yesterday on the status of our educational system. This was more of a
rant than a speech. I’ve not seen Bill so worked up before. He might
even have been a bit over the top with this comment on our educational
system:
"The
guys at Enron never would have done this! I mean this is so blatant, so
extreme that, is anybody paying attention to what these guys do?"
I suppose it is a good thing when a guy like Gates gets involved in
matters of public policy. He’s spending his own money. He has no axe to
grind. But nothing is as clear as it appears. It’s not at all certain to
me that Big Bucks Bill is on the right track.
Central to Gates’ educational agenda is his belief that American schools
do not turn out enough scientists. That we will inevitably fall behind
places like China or India as they have more scientists than we do. Bill
believes that we should redouble our efforts to improve math and
science education. If we do that our future as the global leader in
science and technology is assured.
Actually that is not true at all. The acute problem we face is that there are too many scientists. This (long) article by Beryl Lieff Benderly tells a much different story than Mr. Gates. I few quotes from the piece:
It is not, as many believe, that the nation is producing too few scientists, but, paradoxically, just the opposite.
“There is no scientist shortage,” declares Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman.
Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, cites the “profound irony” of crying shortage — as have many business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates — while scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.
I loved these words by Susan Gerbi, Chair of molecular biology at Brown University. This lady is on the top of the heap of scientists in America:
"Obviously, the “pyramid paradigm can’t continue forever,” Like any Ponzi scheme, she fears, this one will collapse when it runs out of suckers
— a stage that appears to be approaching. There has been relatively
little attention given to possible solutions for the scientist glut — in
no small part because the scientific establishment has been busy
promoting the idea that the U.S. has a shortage of science students."
So are we creating a Ponzi scheme of scientists? Or are we critically
short of scientists? I don’t really know. The evidence is pretty clear
that there is a very big glut today. And there is every indication the
glut will get bigger. These folks better find something “Big” to do. I
see no new “cutting edge technology” that is going to suck up the supply
of the underemployed scientists. We’ve already invented all the “good”
stuff. Inventing more stuff that extends lives is really not all that
helpful at this point.
been working in the industry a while.
Ive think that big companies like Google, microsoft, facebook, cisco etc recruit employees on H1B as full time employees only if they are genuinely competitive. The cheap labour they benfit from is mostly contracted out to second tier companies that probably use H1s or L1s. I think mostly L1s as H1 visas have wage restrictions and they are not tied to the company like L1s are.
I can tell you for a fact that you are quite wrong. Some may fit the bill, but the vast majority of H1/L1's that I've seen do not.
Bingo!
I'm in the industry. It is about creating an army of cheap IT labor to feed the corporations. Visas are one way. More engineering students are the other.
In any case, schools do not produce the same caliber of software engineers as they once did. They know languages and tools, but they often lack fundamental understanding of basic engineering concepts.
Except the ones that do think outside the box won't be allowed to be paid inside the box.
WTD! This is an oh so loaded statement. I began my science career in 1988, trained to be an independent thinking and independently operating scientist.....for an all too soon non-exisiting system for such.
Or managed out of it - I spend my day working on new algorithms, then at the end of the day I'm supposed to login to our scheduling software and update my progress toward a shippable product. It's not a manuscript to be typed where I can count words/pages. Sometimes the biggest progress is made changing 1 line, after several days of test runs and staring at the code.
Oh, and I disagree that there will be no more good stuff - design capabilities are expanding so rapidly and including multi-physics effects, we are just starting to see the benefits.
i do think US does not graduate enough engineers.
Link to latest bachelors degree by field of study.
Link : http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_282.asp
you can download this in excel.
Interesting tuples
Total : 1601368
business 347985
Sociual sciences 168500
education 101708
psychology 94271
communication & journalism 78009
English 55462
All of Engineering : 69133
Computer an informatiuon sciences 37994
Engineering and computer science are waaaay at the bottom of the list. I dont think the H1B argument is really relevant. Engineers and CS graduates still make more money than most lawyers, business students & psych and histroy majors.
Most universities students drop out of engineering and CS in the second year because the math is too hard for them.
Or maybe the numbers of engineering students being lower than the rest is because you don't actually need that many in the grand scheme of things.
Look at it this way, would having eighty percent of graduates being engineers make everything better? Of course not.
Interestingly, actually we do need more doctors and business people (OK... not lawyers ;-) than engineers.
As a percentage of the economy, manufacturing is a minority and so is the number of tech geeks needed.
maybe production is only a minor chunk of the economy because most ppl want to major in psychology, law, education & social sciences.
Cant say for sure which is cause and which is effect.
The Mindscape of Alan More. Just when things where getting a little boring.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvcPVxzhTLQ
+2= Rossi, remember that name
Scientists require immense sources of energy and complex infrastructure to do work. That we "have to many" is simply a reflection of the fact that both energy and complexity here are not exponentially increasing.
+ 1