How to make science and engineering degrees more popular?

[PeZook]

Doesn't the low gravity on the moon negate the advantage of the high lift capacity of an Orion drive? Would an Orion-drive outcompete a conventional rocket enough to be viable there?

It actually multiplies it, since you need six times less velocity to reach orbit, so you can loft vastly more mass with the same amount of nukes.

[Shaun]

The fuck you guys on about?

[Eddie Van Helsing]

Same here. Even if Orion drive allows you to lift absurd amounts of mass, setting off tons of nuclear bombs in atmosphere is not a great idea. If I were Emperor of the Moon, on the other hand...

I guess building the Orion-class ship in Earth orbit is right out as well. Presumably setting off the first few nukes to get the ship to escape velocity would fuck over the ionosphere.

[Cecelia5578]

Medicine probably scoops up a lot of the really smart people going to college, too. In the US, being a doctor means tons of prestige and, at least in the popular imagination, tons of money (in reality, it's also long, brutal hours and years of paying off giant student loans, but nobody mentions that on Grey's Anatomy).

It actually does not. The premed students have a very high wash out rate. Medicine tries to scoop them up and fails. Unfortunately for the biologists, grade inflation is... I wont say encouraged, but it is a natural consequence of bitchy premeds that complain about everything. You see, your TA or Professor evals are directly proportionate to the class average. If you are a TA, you may well lose your job if you don't pass as many as you can. Only the professors who are crotchety old men with tenure will intentionally fail such people, and that is why it is always some crotchety old Full Professor who teaches organic chemistry or genetics. As a result the market is flooded with people with a BA or BS in biology who fail to get into med school.

I actually get a count of the premeds every semester before I start teaching to calibrate how stringent I can be when it comes to grading, and how much I should try to really get my students interested in Biology for its own sake.... If there are premeds I have to lower my standards and not make any attempt to enrich their lives. They don't appreciate actual organisms.

One thing that would greatly help the pre-med mess (and I assume pre-nursing and other health fields as well) would be to massively expand medical and nursing schools. After all, don't we constantly hear stories about how in demand nursing and other allied health jobs are (I don't know quite what the demand is for doctors, but I'd guess similar)?

After all, many states have only one medical school, some have none. Greatly expanding the number of schools would cut down on that grade inflation and people just trying to get straight As without giving a shit about the actual material.

Of course (other than cost) the main problem with that would be medical professionals themselves; massively expanding the number of health care workers would probably lower salaries.

[Simon_Jester]

I guess building the Orion-class ship in Earth orbit is right out as well. Presumably setting off the first few nukes to get the ship to escape velocity would fuck over the ionosphere.

If you're going to assemble in space, you might as well use more conventional high-impulse engines, like an ion drive. The reason Orion is interesting is that you get immense thrust over very short timescales, which makes it a competitor with chemical rockets for launching stuff out of a gravity well. A lot of other propulsion systems can't do that, because they can't generate high short-term thrust.

[HMS Conqueror]

As a UK Physics student myself, I don't want to make STEM degrees more popular. Not because I want a high salary due to low supply (though that's always nice), but because in my experience everyone who was capable and suited to STEM went into it voluntarily. Adding more people would mostly add incompetents, diluting the teaching system and producing worthless additional graduates at considerable public expense. STEM has dropped as a proportion of degrees only because more (and less intelligent) people are being subsidised to go to university than in the past.

As for this, "A report has said that around 12% of UK graduates graduated with a degree in STEM. The report suggests that this number is vastly inferior to the required targets needed for our economy. STEM graduates must increase by over 100% if we are to keep up with the predicted growth in the economy." I don't even know what this means. What government department calculated how many particular individuals were needed for particular sectors over 10-20 years? Presumably the same lot who managed British Leyland the NCB oh-so-competently. If we could just produce Russel Group Physics and Maths graduates at will, there would be no reason to not have almost everyone do that: those people are already among the very top earners. But the market responds to what is available and possible, not vice-versa.

Of course, if it ever became really urgent for some reason to have more scientists in the UK, loosening immigration laws would readily provide whatever number you need from India and China.

[Shaun]

It basically means that our economy is losing out on some money because we cannot produce enough STEM graduates. Whether it is because many R&D positions or other positions requiring good knowledge of STEM are having to be moved abroad to countries where people actually care about science I don't know.

[Starglider]

Yeah, on the subject of not enough jobs for sci/eng graduates (from ZeroHedge, see original article for lots of supporting graphs);

What made America great is now Killing her!

What made America great was her unsurpassed ability to innovate. Equally important was also her ability to rapidly adapt to the change that this innovation fostered. For decades the combination has been a self reinforcing growth dynamic with innovation offering a continuously improving standard of living and higher corporate productivity levels, which the US quickly embraced and adapted to. This in turn financed further innovation. No country in the world could match the American culture that flourished on technology advancements in all areas of human endeavor. However, something serious and major has changed across America. Daily, more and more are becoming acutely aware of this, but few grasp exactly what it is. It is called Creative Destruction.

It turns out that what made America great is now killing her!

Our political leaders are presently addressing what they perceive as an intractable cyclical recovery problem when in fact it is a structural problem that is secular in nature. Like generals fighting the last war with outdated perceptions, we face a new and daunting challenge. A challenge that needs to be addressed with the urgency and scope of a Marshall plan that saved Europe from the ravages of a different type of destruction. We need a modern US centric Marshall plan focused on growth, but orders of magnitude larger than the one in the 1940’s. A plan even more brash than Kennedy’s plan in the 60’s to put a man of the moon by the end of the decade. America needs to again think and act boldly. First however, we need to see the enemy. As the great philosopher Pogo said: “I saw the enemy and it was I”.

THE PROBLEM IS NOT CYCLICAL, IT IS SECULAR.

The dotcom bubble ushered in a change in America that is still reverberating through the nation and around the globe. The Internet unleashed productivity opportunities of unprecedented proportions in addition to new business models, new ways of doing business and completely new and never before realized markets. Ten years ago there was no such position as a Web Master; having a home PC was primarily for doing word processing and creating spreadsheets; Apple made MACs; and ordering on-line was a quaint experiment for risk takers. The changes in ten short years are so broad based that a whole article would be required to even frame the magnitude of the changes. What needs to be understood is that this is precisely what is destroying America. Let me explain.

The process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact of capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern must survive within. America as the birth place of modern capitalism was rooted in a clear understanding of this process and the indisputable reality of survival of the fittest.

"CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: … the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization – competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives”.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

From Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975) [orig. pub. 1942], pp. 82-85:

In 1997 prior to the ‘go-go’ Dotcom era unfolding, America’s unemployment was less than half of what it is today at 4.7%. At that time the US added 3 Million net jobs which reflected the creation of 33.4 Million new positions while obsolescing or cutting 30.4 Million old positions. Job losses occurred in old vocations such as typists, secretaries, filing clerks, switchboard operators etc. Hired were new occupations such as C++ programmers, web masters, database managers, network analysts etc.

As the chart above illustrates however, the additions have fallen off precipitously while the job losses have stayed relatively flat. In 2009 job losses were 31.0M and only slightly larger than 1997 which would be expected with further internet application development. New job creation however was only 24.7M which is dramatically lower than the 33.4 in 1997.

The result is 40.8M people on food stamps in the US, as seen below.

http://home.comcast.net/~lcmgroupe/2010 ... Growth.jpg

This net creative destruction chart reflects closely the US economic output gap.

Employment levels at 58.5% are now near 30 year lows and do not show any signs of significant improvement. This is despite nearly $13T in artificial stimulus to restart an economy that appears to refuse to restart or unarguably is minimally a ‘jobless recovery’.

Once again Tyler Durden and the folks at Zero Hedge did an excellent analysis of the July unemployment numbers by correctly adjusting for shifts in workforce participation. It is surprising that no one other than Zero Hedge understands how to properly assess the monthly labor rate. Their analysis, using government BLS numbers, is shown below and reflects an unemployment rate of 14.7% adjusted for workforce participation.

Is it any wonder Christina Romer as head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors resigned the day before the July Non-Farm Payroll numbers were released, when she once again would have had to spin and justify the unemployment rate to the media?

ITS STRUCTURAL, NOT THE FAMILIAR CYCLICAL BUSINESS CYCLE

All the preceding graphics have been labeled with a December 1999 vertical bar. In every instance it shows a major cusp occurring near that point in time. The dotcom market bubble finally popped 3-4 months later. There are anomalies that create some distortions after this period, such as the explosion in both the residential and commercial real estate sectors that temporarily fostered massive hiring from brokers, agents, contractors, trades personnel, developers, etc. Much of this has subsequently been pulled back.


WHAT HAPPENED?

The short answer is the US is no longer innovating fast enough. Innovation needs to sustain its exponential growth to absorb the creative destruction job losses. It no longer can. Mathematicians would have argued some time ago this was a certainty to happen, but precisely when this would occur however was the unknown.

We have been cutting Research and Development expenditures in the US dramatically. I warned of this in 2009 in my article: America, Innovate or Die! It has only gotten worse since. Corporations may be reflecting minor cuts on their balance sheets in this area but it obscures the fact that the money is increasingly being re-allocated and spent offshore. Jobs and innovation follow R&D.

The Financial Times in the UK featured this global analysis to the right, which to the best of my knowledge never saw the light of day in any US publication. The rate of growth in research papers in the US is not keeping up.

Total researcher share is shrinking and falling further behind as the chart below demonstrates.

Even more alarming is the number of US patents being filed. Other than IBM and Microsoft the numbers are stunningly small. It needs to be fully appreciated that both IBM and Microsoft now have large numbers of major world class research facilities outside the US and the US filings numbers below are likely reflecting this (see America, Innovate or Die!).

“The numbers of engineering graduates in China and India far outpace that of the United States. In China, it is 600,000; in India, 350,000; in the United States, 70,000, and many of these are foreign students who, more likely than not, will be returning to their home countries.”

Senator Edward Kennedy -- 10-25-05

Testimony - Senate Record

Let me relate a personal story if I may. In the early 90’s I was a Vice President of Engineering for a S&P 500 corporation in Massachusetts. This engineering facility in Massachusetts consisted of over 900 engineers supporting an enterprise with 28 facilities and over 10,000 employees. Today it is all gone. The towns in the immediate area of this enterprise also had major facilities of two other S&P 500 corporations. They are also both gone. There were companies in Massachusetts at that time by the name of DEC, Data General, Prime, Wang to name but four, that employed hundreds of thousands of highly skilled personnel. They are likewise gone. So where are the jobs to replace them?

Communities in this area now reflect those who have temporarily found jobs as a result of the over building of retail stores and malls during the last ten years in almost every available piece of land that could conceivably be built on. I walked into yet another Home Depot and found one of my former employees working in the electrical department who happened in the ‘90s to be one of the world’s best power supply design engineers. He told me there was one other with him from his old department. Both as I recall had Master’s degrees in electrical engineering.

The new technology in the area is now Bio-Tech. These new Bio-Technology corporations however only employ in the 5 and 10 thousand range of employees. Not the 100s of thousands that the four corporations I mentioned above once did. These Bio-Tech players additionally have an extremely high percentage of Master’s and PhD level employees. What about the high school and/or college grads? Few need apply. I personally see this demographic lined up for Dunkin Donuts application forms each morning while relaxing after my morning jog. More also out of work PhDs due to reduced teaching positions is not the solution. This is the state of affairs in R&D that our politicians don’t see nor fully comprehend.

IS IT GOING TO CHANGE?

I told you the above personal story as a way of leading into one of my primary goals in the early 90s as VP of Engineering of this particular operation. It was something called Cycle Time reduction. This is the process of shortening the time to market of products from concept to revenue generation. The chart to the right shows a graphical representation of this.

We were so successful at reducing this through computerization such as the implementation of CAAD-CAM-CIM, JIT, Kanban, TQM and a host of other acronyms that we were at levels approaching 80% of the following years revenue being forecasted to be derived from products still on the engineering concept boards. Margins and room for error were absolutely razor thin. The strategy was like the old three legged race at the community picnic. The faster some tried to run the more they tripped themselves up. It was a strategy where speeding up the process left unprepared competitors with a fatal competitive disadvantage. The fight for market share was intense. Though I had moved on, when the internet arrived and supply chain management was reinvented and overlayed onto the previous advancements, the enterprise was rapidly shuttered and moved to the far east. It is one, of no doubt, thousands of similar stories in America. America’s ability to innovate and adjust to that innovation killed this American based organizational unit. The highly skilled, intense and motivated employees innovated themselves out of a job.

THE LESSON IS THIS

America used the rate of innovation as a foundation for its competitive advantage. Like the tortoise and hare however, the US can no longer maintain this rate and hence the advantage has temporarily shifted to the previous followers who are presently less impacted. America must once again innovate and change but now in a manner more fitting for the realities of this new decade.

The product today is no longer the widget that comes off a manufacturing line and is stuffed into a box to be shipped to distribution centers for sale. The product today with short product life cycles and hundreds of new products is Intellectual Capital. Intellectual Capital is the knowledge of knowing how to do something. How to design and build something – not the actual ‘doing of it’. Until America forces corporations to account for Intellectual Property properly, the multi-nationals will continue to fully exploit this tax loophole. Even worse, America’s innovation will continue to be used against her. The cost of manufactured products today are less and less in labor & production and increasingly in materials and innovation. Capital is likewise shifting to be more intellectual versus financial. A major overhaul of accounting standards must be driven by our legislators or it will not be changed. It is not to the multi-nationals advantage to allow such a debate and shift to occur.

Unfortunately our law makers allowed this American asset to leave the US unrestricted, untaxed and without recourse. It was America who knew how to design and build a PC. It is fine for the product to be built where it is cheapest as part of free trade, but only when the cost of the knowledge or Intellectual property is priced in. Amortization of research & development must include the Intellectual property value as well. The Intellectual Capital was an American asset, not a corporate asset which left. Massive royalties should now be flowing to the US taxpayer today which would offset many state and local services cuts. Instead we are left with underfunded corporate legacy pension plans that the government in the years to come will no doubt pick up the tab for by likely hyperinflating the currency. Though it is too late to revisit the horrendous US failure of public policy in the past, it is not too late to prepare for tomorrow.

While I disagree with some of the proposed solutions, the offshoring of the bulk of corporate R&D is real and is a very serious problem for first world societies. Of course on the flip side it's a huge gain for China and India.

[Starman7]

Speaking as an undergrad, I think there needs to be a bit more focus on what engineering degrees are like at the high school/early university level. I never really considered an engineering degree in large part because the classes involved didn't integrate well into my other studies, since it looked like a very credit-intensive area with little crossover into other fields. I am going into biochemistry/premed, but I regret not having a chance to look at engineering before I had to decide. In hindsight, I probably should have asked my advisor, but going into my junior year there's no time to explore engineering and then take all the classes needed for it. At least not without obsessively planning my schedule and taking so many classes I turn into an insomniac.

On another note, I must agree the primary/secondary schools I went to did not work to prepare me for college. Everything seemed so basic that I never learned to study, which really came back to haunt me. I'm usually a 3.5 student, but in my last semester, between a high-level CS class, organic chemistry, and Biocore (a hard, somewhat rushed intro biology class that covers a lot), I had a 2.75-ish semester. Most of the classes I had up to that point were either conceptual or easy, and when I had to memorize many detailed signal pathways, reaction mechanisms, and mathematical/programming details that went way over my head, I procrastinated rather than put in the time and effort to study hard.

Parental encouragement can go a long way towards directing study: with a doctor for a dad, there was little question that I would go into a "hard" STEM field rather than a perceived "soft" field such as English, burger flipping, or accounting.

Finally, I have to complain about the way they teach the scientific method in high school. Teachers just go through the "observation, hypothesis, experiment, analysis, theory" steps without teaching the details or the significance of it. I never knew what a replicate was until my sophomore year, I'm pretty sure the first class to teach me about double blinds was college psychology, and the fallacies of anecdote, causative vs. correlative data, and lack of statistics were never really picked up on. Pseudoscience thrives on anecdotal evidence, and that just isn't taught in high school.


And no, I'm not simply punching the premed ticket Alyrium, I'm actually more certain about bio/chem research than I am about medicine. I am really, really bugged about an experiment where I got data opposite what was expected... and about how I somehow managed to miss the fact that nickel chloride was a carcinogen right up until I got to lab and the professor told my group.