Education: Are we training too many scientists?
Brendan Maher
Friday, 25 April 2008 11:40 UTC
It’s baffling to many that education reform has been so absent in the campaigns of U.S. presidential candidates. In the May 1 issue of Nature, Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell of the Urban Institute provide their take on U.S. competitiveness in science and technology. Every time international testing of students on science and technology is done, pundits fret over what it means for the United States’ ability to compete. But while the mean scores place the United States as underachievers, no one seems to be paying attention to the long tails of distribution: The impressive number of high performing students and the equally impressive and dismaying number of low-performers. What do you think needs to be done?
Should we look to the lessons of ivy-league bound students in South Korea as a recent New York Times story seems to imply?
Can we better learn from high performers within the bounds of this country, or is the Nation’s educational system as obsolete as Windows 95?
The time for discussion is ripe as the National Academies convened this week to refocus congressional attention on their clarion call for change, Rising above the Gathering Storm
Lowell and Salzman who responded in the past to the Gathering Storm report have said they may be able to respond to questions and comments.
Also this week, Andrew Moore from the European Molecular Biology Organisation writes on the need for molecular evolution education in European middle schools click here for the forum on that commentary*
Updated 30 April 2008 18:00 UTC
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Replies
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The article suggests that good performance in school causes students to kill themselves. Or perhaps the causation is the other way around, who knows.
Apparently the claim was based on an extensive study of statistics and correlations which, among other things, tell that in Finland the number of suicides is far smaller than in, say, Alaska (18 vs. 23 per 100 000). Thus I’m inclined to believe that Alaska must have the best educational system in the USA or perhaps in the whole world.
Alaska has also a two-times-higher murder rate than Finland, which makes things a bit confusing. Why does a world-class education in Alaska make people kill each other but not so much in Finland?
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What we need to do is restore Equal Employment Opportunity to the H-1B visa-hiring program so that employers are required to seek local talent. Tech professionals now face want ads that call for H-1B only.
We can do that by lobbying Congress to pass S1035.
In a letter dated April 1, 2008 Senators Durbin and Grassley, who had introduced bipartisan legislation last year to prevent H-1B and L-1 Visa abuses, wrote to the top 25 recipients of H-1B visas in 2007 stating, “Most companies can explicitly discriminate against American workers by recruiting and hiring only H-1B visa holders. As the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has said: “H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of a foreign worker.”
Legal discrimination always creates an oversupply of qualified professionals, as Salzman and Lowell’s report suggests.
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It has been the policy of the National Science Foundation since 1990 to increase the number of foreign students at U.S. schools in order to lower the salaries of of university researchers.
The “Johnny can’t do math’ argument being played by college administrators and high-tech industry lobbyists just carries this perverse logic to new heights.
And now, by adminstration fiat, under ‘emergency’ rules, we have Michael Chertoff extending the OPT period for foreign students on F-1 visas to 29 months, which is a de-facto increase in the H-1B visa…
Will the last American technologist please turn out the lights?
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Did you hear the comments from citizens of West Virginia about Obama ? If anything we need to move camp to W. Virginia and enrolled anyone still breathing. Please, a mind is a extraordinary gift to waste and there are those headed for the nuclear dump.
Sincerely,
Norman A. Smith
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