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.

peter o'keefe - I agree about the arts being important.

However, I feel that we have gone from artists pursuing their craft because they had a non-suppressible creative drive, to artists thinking - well, seems like an OK way to make a living.

Many earlier Canadian artists suffered a lot (not that I'm saying that's right AT ALL), but they created because they had to. Goodridge Roberts, after plein air sketching, often could not get up because he was so weak from hunger.

So, sadly I think some artists have become just another GSE (as mentioned earlier in another context).

Peter, what exactly is "success" in the arts? You also are suggesting there is a positive relationship between the "arts" and "liberal arts" degrees. I think that's tenuous at best.

I was inaccurate - GR "had trouble getting up", sorry

I don't know how you draw the line between those who are great creators that will have a long term impact on the culture of a society (on one end), and the dilettantes who fritter away tax dollars producing BS (on the other end of the spectrum)

For a society, I guess it comes to a risk/reward ratio.

And, also how much the Chinese government, representing millions of workers screwing heads on Barbie doll, are willing to fund this through bond or US Treasury purchases.

The one "we were waiting for" keeps scaring me. For us all, I hope these fears are unfounded.

Stalin's label for engineers was "wreckers".

Why did Stalin do this when they were needed to build the utopia?

Solzhenitsyn was an engineer; Stalin feared him.

This random quote from google is mystifying to a layman: ""The broad masses welcomed the shooting of wreckers who tried to ..."

What is it about engineers? Why are they feared by tyrants?

Oops, meant for that to go on the above topic.

Education is an industry in this country and we have many people who are way over educated compared to other parts of the world.

I am a licensed electrician who works for a major electricity generating company. I have two college diplomas and a university degree. I make more money than most of the engineers who work for the same company, (because I'm payed by the hour and work a lot of overtime)

I could have become an electrician right out of high school, but I would have been unemployed at the time if I did.

At trade school I learned how to design the electrical services for major industrial building. In the real world electricians don't do this. Engineers do, they produce the drawings and we build it as they design it. Its good to have the knowledge to be able to tell them they are wrong on occasion, but really, we are way over educated. Most electricians don't do anything more complex than installing light fixtures most of the time. You can learn how to do that in ten minutes.

Look at the people who you know from your parents generation. What jobs did they do, and what education they have? Most of the people I know from that generation did jobs that now require university degrees, while having high school educations.

Minuteman; I too worked with computer programmers, (Systems Specialists) among others, who only had a high school education. There are many very bright people out there and all didn't have the opportunity for a university degree program.
In the Political sphere, I would rather have a person well rounded in life experiences than a Lawyer, for example, who had little experience outside of his Law office. (referring to the Great One not Lawyers per say)
A great man once said that greater education amounted to learning more and more about less and less.

who says engineers cant write fine prose too.

AMANAPLANACANALPANAMA

the worlds best engineering palimdrome

a universityprof I did handyman work for had stacks of technical binders and books thruout his house, and yet he couldn't figure out his dininglight dimmer when it crapped out--He thot it was the wiring! HAR!

Highwayman - GFY

I tried a palindrome for a lefty but missed a few letters, close though

Highwaymannutlesslefty

CAL2 - that was so amazing that all interst in palindomes completely subsided as a result.

Many have tried to top this (me included), but it can't be done.

Or as the ecofascists say "many are fried but few are frozen".

Cal2 - I was referring to your AMAPA comment.

I would nevertheless encourage you to keep up your lefty palindrome program.

It is a work in progress

minuteman - what you said.

Plus, we have lost a lot of skills to do "common sense" things ourselves.

G'day Highwaypoofter

even those of us [like me] who are building a future for the wretched and disenfranchised of the world need a bit of time off.

I bet that if I'd said that I was down here helping to wean the poorest of the poor off their reliance on CO2, you'd have reckernized me as a hero of the left.

De nuevo - GFY

OK highwaypoofter - what do you do for a lving?

I do what I do because I love my work and I'm f***g good at it.

I don't do it as a way to assist the poor, I do it because I'm good at it and people ask me to help them. For me, it's a bit of a bonus that per cap GDP increases as a result of what I do.

Me and my colleagues learned our trade in the first world [Canada, US, Australia, Europe].

My Peruvian mates are as competent as any Nth American engineers. All they need is the continuity that comes with development.,

The way it used to be when I went was people most often flunked into Education. I was in the Sciences and after the first semester there were a lot of missing people. I don't have a problem with that except maybe their science experience may have swayed some of their students away from sciences. I have seen HR treat all science degrees as 'equivalent' meaning they would put a BSc in Biology in a Chemist position. That does not work well very often.

jlc, please ignore, it just wastes everybody's time and energy - cheers, Peru sounds more fun than -5C

What a senseless waste of human life.

Not that I'm in favour of taxpayer-funded fluffducation, but I just gotta point out the obvious: Cap'n, isn't Economics widely considered to be a fluff degree? ;-)

jlc @ 3:53

1. Panama Canal (as previously posted)
2. The German Autobahn
3. The Roman roads system
4. The US Interstate Highway system (The Interstate Highway and Defense Act and still funded by the US Defense budget)
5. The Mississippi levees
shall I go on....
Most of the original ports, highways, railways and transportation canals in the colonies (eg Halifax, Montreal, Rideau Canal)mainly because the Royal Navy and the Royal Engineers were the only organizations with the trained engineers, logistics, organization and funding, to undertake large projects.
The point of my original post is the British elite of the 19th century, although educated in the classics, did not attempt to make their living from the subjects studied at university or in schools. They went into the world as soldiers, sailors, merchants and such. Their educations gave them a broad knowledge of their world and its history. A modern Arts degree should do the same but is too often so narrow in scope (eg womyns studies aka the intellectual slums of a university) as to be useless.

Furthermore the graduates of arts programs believe they should be able to work in their field of study because medical, engineering and accounting students get work in their fields of study. So do, most don't. As another poster stated, if arts programs taught critical thinking their graduates would do well in all sorts of business and industry positions.

I see that Korea has the highest percentage of sci-engineering grads.

No wonder Hyundais and Kias have improved so much. Just look at the new Genesis high-end sedan. It's actually right up there with grand marques such as M-B, BMW, Lexus, according to the nearly-impossible-to-please auto journalists...

Maybe more sci-engineering grads in N.A. will help the Detroit Three to improve their offerings... I think they have too many people in suits, too many bean-counters, and not enough engineers and others responsible for the product itself... involved from product genesis to production.

Oh, as for myself, my degree is in business, with all my 'optional' courses chosen in the economics discipline.

Didn't do much good for me professionally, but at least it gave me a start from which to learn about the real world and discover that much of what I learned in university didn't address the complexity and reality of the world. It's as if universities are enclosed within protective bubbles so as to not really reflect the real world in "teaching" (many professors don't teach, but rather babble on and on, making people bored and frustrated and learning little if anything, like I was, so I learned to teach myself, actually, and found that I could actually not bother to go to some non-math/science classes and still do really, really well on exams, and this happened in a law course professed by a former Liberal MP who was defeated by a Tory).

Graduates are as naive when leaving university as they were when entering (I know I was, and I really only learned about all sorts of things the hard way at work). The awarding of the degree is the beginning of the actual learning experience. University... it's a bit much... too many unnecessary courses, too expensive, too dogmatic... I truly do wish I went to a tech school of some sort... could've been an electrician (my brother, recently early-retired from the Forces, has a business degree too, but is now an electrician, not some tightass in a suit and tie).

I worked with an "Engineering Graduate" from either Lebanon or Syria, once, about ten years back while I was in Australia. He had a degree called a "BSEE" It turned out, after we worked with him a short while and began to wonder, that it was the equivalent of one of these post high school technical certificates that you see advertised on TV now and then. Of course, in Australia, firing someone was nearly out of the question, since he did not explicitly lie, so we had to find something for him to do and limit the damage as best we could.

ahh the arts. I'm actually sitting in an international relations class right now-hopefully no one criticizes the fact that I'm not listening-and I'm weighing in on the pros and cons of my political science degree.
To begin, I know it doesn't have inherent value as a background to any essential service. Let's get that out of the way. I won't be able to use it to innovate, develop or produce future technology. But then again I knew that when I enrolled.
What my degree has provided me with however is a background in economics, a comprehensive understanding of political history and a very extensive worldview. I am well spoken, written and knowledgeable in how governments function, interact and remain productive. I can bash the left, criticize political correctness, make educated arguments against any political point, tear Marxist arguments apart and promote my conservative values with a wide array of concrete historical arguments.
So, all in all, my degree has provided me with an education that has made me well rounded and knowledgeable in current affairs and the political context in which I am living. It has prepared me to further my education with a business degree and I can honestly say that my understanding of the world around me surpasses any of my engineering peer's perspectives.
Criticizing knowledge is a counter intuitive concept. Any elite member of society needs to have a background of some sort in the arts and an undergrad is a great way to achieve this. It's a launching pad and a foundation but shouldn't be an end in itself.

Iceland at 15%!!!

I guess the Icelanders are all studying banking and credit :-)

Brian O'Doyle at February 23, 2009 1:52 PM

I also am very erudite and knowledgable about human history, culture and politics and philosophy.

I also understand mass, length and time, as I am an engineer.

When visiting Sweden in 1975, I was surprised to learn that in Sweden, engineers are paid more than doctors, with the later all employed by the government as civil servants. Go figure ..!!!!

"Most electricians don't do anything more complex than installing light fixtures most of the time"

Residential or construction electricians, perhaps. Industrial electricians (well, good ones, anyway) are a different breed: they need to bone up on equipment troubleshooting, industrial controls, etc. Lots of elecs can bend conduit and run wire, but the best/brightest and most highly prized do a lot more.

I tried a palindrome for a lefty but missed a few letters, close though

Posted by: cal2 at February 22, 2009 7:00 PM

Hey, cal2, how about this:

HE G0DDAM MAD DOG EH

mhb23re
at gmail d0t calm