Women and professional degrees

Great Debates
41

So to sum up, no one can actually prove that the admissions of women are fueling professional shortages in medicine and pharmacology, let alone in other trades like engineering, law (snort) and accounting, but some people believe they’re infecting the industries with something?

Does anyone have anything to say to my comment about how loan forgiveness contracts force the recipient to disgorge the benefit if breaking the terms of service part? Am I the only one who was offered/has read one of these? Let me assure you that if you skip out on them you are F-U-C-K-E-D.

If the argument is just “well you attended a state school”-2 points

a) If you’re an in-state attendee, presumably you and your family have paid taxes for X number of years, educating all the other attendees. It’s not as though the state is printing money out of thin air and giving you this for free. Since your change is in the pot, you have a right to decide your own career path.

b) If you’re an out-of-state attendee (I went to a public school out of state) you’re paying private tuition fees. My tuition at my state school came out exactly the same as at some of the private schools I got into. So, in fact, I was subsidising my classmates. Does that mean your out-of-state classmates get to tell you what’s what, because they’re partially funding your education?

The argument of some people seems to be that attending a state school means that you have to sign a contract promising service in Y industry for X number of years, the same way one would sign for a loan-forgiveness contract. I’d ask this of people positing this scenario-don’t you think in the long-term that would only deprive state schools of promising candidates? That the best would start attending private schools that didn’t put strictures on career paths for fear of severe penalties?

If anything, you’re going to end up fueling shortages with these type of control freak policies. I love working for the Feds, but there’s no way I’m going to sign a CONTRACT and there’s no way I would have attended public universities (in fact, I attended 2 public universities, one Canadian, one American) had I been obligated to sign some sort of punitive contract.

I’d also like to point out that there are several top-tier public universities that would never never go for that type of proposition. They’re money-making institutions that are as interested in turning out successful grads who contribute, as much as Harvard or Yale. A contract like “you have to work as a doctor or lawyer” is way too vague to hold up, and contracts like “you have to work in X area in the state doing Y for Z number of years” only means you’re putting the muzzle on people who could go on to give you a new wing for the library.

And I’d still love to see the studies that show how women are fueling professional shortages because so far this thread just comes off like typical griping sans basis.

42

Thank you for pointing this out-I have a good friend who has 2 masters degrees and a CPA (err, all obtained from state schools actually). Between her and her husband they have something like 6 degrees, all from very posh schools. She recently had a baby and became a SAHM. Even if she never goes back, which I doubt, her children are at a significant advantage, having an educated mother like that home.

Not to mention the fact that the value of her work in handling the family finances is quite high, and had she stayed in the workforce, is likely something they would have outsourced out to accountants and financial planners.

The idea that SAHMs should have minimal education, and those of us with grad degrees should be out and about “using” them, is pretty insulting in and of itself, and a completely seperate thread.

43

I am a software engineer. I don’t think that ‘insurance’ would work in this arena. Anybody who took five or ten years out of the field to raise kids and then had to come back because of a divorce or something would find that their skills are woefully out of date and find it very, very hard to get a job.

These skills have to be kept sharp by actually working in the field.

Part time software engineers? I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but we don’t have any of them. Forty hours a week and the ability to travel on less than 24 hours notice is an absolute minimum requirement for this. And going back into it after the kids are in college? Things change a LOT in 18 years in this field. Hell, 18 years ago there was no Internet and the web-based application that I develop now could not have existed.

I don’t think those two points are relevant at all to the field of computer engineering.

Then why go into a degree program that’s specifically tailored to following a certain kind of career path? Why not go to college and get a liberal arts degree and study all kinds of different subjects? I can’t imagine why someone would want to get an engineering degree ‘just because.’

Again not something that applies to a field like engineering. We’re not a ‘here and there, ten hours a week at the public library’ field. You can’t keep up with this field in ten hours a week. For one thing, there’s just too much growth in it, and for another, a lot of that growth is proprietary internal stuff that no company is going to be sharing with the outside world because it’s a trade secret. I somehow doubt library science changes as fast as computer engineering does.

44

My brother-in-law has a CS/EE degree from MIT and makes six figures working 20 to 30 hours a week.

He’s my doctor sister’s house husband. So I really don’t buy that it’s not possible.

45

Not to mention my metallurgist/chem engineering father who is also my mom’s house husband.

He invents one thing a year and then just vaguely travels to the plants that develop his products. And his company pays him very handsomely to do that.

He spent the better part of his time raising me and my sister. Sorry catsix, but I know a whole bunch of very financially successful lazy engineers. Any of those jobs could have been done by women raising a family at the same time. In fact, it’s my mom and sister who work outside of the house, not their husbands.

Maybe some people just know how to organise their time better. I definitely don’t have the intelligence to swing their easy-street lifestyles as I do not understand how to simply “invent” and patent the way my father does, or launch a business the way my brother does…but it is definitely not impossible. In fact, sometimes I regret not going into engineering because it seems less rigid than my job.

46

It’s hardly realistic and without proof there’s no way I’d even believe that it’s true. I know the field because I’m in it, and MIT or not, nobody’s sitting on their ass sucking up over a hundred K a year.

There’s no way I’m going to believe that it can be done in computer engineering. I work for one of the big dogs in the software field (not Microsoft) and none of the engineers have a 20 hour a week job. It’s just not possible due to the type of work we do. There are some weeks when I can get done what I need to get done in less than 30 hours, but those aren’t common by any stretch, and they never happen when on-site and in the field.

You’ve got the wrong view of engineering.

47

(Emphasis mine)

This may very well be how your father makes his money. He may not necessarily be compensated for his labor, but instead for the rights or royalties on his patents. Ditto for these other “lazy” engineers.

Robin

48

catsup, I used to work in software development (I am now a CS graduate student) and this is completely different than my own experience. First of all, I personally disagree that software development skills go completely out of date. A Many companies run legacy applications based on technology that is 10+ years old. You can do a dice search on ‘mainframe’ to see this for yourself. But besides that, I have heard many managers say that they want trainable people rather than a specific skill set. I myself was once offered a .NET position, and my experience is 100% UNIX/Linux.

Second, many companies hire non-employee “consultants” to do work for them, as a way to cover small projects and avoid the overhead of regular employees. Of course, these are not sexy cutting-edge projects at Microsoft and Google, but they are still legitmate, paying work. I’ve seen friends do this type of work out of their house, and the pay can be pretty decent, since the company doesn’t have to pay out benefits. I knew a guy who worked made 1K per day (full-time) as a consultant. Sign a six month contract and there’s your six figures.

Also, outside of 1 consulting firm, I cannot think of a single manager I ever saw who had to travel on 24-hours notice. When I did see it, it was at a unstable start-up that is now almost dead. There are many software jobs that are zero travel (there is an entire category at dice.com), and at the stable companies where I have worked, travel is arranged at least a week in advance.

I have also found software to be a field that can be very friendly to flexible schedules and working from home. While in school part time, I worked from home 1 day a week, and I have no children. At my last job, there was a woman employee who worked at home 3 out of 5 days. Her case was unusual, but she was very valued. Further, unless you are in a support role, there are very few fires that cannot wait a few hours, if not until someone can log on from home after dinner. Its not an ER, after all.

I don’t doubt that the situations I describe don’t happen at your big dog company, I’m just describing my own experiences. You might actually put these positions under the title ‘computer programmer’ rather than ‘software engineer’, but they’re still ways to use a CS graduate degree. Also, I don’t doubt that a SAHM who last worked full time in 1997 would have a hard time finding a job, or that someone with more recent experience would be better for the job. I just don’t understand why you say that she could not have maintained her skills part-time, and why it would not be realistic to re-enter the workforce at all.

49

Art Fry and Specer Silver, inventors of the Post-It Note for 3M, were both chemical engineers and both had (I believe both are retired now) that sweet deal after the Post-It Note was a success. 3M paid them handsomely and they worked, or didn’t. 3M, of course, makes gobs of money off Post-It Notes and Fry and Silver have no rights to the patents.

We have a few EE/CS “research fellows” where I work who have contributed enough that we are happy to pay them if they never come up with another idea. They pretty much write their own ticket in terms of how much they work. Many of them don’t show up in the office much, but they are often the type that show up after not seeing them for a month and spend 80 hours a week working for two weeks, turn something over to someone with “I thought this might be useful” and it is. Or just CAD something up at home and send it in.

50

First, my name is not catsup, it’s catsix. Second, how much experience do you actually have in industry? What industry? How big was the software company you worked for?

There are a lot more people with legacy skills bitching about being unable to find a job than there are jobs that require legacy skills. Most all of that died after the Y2K hole was plugged and the bug failed to materialize. Legacy skills provide for a few niche jobs, but it’s not something a reasonable planner would stake their future, 20 years from now, on.

As far as your interview experience goes, the jobs where the hiring manager says ‘We’ll train you to do what we want.’ tend not to be very high paying jobs, and they want you to work your ass off to stop being an overhead burden and start being a revenue generator for them ASAP.

How often does he sign six-month contracts? I’m serious. A six month contract that makes you a hundred grand sounds really great until you get to the point where you’re going a year or so between those contacts and the bills still have to be paid.

Nice jab at my employer, but it’s hardly an unstable start-up. It’s a 26 year-old, billion dollars a year software company with over 4000 employees in 30 countries. We travel when we need to, and sometimes need arises on short notice.

Where I work, it’s tolerated out of people who are not expected to be on project teams, which is very, very few of our employees. The only other people whose home office is home are those who travel up to fifty weeks a year, the dedicated, on-site field teams.

I don’t have a graduate degree and probably never will, but I do have experience with the big dogs, and anybody from the lowest level programmer to the highest level software engineer who can’t generate 40+ billable hours a week, 48 weeks a year, to the company is seen as a liability.

The company gets paid by the customers based on how many hours I spend working on their projects. We’re well compensated for that, and our bonus is tied to the percentage of hours per quarter we spend as billable. We’re also one a few in the industry growing rapidly enough to have jobs available, but the time requirements are laid out at the beginning.

Dangerosa: Nobody remarks on the number of hours Art Fry and Spencer Silver spent at work before the one invention that paid off, or the fact that such things as they did are rare enough that it’d be unwise to stake your future entirely on ‘I’ll get this degree because one day I might invent something I can retire on.’

You used a very important word in your post as to why I don’t think sitting on the bench with an engineering degree is a reliable way to insure a future: ‘few’.

51

Yes, but there are a few. A few is quite different than none. We don’t know what ana-lu’s brother in law may or may not have done to deserve his part time six figure a year job, yet you said such a job doesn’t exist and she doesn’t understand engineering. Perhaps he has one very profitable patent and his firm is happy to have him work 20 hours a week and pay him handsomely to reward him for one great idea. Perhaps he is regarded as a world expert in a very specific small field - and having him at all is better than him quitting to be a house husband - or working somewhere else. There are a “few” such jobs, and apparently her brother in law is lucky enough or smart enough or well regarded enough to possess one.
Art Fry didn’t spend much time on Post It Notes. He took Silver’s adhesive that no one had found a use for and found a use for it in a eureka moment. He slapped some of Silver’s adhesive on some old scratch pads and handed them out around the office (well, first he tried to talk people into the idea, but they thought he was crazy - so he made prototypes and handed them out). This wasn’t years of sweat and tears in the lab - this was the 1% inspiration (Silver may have done some perspiring for the adhesive without a use to start with). Now, Fry had been working for 3M as a chemical engineer for years, and had probably produced lots of sweat for other, less successful or well known, applications.

52

catsix, I apologize that I spelled you name wrong. It wan’t intentional.

Anyhow, I have a total of 4 years post-BS experience in IT and consulting, spread across two consulting firms and one Ibank. This doesn’t count work on acedemic research projects. While in consulting, I working primarily in telco. The first consulting company was a startup, the 2nd was 10billion/year in revenue, at the time.

Again, we’re not talking about an entire career, were talking about being able to get your foot in the door after an absense, for which a low-paying or short-term job is fine. (And I don’t know how long he had the contract, but he was planning to leave the area within a year, so he was only looking for short-term) It also depends on what you call low-paying. FWIW, my .NET offer (for which I had no experience) was for 80K+bonus+benefits, in NYC.

It wasn’t a jab. Also, remember that not all software jobs are at professional services firms. There is also packaged software, government, and companies that do their own IT in house. As I said, I don’t doubt that you are describing your own company accurately, I am just saying that I have a different experience.

53

Well, I was speaking more generally of why women who plan to stay home might also want to get advanced degrees. While I do know a few software-engineer women who have taken time off and then returned to the industry, I was thinking more of areas like the medical, teaching/academic, business, or construction fields. I’m not sure why this has veered off so abruptly, but…

I can think of two software engineers (and two civil engineers) of my personal acquaintance who have taken time off to stay home. I don’t doubt that there are more. However, might this be one minor reason why there are fewer women in the CS field? It’s possible that some women planning to take several years off might pick a different field to go into in the first place.

54

They are turning people away. I was pre-pharmacy a few years back, and during the application process I learned that what the article discusses is absolutely true. There was a website I can’t find or remember the name of now, but it allowed you to apply to a whole bunch of pharmacy schools at once, and it gave all the vital statistics, and without fail, every school had 80-100 spots, and over 2,000 people applied for each spot. The very best got in, all the rest were turned away.

I don’t know what fairly land your Pharmacist friend is living in.

55

When you say a few years back, do you perchance mean 25 years ago? Cause no pharmacist makes 25k, you might be confused and are thinking of a pharm-tech, but a Pharmacist makes 60-80k in all parts of Ohio (just searched salary.com, simple hired, and monster.com, and all the average salaries tend to be around 70-75k, some as high as 80k)

56

One important distinction is that inventions or other work that is done while on the clock for a company is generally the company’s property. So Fry and Silver wouldn’t necessarily get patent rights, and any bonuses would be at the discretion of 3M. IIRC, though, 3M is pretty generous to its employees in that respect, and I know that its scientists have some freedom to work on original inventions while on the job.

Robin

57

Exactly. A lot of firms that depend heavily on the inventions of their employees try and reward those employees appropriately - so corporations will occationally have research fellows - people who contributed so much (either one time or with multiple patents) that they keep paying them regardless of if they every produce again. Keeps employees from going off and patenting and marketing their own multi-million dollar idea.

But we have veered off course. There are lots of reasons why ANYONE leaves their profession - sometimes I think motherhood is a convienent excuse for someone who found what they spent so much time studying to be unfulfilling in real life. Its no more fair to base a decision on who to educate off of who is likely to reproduce and be a stay at home parent than who is likely to pack it all in and hike the Himalayas. One problem is the two professional family - when you have two people making a really good income it becomes more plausible for one to quit.

If there is a shortage of doctors and pharmacists, we need to create more supply.

(How come no one complains about a shortage of lawyers? I know a ton of lawyers who don’t practice, but I rarely hear about how they are doing a disservice to the world by not using their education).

58

Because some would complain that they do a disservice by using their education. :smiley:

Robin

59

We’re desperately trying to.

In our state, over the past four years, the med school has increased from 128 to 156 slots, and it should be at 200 within the next two years. Similar increases for nursing and pharmacy.

Also, those lawyers most likely are using their education. Tons of people want JD’s even if it isn’t to practice law. Also, no one complains about a shortage of lawyers because there *isn’t * a shortage of lawyers.

It just so happens that there are plenty of JD’s to fulfill the world’s demand for lawyers, not so for nurses, doctors, PA’s, and pharmacists.