Category Archives: Education

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

Where Have All The Chemists Gone?

9 Comments

Thoughts on STEM from Walter Russell Mead. Part of the problem is grade inflation in the softer courses and overemphasis on GPA as part of the faux credentialing of modern academics, which chases students away from real degrees and courses. And I agree completely with this comment with regards to engineering:

Engineering is difficult. And if you’re going to stay the course you really must want it in your gut with a passion not far from love. It helps if you were one of the kids who tinkered with radios or with automobiles or even blowing up “spare” stumps with strange concoctions. Experience made college easier. Those who got into it because daddy was an engineer and expected the son to be an engineer mostly didn’t make it. The fire in the belly was missing.

So what’s new today? Manufacturing in the US is a faint shadow of what it used to be. And computer aided design is doing away with the need for large teams just to build a small subassembly for a product like an airliner. You don’t need several passes trying to determine the proper airfoil for a Dreamliner. The computer performs an awful lot of the preliminary testing neatly and cleanly. The final product is then built and tested to confirm performance with little more than some computer drafting needed to tweak performance to specification. A small team can do what many larger teams did in the past.

Despite a long career in engineering I don’t recommend anybody get into engineering these days, particularly if they want to do it for the money. If you must get into engineering do it because you build things, love it, and want to understand how to build them better. Go into it because your hobby is engineering. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

I’ve commented in the past that when I was growing up, engineering was what a lot of lower-middle class kids whose parents didn’t go to college went into as a way to step up in life, and they were the kids (mostly boys) who tinkered with radios and cars (my uncle was in this class). I think in the eighties, a lot of young women who were good at math steered into it, post-lib, but many of them didn’t have a natural affinity for it. But no one should go into it only with the expectation of financial reward — as other commenters note, most engineers who do really well financially go into management or become entrepreneurs.

I would also note that one of the things that drives New Space, and it’s dramatically lower costs, isn’t just the difference in incentives and business structure, but the fact that the tools available allow small teams to do what large ones used to.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is a good comment, too:

Being an engineer for over 50 years, I note the difference between the liberal arts and engineering grading systems. As was stated to me by Dr. R. F. Mehl, the engineering program does not grade on the curve. It uses real numbers. If you are driving cown the highway, you don’t want to cross a bridge built by an engineer that was graded on the curve. Grading an engineer on the curve can cause disasters later. However, grading a liberal arts student on the curve can only cause a social disaster like Obama. And the unintended result is that the liberal arts person feels so good about him/herself that they can’t be corrected.

Just like Obama.

[Late morning update]

Heh. “Hey, my major is ‘real,’ too.” It’s hard to tell initially whether or not it’s satire, but it becomes more clear as you get further into it.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Change” and Marxism

3 Comments

Some thoughts:

In my other life, when I was national security adviser to Communist Romania’s President Nicolae Ceausescu, I wrote the lyrics of his ode to “change.” Ceausescu pretended that his predecessor had devastated the country, and he pledged to change that change. In those days I heard that ode to change a thousand times, and today I am stunned by its similarity with the Democratic Party’s “change.”

I’m not.

Education, Media Criticism

Teaching Students How To Write

3 Comments

Some thoughts. I found this comment interesting, and it wouldn’t surprise me:

You guys have not read many manuscripts from academic writers, have you? As a long-time academic editor, I read hundreds–hundreds that were submitted for publication, no less.

Academics do not write well at all–most quite poorly. The three I knew who were truly gifted writers… to have lunch with them was to begin to study the wall for crack patterns, they were so introverted. Department chairs were absolutely incoherent, but there was substance there–they were simply quite used to having secretaries and copy editors do the hard work of making it readable for them. The legions of humanities and social science assistant and associate profs… one wanders across the tundra of their boggy prose delighted for even the tiniest patch of semi-solid jargon-free verbiage.

In my experience, good workman-like writing at any education level is quite rare.

I’ve often suspected that this is true of many “journalists” as well, and was one of the reasons that there was so much initial resistance to blogging — a lot of them really do need “layers of fact checkers and editors” to create their “product.”

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Higher Education Bubble

24 Comments

When will it pop?

He makes a point that doesn’t get made enough — that what kind of degree you get matters, but a lot of these children (and particularly the ones who are shifting back and forth between occupying Wall Street and occupying their parents’ basements) don’t get that. Nor does the student loan program.

[Update a while later]

In defense of classical studies.

Economics, Education, Political Commentary

An Open Letter To Greg Mankiw

27 Comments

In which oversized children at Harvard demand that they be mistaught economics. I love the comment from “Karl Marx.”

[Update a few minutes later]

The Crimson‘s response is brutal:

…the students’ attempt to connect their classroom protestations to the Occupy movement illustrates the disjointed and often unfocused nature of the movement. Indeed, it seems ironic that students in an introductory economics course at Harvard feel that by walking out of their completely optional lecture taught by a famous economist on the theme of income inequality feel that their actions ought to be considered a sign of solidarity with the Occupy movement. Such protests don’t show solidarity, they show ignorance and a lack of self-awareness.

There’s a lot of that going around at #OWS.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Latest Warm-Monger Scam

2 Comments

Some thoughts:

Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?

Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.

What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”

This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.

The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Are Schoolteachers Underpaid?

8 Comments

No:

Most teachers have Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in education, and most people with education degrees are teachers. Decades of research has shown that education is a less rigorous course of study than other majors: Teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores but receive much higher GPAs than other students. It may be that a degree in education simply does not reflect the same underlying skills and knowledge as a degree in, say, history or chemistry. When we compare salaries based on objective measures of cognitive ability — such as SAT, GRE, or IQ scores — the teacher salary penalty disappears.

I’d always suspected that, but I had never actually seen the statistics. Colleges of Education should be abolished, or at least not eligible for federal funding of any kind, including student loan guarantees.