Part of a larger study to ascertain which countries may have a brighter and better future than the US, I found data that allowed me to calculate what percent of students were majoring in engineering or the sciences. The point being of course that "sociology" majors or "journalism" majors don't really advance society or technology at all and are basically hobbies rich, spoiled suburbanite Americans like to major in thinking somehow they'll produce the wealth necessary to support themselves throughout their lives (which they won't).
Alas a good metric to gauge the future productivity of a nation is to measure what percent of the students major in something worthwhile, and thus these statistics from the OECD (2006)
As one would have previously guessed Asian nations score rather high with Korea having over a third of their students majoring in engineering or the sciences. The Scandinavian countries fair rather well, except Iceland which may go a long way in explaining why their country collapsed and others haven't (engineers tend to have enough math skills to know you can't spend more than you earn). Mexico beats out Canada by a wide margin, but Canada is not as bad as the US where only 15% of our students major in something worthwhile.
It's not that difficult to understand that if your country majors in worthless subjects then your future productivity is going to suffer, but the problem you run into is where capitalism has produced so much wealth in the past it affords the masses the LUXURY of majoring in a hobby and not a career.
Alas, fluffy el crapo degrees will be with us for a long time.
we will all be rich through interpretive dance.
truck drivers. roughnecks , factory workers. engineers , covorting frivalously across the pristine landscape. cue the William Tell Overture pastoral music.
A few quibbles:
What about the overall numbers of students.
If country "A" has fifty million in post secondary education,
and Country "B" has one million, the actual percentages become moot. Country "A" will produce many more productive contributors.
While I don't know the numbers, I'm assuming that the US has a very large number of students in post secondary education.
Also interesting is where the students end up. It seems to me there are a lot of highly "technically" educated Asians coming to N. America.
I'm thinking there's not a lot of highly educated Americans heading to Asia.
Also one would want to be careful not to discount what a generation of spoiled post adolecents represents: an accumulation of wealth.
Where in other countries, the wayward 21 year old may be merely unemployed, and living in their parents' squalid apartment,
in Canada and the US they are unemployed, but in the "humanities", with expendable wealth, living in their parents' nicely developed lower level.
Expendable wealth is good for an economy, no?
One must be careful when referring to data like this. Fareed Zakaria in his recent book, The Post American World (2008, discusses this topic in some depth and found that the numbers for the Asian countries were skewed as by "engineering" and "science" students they include auto mechanics and similar type courses or professions that are not included in the US and Canadian numbers. So the numbers cited are distorted to some extent and need careful review before concluding the Asians are that much further ahead.
Re the 'Fluffy el crapo' degrees, http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2006/10/daddys-little-girl-gone-and-got.html
I need to see the 'subjects' surveyed...;)
My un-scientific experience at university (as a biology & chemistry major) was that engineering students, while adept at technological answers to questions (assuming a pure science type had actually worked out the theory first), were woefully ill-equipped for the rest of life.
From explaining to them about the "birds & the bees" to the desirability of eating with a fork in polite company rather than their hands, they were perceived mostly as "useful idiots", who's math skills consisted mostly of spending other people's money - their parent's mostly. Enter the B.Comm majors, who regularly exploited both of us for material gain.
Your chart would be more convincing if you explored the correlation between engineering students and the b.Comm students eager to market their inventions...:)
The artsy-fartsy crowd were viewed more as background noise, and a source for cute one-nighters, than as any meaningful contributors. If you wanted a more permanent hookup, you loitered around the nursing students, who had a nice mix of earthy good looks, enough science to be interested, and a predilection for being sympathetic smoozers.
I suspect our current mess can be directly traced to science and engineering flunk-outs who went to teacher's college or had to take the liberal arts program instead, combining both a lack of understanding of things scientific and possessing below average social intellectual skills, being inordinately susceptible to things that sound like a good idea, rather than being a good idea.
/sarc :)
As in most human endeavours, when the endeavour becomes the goal the individual and those around him become stunted in their growth and potential. So long as Education is a goal the usefulness of education will decline.
As others have pointed out, the ratio of students in proportion to the whole population is an important statistic.
Also, did you note that Mexico, which is on the verge of economic and societal collapse, has a high proportion - 25%? Admittedly, Mexico ships most of its impoverished off the the care of the US taxpayer, bases its economy heavily on drugs, and ...?
biff, I agree 100% with what you said
Let along the work ethic of many Asian born students that I've met
I honestly wouldn't work as hard as they do
That being said, there are sure a lot of "non-productive" career training being fostered by our North American schools of higher education.
Speaking as an engineer, I have often found it less than desirable to eat with a fork in polite company, especially such as when eating soup, in which case I often find a spoon to be more practical, depending of course on the viscosity of said soup. Of course, to non-engineers, practicality is often of little importance.
vitruvius - rheologically speaking?
In which sense, Erik?
vitruvius - I'm in over my head. It was supposed to be a pun on "rhetorically speaking" - because I didn't understand where you were coming from with that post.
In any case, I would view the push to increase "higher education" in the US/CAN being quite similar to the GSEs pushing everyone into home ownership.
Not everyone should pursue, or should want to pursue a "university education". There are some that don't have the tools, and then just "sign up" for lame degrees that really provide no training in core skills.
I'm all in favour for thinking and broadening minds, but that can also be done by individuals after a hard day's work, rather than on the taxpayers' dime.
Ah yes, Vit, but if my understanding is correct, you are a software engineer. The spoon is an appropriate engineering conversion of a fork, and consistent with your meme...:)
The civil and mechanical boys would have just grabbed the bowl and evacuated its contents directly as fast as the cross-sectional area would permit...
The Scandinavian countries "fare" rather well.
They may be "flufy" degrees, but at least the grads should be able to use the language when they graduate. At least, that's a goal.
Based on what I read in all sorts of published realms, none of the graduates are "able to use the language when they graduate". Any language.
Lol, I got a music degree. Real useful! But I'm actually really good at math and sciences. I aced a whole bunch of Economics courses I took in university too. The truth of the matter is that you can learn more from reading online and teaching yourself than in university. Post-secondary education has turned into a kind of make work project.
Hitler had a better idea, too, which didn't include fine arts or philosophical thinking - analytical thinking, beyond that which benefited the Reich or the then-emerging new world order. After all, a nation in obscure servitude is ideal for an oligarchic society.
Yes... get rid of anything that smacks of humanity... replace it with the artificial, the dead. The living dead. That's the society that you want, right?
SDA = "Small Dead Minds."
No matter what the topic, a leftist will always find a way to invoke Hitler. They seem to be obsessed by him.
While I agree with Captain most of the time, as a physician I have found Social Workers for the most part to be very useful people. For example when I have to send a geriatric from their home to a long term care facility the social workers are extremely useful at helping to navigate the complexity of the system and figure out all the things that need to be done so I don't have to waste my education on these issues and can practice more medicine - which is desperately needed.
I don't think any of you including the Captain is suggesting that we just pitch some helpless or addled geriatric out on the street.
That being said I know where the Captain's point lies: useless programs like womens studies etc. are a waste of a person's four years and my tax money.
As a civil engineer working almost exclusively for foreign companies and thus bringing money into Canada, I strongly object to my taxes going to support university course in gender studies, pottery for the deaf and any other courses designed specifically to indoctrinate impressionable young people in Marxist-Leninist "philosophy".
I don't propose elimination of these non-productive courses. I only suggest that our taxes be used only to subsidise engineering, medicine and hard science courses.
Unfortunately, this is likely to continue until scientist/engineers in the U.S. can look forward to salaries competitive with those earned by marketers and financial planners and the job security offered by teachers, government bureaucrats or professors of women's studies and other nonsensical fluff disciplines.
I'm a little insulted that you think my television career doesn't really count as a succesful job and my degree in journalism is worthless. But hey I'm not going to hual you in front of the HRC because we disagree.
DON'T ANYONE BITE.
langmann - I agree that many social workers bear a heavy burden - and make often are forced into extraordinarily difficult decisions with a disappointingly commensurate low pay. I would not wish on my daughters the career of social work - terrible job. And, if anything goes wrong, your name is in the paper.
The problem with many university programs IMHO is that "options" to help broaden the mind have become "Majors". These programs as an end result produce more "professors" who can't find jobs, but who end up in special interest groups as a way to make their living. And then the shakedown industry grows and grows.
Erik Larsen: ... I would view the push to increase "higher education" in the US/CAN being quite similar to the GSEs pushing everyone into home ownership. ...Not everyone should pursue, or should want to pursue a "university education".
Excellent points. Keeping in mind that 50% of the population have IQ’s in the double digits, our system is producing large numbers of people “educated” well beyond their ability to understand what they are “taught”. And that’s under the often dubious assumption (particularly in the po-mo humanities) that what they are being “taught” is “understandable” in the first place.
I agree Erik. Most degree programs are crap. I personally think universities need to be privatised. Even in the sciences some degrees aren't really worth it in terms of post-degree income, many of the science degrees need to be focussed on technology: for example I took a degree in Biochemistry from a major Canadian univsersity but if it were not for the outside work I did in a laboratory, I wouldn't have known any better than the average person how to work and design procedures in a modern laboratory.
(add to above comment) modern laboratory "in industry."
langmann - my undergraduate degree was also biochemistry. Most of my courses were non-contributory to my current specialty.
Similarly, I learned comparatively more lessons and skills about life in summer jobs from my manual labour co-workers.
They gave me (if I may be so bold to self-assess) a depth that I would not otherwise have, and I thank them for *that* education for which I was well paid.
Sociology? Where do you think government bureaucrats come from? Unfortunately.
It's amuzing that in the sciences we see many foreign students, especially graduate students; but my colleagues in the Humanities still think that the world is white!!!!
My only caveat regarding this post is when the British were teaching their future leaders Greek, Latin and "the Classics" they built a huge, powerful, prosperous Empire. The great engineering works were done by military engineers. When the Brits started teaching math and science in their universities, the Empire fell apart. Go figure.
All those "fluffy" degree programmes would evaporate in a real market with the student on his own dime. One of our greatest social problems is the growing of a class of over-schooled people who become disenchated when the world doesn't value them to the extent they had come to expect.
ENGINEERS. Well, I won't engage in the predictable stereotypes about engineers being socially unfit and stuff, but from a heavy dollop of reading of the Austrian School of Economists (Von Mises, Hayek) engineers DO tend to be fond of CENTRAL PLANNING of the sort that destroyed certain totalitarian regimes and their enslaved societies.
After all, not by accident did we get the term "social ENGINEERING".
It's not a lack of engineering students we're suffering from. It's a lack of critical thinking, which you don't need an engineering degree to master.
Erik: I agree; those who end up in blue collar jobs seem to be marginalized as being not intellectually bright; big mistake. I also discovered to my surprise the same as you. Many commerce area degrees also end up in construction jobs because of the pay. I was also surprised to find many conservative opinions among those workers.
Lesson: don't mistake the lack of skill with prose as coming from a dull wit. Usually it's the other way around. Examples in these pages abound. I don't refer to SDA contributors but to those names dropped frequently. Just watch the Oscars.
Captain, great read. One would have to add lawyers to the list of worthless professions that contribute very little to the future well-being of society.
Not to say all lawyers are bad, some do add worth, but they are in the minority. Most are just leeches.
Are you telling me that my Masters in Queer Studies isn't worth squat? That I've blown (ahem) six years of my life and $100,000 of mostly government money studying something that does has no value to society and no marketable value outside of university?
Ah Jeez, I wish people would tell me these things ahead of time.
Norm Matthew
funny that, those educated in the "leftisms" subjugated the lessors to do their dirty work for them, once educated in the real world, they did their own work, It's still so with the lefties today, they do nothing and then wonder how the roads get built and snow gets plowed:-))))
Vit
I'v worked with a lot of engineers in my day, I warn you tread softly:-))))))
Rabbit, if you get a tenured position, you've made a great investment. The problem is that very few end up in that "position".
It's sort of like having sports figures going around to disenfranchised children, and saying "professional sports is your future, it saved me from a life of disaster".
That strategy may work for one in a gazillion kids, but the rest would be better off being "pipefitters", or other meaningful professions where people actually produce things.
Cheers.
Norm - you're full of crap. Name 5 great engineering works built by the military.
SFA - that's how many.
The ultimate most noble profession, is plumber, bar none. We can all be great chefs, engineers, philosophers, scientists, and even politicians, but at the end of the day, it all reduces to ....
MND -
As an engineer and member of CPC, I can assure you that most Canadian engineers are not fond of central planning.
Working engineers tend to be the most free thinking and open of all the professions (being least dependent on government).
BTW, I manage quite well with a knife and fork (although, of course I prefer to eat with my paws).
JLC:
off the top of my head - the american interstate system, the flood control of the missisppi and the missouri and the roman aqueducts. I am sure there are many, many more.
"vitruvius - rheologically speaking?
Posted by: Erik Larsen at February 22, 2009 12:35 PM"
As a Mechanical Engineer and a someone who likes a good play on words, I found that phrase very amusing. Nice one.
PANAMA CANAL
*Cough* DARPANET *Cough*
Gordie,
stick to your knitting, mate.
None of these were military works, even if some were constructed under the auspices of USACE.
Others were sponsored by gov't agencies (eg USBR), however final design and construction were, in all cases, by private enterprise.
BTW, Gordie - I'm responding to you from Peru where I'm helping a local group build a very large hydroelectric project.
What are you doin' right now?
It's okay to push science and technology, but it's not okay to knock everything else.
The great thing about science and technology is that it is easy for everyone to measure success: it either works or it doesn't.
Same with finance: there's either more money or less.
But, measurement of success in the arts is imprecise at best, and can even change over time, as any art historian can tell you.
This doesn't mean that a career in the arts may not be worth pursuing.
I'm glad to hear that, JLC. For a moment there I thought
all you were engineering was that chip on your shoulder.
Everyone's an artist, Peter. An engineer
is an artist who figures out when to stop.
Artist: It doesn't matter, I'm free.
Engineer: Your bridge fell down.
Peter; I was trying to say the same thing, but in my own awkward non enlightened way.