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.
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