn't make sense (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
(compared to 50-60 hours a week regularly on the IT side)
Slacker
Good only if the work is there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You speak as if people have much of a choice.
Witness scott walker. All he talks about is destroying unions, and workers rights. I'm in Chicago (area) where we have a Democrat (a Democrat in theory) talking about destroying unions. Right to work laws, that in some cases are designed to pull money from unions - the unions can organize, but in effect are starved of funding until they die.
We're working on eliminating near minimum wage jobs. A restaurant needs X waiters/waitstaff to wait on N tables. Lets g
Re: (Score:3)
There is a choice, but our so-called leaders stand in the way. They have forgotten that the economy exists to serve the people (all of them), not the other way around. They treat the economy as if it was some sort of god.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm concerned that the money will be spent in Silicon Valley, because that's where the jobs are. The problem is that a large proportion of the people living in Silicon Valley were not born in the US, and will live in the US only temporarily. If we concentrate the training there, then we'll be training a lot of students who will return to their home countries after a few years.
I'd rather spend the money in areas, like Appalacia, in which a higher proportion of students are Americans.
federal discrimination? (Score:1)
"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?
Yeah.... no (Score:1)
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 a
Here's the problem... (Score:3)
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.
So... everybody gets a buck? (Score:2)
more than 1/3 of the amount (Score:1)
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.
Pointless (Score:2)
This will go nowhere.
Pointless (Score:2)
This will go nowhere.
PR Stunt? (Score:2)
We are trying to get more Americans in STEM, but until we have enough, we need more H1Bs.
Less than a day in Iraq (Score:2)
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?
Financial education (Score:2)
All they taught me in high school was how to write a check.
Re: (Score:2)
"All they taught me in high school was how to write a check."
Seems like this is what is needing to be taught more nowadays....along with balancing it, and how APR and interest rates work.
"This year's fair is focused on diversity. " (Score:2)
Since the majority of college attendees AND college graduates are women, does that mean they're looking particularly for men?
Somehow, I doubt it.
What about college debt? STEM jobs? (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
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 d
You'll just end up in the Purple Squirrel bind. (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Is that really the first thing you thought of? Is that really how your mind works? "How can I troll today?"
Re: (Score:2)