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Free Tuition for Math, Science, and Engineering?
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Zonk
on Tue Aug 21, 2007 08:32 PM
from the sign-me-up dept.
from the sign-me-up dept.
Gibbs-Duhem writes "Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus wants free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon working or teaching in the field for at least four years. From the article: 'The goal, he said in an interview last week, is to better prepare children for school and get more of them into college to make the United States more globally competitive, particularly with countries like China and India. "I think the challenge is fierce, and I think we have a real obligation to go the extra mile and redo things a bit differently, so we leave this place in better shape than we found it," Baucus said.' Do you think this would help with the US's lackluster performance in these fields?"
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Higher Tuition For an Engineering Degree 531 comments
i_like_spam writes "The NYTimes is running a story about a new trend in tuition charges at public universities throughout the country. Differential pricing schemes are being implemented, whereby majors in engineering and business pay higher tuition rates than majors in arts and humanities. Last year, for instance, engineering majors at the University of Nebraska starting paying an extra $40 per credit hour. One argument in support of differential pricing is that professors in engineering and business are more expensive than in other fields. Officials at schools that are implementing differential pricing are aware of some of the downsides. A dean at Iowa State said he 'thought society was no longer looking at higher education as a common good but rather as a way for individuals to increase their earning power.' And a University of Kansas provost said, 'Where we have gone astray culturally is that we have focused almost exclusively on starting salary as an indicator of... the value of the particular major.'"
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I think it's good (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, it should be good for the country as a whole, having more scientists and engineers. Those extra beakers and hammers are really valuable!
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Insightful)
As such, I'm a little skeptical of the scheme, but without knowing more of the implementation details I'm afraid I can't critique it in depth...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I think it's good (Score:4, Insightful)
I know it sounds harsh, but the kids already in school are pretty much a lost cause. This country needs to focus on getting parents to perform the roles they are supposed to - socialize and prepare their children to be productive members of society.
Sitting them in front of the TV to watch the same DVDs over and over again, or to play Grand Theft Auto and shoot the homies doesn't count. That produces the misfits that are coming out of the schools in droves.
If this country wants educated people, we need to approach this problem differently than just offering free degrees in math and science. They are crap degrees now anyway. Kids get passed up the ladder from grade to grade because the teachers don't want to get dinged for flunking a bunch of illiterates and the classes have been marginalized to the lowest common denominator.
The problem right now is with parents. They are too interested in their own little universes to properly care for their kids. They need to know and act like kids are the responsibility they really are. They need to show interest in their kids. Not just plop them in front of anything that will keep them occupied while they watch American Idol or some Monday night footbal game.
Re:I think it's good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>>Advances in science and engineering both create jobs. A couple of coots putting together a transistor in Bell Labs apparently spawned off the international industry
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I think it's good (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Insightful)
If it increases the pool of qualified science teachers, it is -- and right now, there is a real shortage of math/sci teachers who know science and math, even leaving aside the issue of their teaching skills.
Re:I think it's good (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever look into games theory?
Re:I think it's good (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Insightful)
You ever thought that the job the Physics PhD wants is a teaching job?
--Mike
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not really sure if your post is implying that a PhD might teach poorly, but I had a PhD in physics as my high school physics teacher. I had never had another person with a PhD as a teacher before, and he was by *far* the best teacher I ever had. Pretty much exclusively due to his existence, I am now a fairly well published researcher getting my PhD in Materials Engineering from MIT. Granted, he's special in a lot of ways because he was willing to work as a teacher in an inner city high school despite being somewhat overqualified by our typical standards. However, I suspect that anyone who is able to get a PhD understands and is excited enough about their field so much that if they try at all they'll be able to generate many future PhDs who would never have thought about doing something more difficult than IT. Being Weird to an employer definitely does not imply that you are a bad physicist!
I plan to teach someday too, but currently I'm enjoying the heck out of myself doing actual research, so it'll probably be a few decades. =)
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Insightful)
part of me wonders how effective a PhD would be at teaching high school students. Honestly, if you have a degree in Physics and can't find a job, I'm not sure I want you in front of students as you must be a horribly weird person.
What a small-minded comment. Not everyone is just after the money, you know. Most people who go to the trouble of getting a PhD have a passion for the subject, and often that is accompanied by a passion for sharing the subject through teaching. Have you ever considered that the person wanted to teach high school students, rather than viewing it as some sort of fallback job?
Re:Where's the motivation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Passion, sir. Passion.
Any companies driven by passion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think it's good (Score:4, Insightful)
_That_ scares politicians.
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I think it's good (Score:5, Interesting)
Students saddled with debt The recent student loan scandals have shown us that most student "aid" in America is in the form of loans, and the whole industry is one big racket engineered to rob the unprepared (students) and the taxpayer (govt subsidy on interest). Recent college graduates, not to mention dropouts, are saddled with insane amounts of debt.
Government money better spent this way
Finally, my personal hypothesis is that was placement in college affordable for a demanding major, the more incentive for children from poorer sections of society to avidly pursue it. "Free" is a very powerful word. As long as it's reasonably strenuous to get in (i.e. quality and selectivity are not being sacrificed for price or subsidy), I think the demand could be great enough to drive reform in individual high schools. Inspiring such bottom-up reform in the bloated bureaucracy that is our public school system is far more worth it than any "top-down", watered down establishment approach.Can it be retroactive? (Score:4, Insightful)
But seriously, forgiving the debt of recent graduates who are now working in engineering fields will pump a shit-load of money into the economy.
Re:Can it be retroactive? (Score:4, Insightful)
So don't raise taxes. Cut other programs (like the war in Iraq) that are sucking money to no good end.
Great Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Clever (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
link [ed.gov] see page 3.
This won't happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because anything that makes the least bit of sense never does, in America.
Cynicism aside, this is a much needed proposal for the future of America. We are being left behind in so many markets due to increased global competition, but we are also lagging far behind in quality accessible education (meanwhile, tuition rates continue to rise).
I wish Senator Baucus the best of luck with this. He deserves our support.
Of course it will help (Score:5, Informative)
But have they considered (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But have they considered (Score:5, Interesting)
I truly applaud this senator for the initiative and believe that that ALL states should follow suit and offer a similar program, to help keep the sciences strong in the US.
Increasing the amount of graduates.. (Score:3, Insightful)
So what you'll end up with is a bunch of people with math, science and engineering degrees asking "Do you want fries with that?", which actually isn't bad. At least they're educated.
No free lunches (Score:3, Insightful)
And the 'Free money!' (of course TANSTAAFL) mentality would totally distort the education establishment even more than the transition of Athletics from a sideline into a major cash cow did.
Consequences of Unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
So either the scholarships need to be available to anyone who meets the simple criteria of graduating and working in the field, or they probably won't have the intended effect of increasing the quantity and maintaining or improving the quality of engineering graduates. They'll just end up being a hand-out to the people who don't need handouts.
Honestly, I think the USA's best bet is brain-drain. We need to tear-down a lot of the post 9/11 every-foreign-student-is-a-potential-terrorist rules, and kill H1B, replacing it with a fast-track to citizen-ship visa (I say go so far as to make citizen-ship a requirement after 3 years on this theoretical visa) so that we attract and then keep all the smart people from the rest of the world.
Nothing will change (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't bribe someone to be a nerd.
Either you are interested in learning about the world or they aren't.
American kids aren't avoiding math and science for lack of funds.
They avoid math and science because its HARD and not cool.
They are more interested in sports and MTV and shopping and spending their parent's money than they are in learning how to do anything that takes effort.
If they can't charge it to daddy's credit card, it's not happening.
Of course this is an over-generalization, but you know its true.
That is our culture.
Even foreigners who come from a culture that values hard work and education fall victim to American culture. They bring their families here and in a generation or two their kids are lazy and spoiled like the rest of us.
American society cares more about athletic ability than anything else.
We act like sports is life-and-death.
Play in a company softball game and see how people act.
All anybody ever wants to talk about is sports.
People look at you funny if you want to talk about the space program or something crazy like that.
But if you want to talk about how Johnny Random hit a ball with a bat, that's fuckin fascinating..
Maybe its just where I work or something?
Re:No, it won't help (Score:4, Funny)
Dad?
$1000 for Graduating HS on Time (Score:5, Interesting)
It costs the government something like $30K a year to keep a person in jail. Not to mention how much it costs to run the rest of the judicial system, to build the jails, the damage caused by their crimes, or the taxes they could have paid if they were free to work. By the time we're done with the difference between a free person and a jailed person, it's probably over $50K a year. The average Federal jailtime is over 5 years [usdoj.gov] per sentence, or well over $250K per prisoner (many get multiple sentences per lifetime).
People graduating HS on time are less likely to commit crimes and go to jail. So every person who the bonus spares from jail is worth over 250 people who get it, but still go to jail. In other words, if the increased on-time graduations reduce the crime rate even as little as 0.25%, they're worth it. It's probably closer to needing only 0.1% or less to "break even". And that's not counting other benefits, like increased productivity, reduced teen pregnancy, and all the other benefits of on-time graduation.
We can afford a lot more investment in Americans' education. Some targeting high performers who need more money for even higher performance. Some targeting low performers at risk of creating more damage than it costs to prevent. Education is always the investment with the best return. Investing more will pay off quickly, creating more money to invest, and improving the country across the board as a "byproduct".
Consequences for the research/credential question (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, there are some students who straddle the fence — in a way, I was one myself — but for the most part the undergraduate student population is rather sharply divided between the research-directed and the credential-directed. The fact that programs have to accomodate both lead to conflicts — the research-directed students complain bitterly about dumbing-down of material and excessive commercial influence on the curriculum, while the credential-directed complain about having to learn a ton of useless theory which will be irrelevant to their future.
I mention this because I speculate that Max Baucus' proposal would certainly change the current equilibrium between these two camps, particularly if free tuition is only for science/engineering students. True, there would be a lot more research-directed types who can't get into university now for lack of funds, but I imagine most of the people who'd come who aren't there now would be credential-directed.
There's also another reason they'd be credential-directed, which is the tone set by the policy itself. There's something a little disturbingly utilitarian about the proposal of granting free tuition only to those people. This sort of philosophy makes me wonder whether the line would be drawn around science/engineering as a whole, or around only those science/engineering programs that have a utilitarian (read: "commercial") appeal. I would think it would be hard for the government to argue that engineering and category theory are "useful" but that philosophy and rhetoric are not.
If, however, research-directed programs are ruled out, the result would likely be a forcible segragation of research-directed and credential-directed students, even more than there is now. Maybe this is where we're headed anyway, but it would be regrettable as the forced mingling of the two has been hugely productive for both in the past.
We don't need more engineers (Score:4, Interesting)
The US doesn't need more engineers. If it did, salaries would be higher. In 1970, engineering and law salaries were about equal, or so says the IEEE. That's certainly changed.
The US doesn't need more engineers because high-tech manufacturing has gone offshore. Where the manufacturing goes, the production engineering must go, and the design engineering follows. Then the brands go. Then top management. Then the financing.
Read the Lenovo story. [lenovo.com] They're not a spinoff of IBM. They're a successful Chinese PC company that bought IBM's PC business to expand. IBM is just the company to which Lenovo outsources US warranty service.
Re:Yes, it would work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from that, don't forget that giving free college education to foreigners is great, considering that you get to choose how long you keep them, and where you let them work.
You save twelve years of fundamental education, and with just four, you get an engineer who will work where you want him to work, and for as long as you wish.
The same thing is done by European countries, they import graduates for example from Latin America, give them a free or a cheap Phd, and they get a cheap doctor in whetever they need, for 3 o 4 years of education. Of course, that money comes back in patent royalties, and expensive technology exports even to the same countries that provided the people.
Re:Yes, it would work. (Score:5, Informative)
Since I like helping bigots, here's my link for you: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276508,00.htm
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Helping eachother is the human superpower. Having big teeth and claws is the ti
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, we've (ab)used parts of it, anyway. [wikipedia.org] I think that "using" the rest more would sort of limit the charm, unfortunately.
-b.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. "National service". Make a GOSPLAN [wikipedia.org] while we are at it...
How one stupid Democratic idea can bring others in tow...