Well people, THIS is what happens when we allow an entire generation of children to become athletes and entertainers instead of scholars and engineers :smack:
Tell us what you make of this…and who’s fault it is!! :o
Given the shortage of Americans pursuing graduate education in technical fields, those few Americans who do apply have a better chance of acceptance than their international counterparts.
A. Whitney Brown (He used to be on Saturday Night Live, and I think he’s been on The Daily Show, but we never saw enough of him) wrote about this sort of thing over ten years ago. He printed an ad from the New York Times looking for a Post Doc in BioTech. The candidate had to be skilled in the use of all sorts of high tech equipment , giving presentations, and have an advancced degree. The salary for this was something ludicrously low. He noted that you could do better driving a cab, and suggested that we should steer people away from these jobs for their own good.
Things haven’t changed – I still see these jobs in newspapers and technical journals, and now on science websites. There really is no financial incentive to get an advanced degree – you’ve gotta really love the subject.
Add to that the fact that there’s not a huge job market in many high-tech fields (My own is still reeling from the fiberoptic debacle of several years ago), and that some businesses are trying to reduce costs by outsourcing R&D to Eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere, and you can see that the disincentives are mounting up. Why would anyone want to get into a technical field if there are few opportunities, and the jobs themselves might not exist in the US in the near future?
Corporate Research Labs have disappeared all over the country in the past ten years. The ones that are left have downsized, and are pressured to short-term results with immediate product potential (a lot less basic R&D – so where are the breakthroughs gonna come from?) BioTech is riding high right now, but other fields are suffering.
So why would anyone want to get into a field requiring difficult, long, and expensive training, but with a frighteningly low possibility of employment, and one with a not impressive salary, at that?
I’m a female majoring in geology, and I get some odd looks when I tell people my major. Not because I’m female, but because I’m majoring in geology. Plus I’m an older female, and most of the other older students I talk to seem to be majoring in elementary educaton, business, or similar fields.
I’m not in it for the money, I’m in it for the education and hopefully I can get an interesting job I will enjoy. If I was only concerned about money, I would have stayed in my factory job making $60,000 a year. Why work at a mind-numbing job just to make a lot of money so I can buy stuff I don’t need? A major breakthrough in my life came when I realized I can be just as happy making $20,000 as I can making $60,000. I learned money doesn’t buy happiness. I don’t have kids so my situation is different that people with dependents, I don’t need a large salary. I do need a job that works my mind and is satisfying.
As for the OP, the spotlight has been focused on the star sports performers for more than a generation. At the HS level, I don’t think the kids make that big of distinction amongst themselves. The difference is the amount of media attention. It’s impossible to get the same media attention for a chemistry class as for a sporting event. It’s just never goingto happen. I think the bigger issue was addressed by CalMeacham. Take a look at how many degreed chemist are working as lab techs for $25-$30K per year with minimal benefits and that will give you a better picture of the US scientific job market.
Talking of education standards… whose fault’s this? 
Q: What do you call an engineer with two master’s degrees?
A: Waiter! 
Don’t be fooled by such articles, people! Sure, this is the same wonderful study in 1985, as I graduated HS, which brought me into the “wonderful world” of engineering. What a crock! If they’re going to lure people in these fields, then should give them a written, lifetime guarantee about one’s future in said fields. Basically, the tides of the economic cycles will take care of the problem while following the advice of the media will put you 180 degrees out of phase with society’s need for tech-minded people.
Bottom line is we’ll always need doctors, lawyers, accountants, actors and sports figures. Engineers (that make the world go round) will always be last on that list. And, they eat their own, so be prepared for a lot of hard work with no chance of advancement at all. It’s an ugly profession that’s glad to have ya on-board so you, too, can share in the misery! Going into an engineering life is volunteering to be put at the bottom of the food chain. If you like punishment, then high-diddly-doo, have we got a job for you!
From Know-how to Nowhere,
- Jinx
In 1967, when I popped out of high school like a shiny new widget, the buzz was a teacher shortage. My wife graduated in the same class, and she went to Ball State U. to become a teacher. When she got her teaching degree, she was dumped into the biggest teacher surplus in half a century. Her grades were good, but she ended up in two last-resort schools, working for welfare-eligible wages.
Now, folks who moved from India to the US to get high tech jobs are having to go back to India to get those jobs.
Well, I get the concept of hyperbole, but really it’s not that the majority of the previous generation is an entertainer or athlete, or even aspires to be. I’d suspect that , generally speaking, young people who are most drawn to those fields as professions have natural aptitudes in areas other than hardcore math and science.
An oft-cited problem, although I don’t know how much blame truly lies here, is that industry has wooed so many of our gifted science and math people that we’ve got a shortage of people who can effectively teach those fields to the next generation. It’s a pipeline thing, too–you’ve got to have good teachers getting kids fired up about math and science in elementary school, and then sustain that throughout their educations. My high school physics class was taught by a well-meaning and very nice biology teacher who was sent to some summer workshop to cram in physics content. It showed.
I suppose we need another Sputnik-style national panic over the state of our science literacy.
My town has a really cool “Saturday Morning Physics” program where university professors put on a camp-like physics series for school kids during the school year. It’s wildly popular, and something our school system really couldn’t provide. A couple of years ago Brian Greene was on campus to speak, as part of a string theory conference, and these kids packed the hall and lined up to get his autograph like he was Shaquille O’Neal.
You wo-man Boscibo? I thought you had penis!
Now, I love math and science fields, but I have a hard time imagining that you could get anyone fired up about arithmetic. I think the science portion of the problem could be solved partly by having a more interesting curriculum. All I remember learning about in science in grades K-6 (though I’m almost certainly forgetting a lot) is earth sciences and plants. How many times can you discuss chlorophyll and have it still be interesting, assuming the child was even interested in it the first time around?
Not gonna happen. If the eighties and nineties have a legacy for us, it is that “lifetime employment” is a dead concept. The only way to get a job and keep it forever any more is to become a bureaucrat for the U.S. Government. There will no longer be any testimonial dinners with the awarding of gold watches for fifty years of solid service; the idea nowadays is “Do More With Less,” and that includes human resources.
…and if said human resources have advanced degrees that took years and big bucks to obtain, well, screw 'em. We can get 'em cheaper in New Delhi.
There will come a time when our whole country is going to repent this, big time. But I suspect we just ain’t gonna learn until it happens the hard way.
You know, I am a mechanical engineer. You think “oh, ho-hum. Another dull, boring engineering person.” Yet, people say I have too much personality to be an engineer. It is because I haven’t let the kid inside me die.
I’ve worked with kids in the subjects across this age range when they want to learn and experiment. You should see their faces light up when they figure something out on their own. And, if you are a creative individual and see how new the world is through the eyes of a child, you can make these subjects exciting. But first, put down that textbook and start thinking outside the book! 
A really good teacher would bother to find as many new and alternative ways to teach any subject…instead of letting him/herself and thy pupils grow stale. It can be done, the only question is do teachers feel appreciated enough to do it? EVen rote basic math can become exciting to a child when taught as a child-directed learning experience through tactile means. You don’t have to beat it into them. Just show them the way, and the children shall lead. Also, have the patience allow them to make their own mistakes along the way…you might be amazed how much you can learn about how they think - from observing their mistakes and listening to their questions - even if is a totally off the wall idea.
- Jinx
Buh? If anything, I’ve seen a glut of folks in the tech and business sectors, which is probably influencing those stats. The article was not clear on what “engineer” encompassed. Is a computer programmer an engineer?
Ironically, everyone I’ve known who has a hard science degree also has a music degree. Do they cancel each other out?
In college, I was a chemistry/music performance double major. I eventually dropped the chemistry partly because of the above sentiment. I know, I know, the quote is just as applicable to a classical musician. :smack:
Passions drive us to do funny things. I miss leaving my chemistry behind, but it was a good decision for me. But there is also a reason why I work fulltime in the tech industry, while only moonlighting as a musician. One of these days, I’ll eventually be able to afford making a living in music.
The referenced article does NOT say there is a shortage of engineers or scientists. Far from it, it says there is a shortage of engineering JOBS. The U.S., they claim, is not competing for engineers and scientists, so many foreign-born researchers are working in other countries. They do mention that there are fewer engineering graduates, but this should not be seen as a shortage, nor as the main point of the article.
The only thing about the article that makes me think the U.S. educational system is in trouble is that both the headline writer and the OP read the article and interpreted it to mean that the U.S. educational system is in trouble.
The main thrust of the article was that there’s now foreign competition for engineering and scientific jobs, so we may not be getting the cream of the crop of foreign-born scientists anymore. Somewhat later in the article, it does state that fewer Americans are taking science-oriented courses. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the educational system is in trouble, * it could reasonably be interpreted to mean there aren’t a lot of well-paying jobs in those fields *. The article does drag out the old chestnut about demand for jobs requiring scientific skills increasing steadily by 5%/year, but that seems hard to support given the glut of technically oriented people in the past few years.
However, while we’re on the subject of people failing to learn, ** Starguard, will you PLEASE learn to summarize the articles that you are linking to? ** There have been recent Pit threads about the practice of just posting a link and saying “What do you think?” If it’s interesting enough to comment on, then comment on it, dammit.
Just posting a link without saying what it’s pointing to is lazy and annoying.
I may not have been clear, but I most certainly think that math and science subjects are great. I’m currently in school doing aerospace and mechanical engineering. I’m just saying that there are some hurdles to overcome when trying to effectively teach these subjects. Math, for example, at the elementary level is mostly memorizing and spitting out numbers on command (quickly adding and subtracting, memorizing the multiplication tables, etc.)
Perhaps the system is different in your school system, but from my time in public schools, I remember learning basically the same things in science class year after year. Even if you love the subject at hand, you can generally only be taught the same thing 2 or 3 times before it starts to get boring. The system probably needs to be spiced up a bit by adding in a little of many different fields. Learn the basics of insects, birds, mammals, etc., and include in it some facts that children would find interesting. Put in some basic physical sciences stuff (everything is made of atoms, all objects fall at the same rate) with experiments and demonstrations, and that would probably get children much more involved in science.