Productivity

How much of your day do you think you spend actually doing something that is, we'll say, technical. As in you got your degree in engineering, microbiology, whatever. How much of your day (or week, or month) do you spend actually putting to use that knowledge versus maybe auxiliary skills (implementing a design change, writing up a presentation, writing a grant)?

Engineering Jobs by Discipline

I talked before about what states are hiring engineers and where all the engineering jobs are. Best estimate there are something like 44,000 engineering jobs open nationally right now. The census says that in 2008 84,000 people graduated with engineering degrees. Engineering shortage? I think not. Probably my 44,000 search was not broad enough to include the kinds of jobs engineering graduates might go into. But still, that's nowhere near a shortage, is it Corporate America?

So what kind of engineers are being hired right now? Software engineers.

Making up almost half of open jobs software engineers have it made. If we have a shortage of engineers, maybe it's that kind of engineer. The problem is we're recruiting people into a very diverse field without specifying what we really want or really need. I was curious how this stacked up to major choice and pulled a some numbers from a local university to give a breakdown:

You can tell mechanical and civil/structural majors are heavily overrepresented. People are probably going into these fields and finding the jobs aren't there. This is all magnified when certain geographic areas (Detroit vs Silicon Valley) have very different focuses even when colleges might be more diverse. Chemical and electrical engineering majors are a little closer to the national average of open jobs and software/computer engineering heavily underrepresented.

I'm a bit torn by including software engineers here. There's a big difference between "computer engineer" and a programmer. Many job openings ask for a degreed engineer when what they really need is a programmer. But if they're asking for an engineering degree that becomes a part of the requirement that job seekers have to meet even when it's unlike other engineering disciplines. Given the low numbers though it's possible those with other degrees, or no degrees at all, are filling the gap for these open software jobs. That is if anyone is even hiring.

To masters or not to masters

So I'm going to blame GEARS for getting all my little mind wheels spinning on this. He wrote a few topics at Engineer Blogs firstly to never pay for grad school if you are a US citizen and secondly a post on whether grad school for engineering is worth it. Of course all of this got me thinking. I hadn't planned on going back for my master's. Going through my bachelor's was like going through the gauntlet. I'm still tired just thinking about it. I don't think I'd get to go for free as I'd likely need to keep working through this whole thing. Unless I waited a significant amount of time (like 6 years).

 

And yet at work I am starting to realize I will have to work twice as hard to achieve the same level. Where in two years from now I might qualify for a promotion if I spent the next two years working on my masters I could easily turn that into two promotions in three years. It's possible that the longer I stick around the more people will have master's degrees and the more that will become the norm for engineering.

 

But thinking about it really makes me tired. Yes it won't be as long and bitter as the five years of working full time while doing my undergrad, but it'll still be probably a two year minimum commitment while I'm trying to juggle ever growing responsibility at work. I could wait, but if I wait it just seems like time wasted that could've been spent gaining the credential.

Looking for trends in all the wrong places

I found the above graph here. It's not so important that it doesn't include the last five years or so for my purposes.

 

I was looking at MegaCorp's new hires and discovered that in the last three months of intense intern hiring (it's the season for interns!) 24% of them have been female. I wondered how this compared to engineers hired. Turns out in the first 5+ months of this year, 10% of our new hire engineers have been female.

 

Now, my local university says that about 18.5% of engineering degrees are conferred to women. So the intern numbers seem to be, if anything, on the high side.

 

Compare the new hire numbers to the historical chart at the top and you'd see that we'd have to be averaging 30 years of experience for the engineers we hire for 10% to be a reasonable number. It's unlikely our average new hire engineer is 50 years old or more.

 

What does this mean? Why is the effort being made on the intern level to bring in more women but we don't see it when it comes down to hiring full-timers? It's possible, I suppose, that women are graduating with degrees, and working internships, but then somehow not going into engineer at all. If they are going into completely different fields after getting an engineering degree, and in high numbers, that could explain it.

 

Or is it part of the general trend that women tend to work in lower paying occupations so it's easier for a woman to get hired on as an intern than it will be for her to get hired as an engineer. Or maybe HR is trying to push diversity but can only manage to do so as a part of its intern hiring program but can't convince managers to hire more experienced women.

 

This might make a lot of sense if both numbers were on the low side or on the high side. Then you could draw some conclusion about MegaCorp's particular industry or maybe locality differences. As it is it looks a little strange.

Catch a falling engineer

CNN International has an article up, why would be engineers end up as english majors. They really mean why they end up as non-engineering majors, but that's besides the point. They follow a student, Amenah Ibrahim, on her journey through her education.

"The first thing the (professor) told us was, 'You should expect to see this class dwindle down as the semester goes on.' It was the first thing they told us," she said.

They article references a study showing that STEM majors take students longer to finish. But it glosses over statistics that show that it's disproportionately a deterrence to underrepresented minorities:

Thirty-six percent of white, 21% of black and 22% of Latino undergraduate students in STEM fields finished their bachelor's degrees in STEM fields within five years of initial enrollment.

I think most of us in engineering would agree that a lot of the academic rigor that discourages people is probably a good thing. As some of the commenters put it, it prepares you for the real world. But more importantly maybe, you want your engineer, or your doctor or a number of other professions, to have gone through a rigorous education. You want the weak to go off to other majors where maybe their real life careers won't have such an impact. Though we know we have a problem that the system is encouragin white people better than it encourages people of other races. And that means we probably need better support systems in place and better university understanding. There's ways of making sure we're not booting out talented people without dropping the standards.

On the other hand, people are focusing too much on the "need" for STEM graduates.

James Brown, executive director of the STEM Education Coalition, said a big problem is that educators don't often realize the urgency of fostering the next generation of American scientists and engineers.

I'm sure they realize the urgency. They realize that the jobs that were available years before are no longer available. That even before this recession, getting a STEM job was not easy. If we aren't funding science, R&D and infrastructure programs graduating a bunch of scientists and engineers is not going to create a demand in jobs that isn't there. I just talked about this a few days ago, how while engineering is still one of the better employable majors out there at under 70% for 2009 graduates it's not a pretty picture.

The guy at the STEM Education group would be better off reaching out to businesses to start spending more of their reserves on research or to anti-tax politicians to start thinking about how we're going to fund future development in this country. We used to be the world leader in manufacturing. And while some might think manufacturing is coming back thanks to the weak dollar we're no longer the science and space leaders of the world. Like the space program and the interstate highway system that all means spending money. So while that's currently out of fashion, I'm not sure we should be putting the pressure on STEM students and universities rather than where it belongs: business and our politicians.

More on the superiority of engineering

Today on Engineer Blogs I talked about interdisciplinary engineering which is the theme over there this week. (See posts by Cherish, GEARS, and Paul Clarke as well). There's other engineering in the news today though, again from the NY Times Economix blog college majors that do best in this job market.

 

A month and a half ago I had a post on some economic news that included the mention of an article about engineering being the best paying college major. You'll notice some discrepancies. The CNNMoney article touting high salaries for engineers says they all had a higher starting salary than $60,000. However the Economix chart is based on earned income in the last 12 months so the median income for someone with an engineering degree employed in a job that requires that degree is...$35,548. Now probably some dinosaur engineers will show up and say that this was quite normal for them and kids these days are too demanding. Probably haven't read any of my numerous posts on inflation.

 

Hopefully the low number is due to people starting their job more recently than 12 months and only having a partial years earnings to report along with maybe some people who are working part time. Still, the percentage of engineering graduates who are employed in a job that requires their degree is 69.4%. That's the second highest after teaching at 71.1%. Higher than the oft praised "business" degree, health, or physical science (which will surprise no one in the sciences). Communications, humanities and "area studies" (whatever that it is) make up the bottom of the list. So while you shouldn't always hunt the money, hunting a degree that leads to more full employment might be useful. Though even the numbers of employed grads in the top fields are abysmally low. More victims of this brutal job market.

Home is where...

So I was listening to the radio this morning and then this story came on NPR about a brother and sister, both of whom had had to drop out of college and move into their family home. Their mother had passed away when they were both in high school and the eldest racked up some debt in college before they both decided they'd move home and try to get jobs in order to save the family home and keep up with mortgage payments.

 

The sister, Natalie, came back and was working as a secretary until she got laid off at the start of the recession.

 

They both need that one job — the one that will get their plans back on track. But neither of them can find it.

Chris is selling TVs right now, but it's part time. Natalie got laid off again. They pool what income they have, allocating it on a triage — to the credit cards, to Chris's dental work, to the house.

"Natalie and her brother, they don't want to sell the house, or they can't sell the house — if they do, they take a major loss," Rogers says. "So in a way, they're limiting their search options."

But while a lot of people out of work are stuck where the jobs aren't...

So I was thinking about them stuck in their house, in an area where maybe it's difficult to find a job even if you have a college degree. A lot of people are there right now, barely making it on part time income or a lower paying job than they wanted and unable to move to find a job because their underwater in the house. Seems like it's only the upper middle class schemers who are walking away from their homes, maybe the rest are scared about the problems with filing for bankruptcy or hear the stories about banks coming after those who short sold telling them they still owe extra money. Or maybe they don't want to throw away their investment, or maybe they want to do the right thing, or maybe they just want to keep their home.

 

I stepped outside and scared the bird that's decided to nest above our patio. It's right across from the door so every time we come and go it's a game of trying to not disturb the bird enough that it freaks out and flies away to the trees out front. It probably looked like a good place to settle down. The patio makes it relatively protected against the cats but mostly crows that go after small birds' nests. It might have been setting up on a day we were mostly out for a long day at work, it didn't necessarily know two bipedal mammals would be disturbing it a couple times a day.

 

So it's a lot like a lot of the homeowners right now. Probably just laid its eggs and can't just move the nest. Not always easy or possible to pick up and move where the jobs are. Sometimes you make the best decision you can at the time and can't predict how things will change. Sometimes it's still a good home and worth keeping even if there are problems.

Cost of a college education

What's it cost to get a college degree these days and is it worth it? The economix blog at the NY Times talks about the rising cost of student debt. Graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000. That might not sound as high as the scare tactic numbers you've been reading everywhere, but of course the concern is that not every college student finishes their degree. So while the total lifetime earnings of a college grad are better than those of just a high school graduate, they aren't always achieving higher starting salaries when they need them to start paying off expensive student loan payments.
Cost of college does seem to be more about choices though than the media makes it out to be, Bankrate has this list of the 10 top most expensive and cheapest private and public colleges. Sarah Lawrence tops out at 30k+ a year (not including room and board I'm guessing) but even the most expensive public colleges range from 8-10k. That's probably in-state tuition, and probably not including room and board, and there's always the top 10 affordable public colleges in the range of 2.6-3.2k a year. Not too bad, and several of them are not bad.

Has college tuition and student loan debt gotten out of control? Or are too many people making poor choices and not attending local and affordable state colleges? Or is that not even an issue when expensive colleges and student loan companies are fleecing parents and students?

Smog now in Technicolor!

One of the undergraduate environmental labs at my university uses colored dye, water and salt to simulate smoke plumes and pollution. In a tank of distilled water a mix of salt water acts like an upside down version of smoke or steam pollution. After time these slightly more dense solutions will settle on the bottom of the tank much like a layer of smog can lay at a fixed altitude over a city.

 In the photo below the red layer is a medium density salt water mixture that settled into the bottom of the tank like a layer of pollution. The blue mixture is even more dense and as it billows upwards into the atmosphere (or down into the water tank) it being slightly more dense than the red layer it will settle as a more dense layer below the red layer. Never expected my lab photos to turn out looking so artistic.

Leaky Engineering Pipeline

You ask managers why they have problems recruiting women they will probably tell you things like well, women just choose to go into other fields. Or they like more fulfilling careers helping people and don't like working with machines. Ask those managers why they have problems retaining women they'll probably tell you because all those women keep having babies and leaving the workplace. My own manager in the same breath as promising to finally help me out here (see me whine about my salary here with a colorful graph to illustrate) asked whether he'd have to worry about me taking a "baby leave" anytime soon. I should have turned the question around as he is equally married, only a few years older than me, and just as likely to produce spawn himself. Instead I just took some Fukitol and shut my mouth. Turns out plenty of other women working in engineering might be taking the same drug.

 

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee nearly half of women who leave engineering leave due to the environment and working conditions. Only one in four who left did so to spend more time with family. How many never enter engineering? I know a female student who is graduating and may or may not enter the field. Nothing to do with babies either. According to the study, one third of women who graduate with an engineering degree but don't enter the field do so because of their perceptions about the field being inflexible and having a culture non-supportive of women. Listen to this chilling account from the article:

"Engineering school was pure hell for me," one survey respondent wrote. "My personality inspired much sexist behavior from my male classmates and my teaching assistants. At some point, after many interviews, I decided that I wouldn't want to spend the majority of my waking hours with the type of people interviewing me."

Holy crap. I'm happy to report no discrimination in my university experience. Or at least, none that I witnessed personally or can remember. But it could be my experience is not typical. And it's disappointing to me the cold shower of disappointment that hit after I entered the industry is actually getting to people before they even start working and discouraging them to enter the field. So what about the women who leave after they get started in the field?

Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers, were most likely to want to leave their organizations, according to the study.

Long working hours, unclear work objectives and a lack of company planning also drove women to leave the field.

...

"This study touched a nerve with so many women," Fouad said. "Those who stay in the field differ in that they have supportive supervisors and co-workers, and they have very clear perceptions of their jobs and how they can advance in the field."

Total shock that women probably want the same things from their jobs that men want. We are not all baby making machines ready to leave once the 'mones kick in. Asking too much not to be belittled or undermined in the job, having some vague idea about what your job purpose is, and knowing how to move up? I know you're thinking, "Hey FrauTech, I'm a dude, and I have these same concerns!" You're right sir!

Men could have the same complaints, but they haven't left the field as often.

...

Many companies have struggled with employee retention.

"There are probably quite a few male engineers who aren't necessarily thrilled with the workplace climate," said Charlene Yauch, Industrial Engineering program director and associate professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

...

It also says companies should have zero tolerance for bad behavior.

"We hope to reach out to men as well," Fouad said about another study she wants to do.

It's kind of sad that for this kind of thing to get traction means they have to "reach out" to men. Like we're two different species. I tend to agree with the statement in the article that states that engineering universities should "give women a more realistic preview of engineering tasks and workplace cultures." But I don't think that's a women only problem. And much as the macho/top-dog/kill yourself working culture hurts women it hurts men too. Only the other societal pressures on men are probably not as heavy as they are on women, hence why women leave the industry more often. But that doesn't mean fixing the workplace culture wouldn't benefit everyone. And it means it's not some crazy niche idea for women only.

But the numbers for women have stayed pretty flat: "Women comprise more than 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are female, according to the National Science Foundation." I hate to think how much talent we lose when we ignore the low numbers of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering. Or the creativity and innovation we're throwing away when we stick to models of "good old boys" that hurt everyone, women, minorities, even white guys. I guess we need to "reach out" to those white guys to get them to buy into this idea that the system isn't working for them either. And that by working together we can make it better.

Can college teach critical thinking?

Two sociologists wrote a book from a four year study that followed 2,300 students at 24 universities and tried to see what they actually learned. What they found was, in general, college students did not improve on critical thinking and writing skills. They blame a lack of "rigor" in university schoolwork and a system of student evaluations that pressures professors to assign less and less work. Students in liberal arts disciplines did slightly better than students in business or communications.

 

I first read about this over at Historiann's with a longer article on the study here and was reminded about this when one of the authors did an interview on NPR this morning. There's also an article on discussion on this topic over at Higher Education.

 

Personally I feel so much of it is a kids these days kind of attitude. It's in the ruling elite's best interest to prove that today's college students just didn't learn as much or as well as they did back in the day. But what with cutting funding over the last 30 years to public education institutions it's no surprise to me something would suffer as a result. But how about critical thinking or writing? Never once I have seen that directly asked in a job application or been able to deduce that an interviewer was actually looking for it. Especially in engineering there is a tendency to ask what products the person worked with, what kind of designs they can generate, their hardware and software skills. Back in my humanities days I wrote a lot. We had an excellent writing program in my high school which was topped off with a very specific writing program in college. Almost all my humanities classes required papers, easily hitting the 20 pages they discuss in that article. In engineering there was writing, but it wasn't as consistent. There was writing in early introduction and design courses, then again at the end in the senior level classes. But inbetween it's mostly problem solving. The occasional use of a CAD program or a few classes covering software programming whether in C or matlab were the only real take home assignments.

 

And why not? I write better than many of the young engineers I work with. But my writing skills have never come into play with my employers. I have a whole degree that covered writing, analyzing, critical thinking and other "soft" skills. Instead they ask what CAD program I've used, and for how many years, and did I use this other analysis programs? They ask what kind of hardware I've designed or tested looking for application specific knowledge. I think there's an assumption amongst employers that "soft" skills like writing can come in time whereas technical skills they really want new employees to have right away. I think this might be flawed, but it represents the system as it is. A good [designer] can learn to write whereas a good writer can never learn to [design], substitute in whatever the desired technical skill is.

 

But employers like to complain that college grads are not qualified period. That even in this economy they can't get qualified people to hire. Often this is attributed to a back in my day we used to kind of attitude with an assumption that whatever skills that manager learned in school 20 years ago are superior to whatever skills the student is learning now. I'm not saying the bar hasn't lowered for higher education. But a student graduating now is expected to have all the technical knowledge of an engineering degree, with the hands on knowledge of a shop, as well as software skills with programming, CAD, matlab, ANSYS, etc. They're also supposed to be pretty competent with MS Word, Excel and Project. Oh and they want specific application experience. I mean how can they expect to have this memorization and working knowledge combination and come out with a student who can think independently or apply the facts they've spent the last 20 years learning? I think new college grads will never be good enough for employers or for sociologists alike.

 

So much of what makes you who you are and what makes you good at what you do you learn on the job. This holds true for technical skills, application specific knowledge, and tribal knowledge. So why can't it hold true for critical thinking? If we aknowledge technical skills can be learned on the job, why not soft skills? We may not value it as highly but it seems like our employees could improve in many ways and we should stop expecting so much for an education system we've stopped adequately funding.

Engineering is Elementary

An elementary school in Minnesota is turning itself into a Specialty School for Aviation, Children's Engineering and Science. I like the idea of getting kids exposure early on to topics like engineering. But I dislike schools that tend to focus to narrowly on either a profession like this, or often language skills (which can be extremely useful if done well, or reduce the children's math and english understanding if not done well). I find it also kind of disturbing to see trends of pushing more people into the engineering profession. I think it's a great idea to make sure more people know about it and people who otherwise wouldn't have the option of going into it but have the ability or an interest to be able to pursue that but I fear programs like this give parents a false hope of a future stable career.

 

It's been all over the blogosphere about how there are a lot of PhDs in science. And post-doc salaries, as well as limited geographic choices and people leaving for other careers or not getting any job related to what they wanted would seem to imply we have an overabundance of scientists right now. Yes America, the UK and Canada need more scientists but they also need an industry and government foundation being the dual pillars of support for that innovation. And right now industry has been sorely lacking in this area for domestic development while government is fading away.

 

A little old, but this article discusses the myth of the engineering shortage. It discusses the H1-B Visa push in the late '90s to support a supposed shortage of IT and technology workers and how increasing education in China and India has meant where once we were competing with them for call centers or low level technician support now many professionals are on the same wave length as a highly skilled foreign workforce. And this opportunity is too much to pass up by domestic companies looking for short term profits. In fact for all the talk about a shortage of STEM degrees the article points out if you remove social scientists and technicans from the STEM umbrella past studies have looked at there has been a 130% gain in STEM degrees over a 20 year period while only a 30% increase in occupation. He goes on to state that given the graduation rates between 1993 and 2002 the US graduates enough workers in STEM to replace the entire STEM workforce every 15 years. Obviously, people don't retire every 15 years so unless there's economic growth at a rate comparable there's no possible shortage here.

 

Encouragement is not the primary issue assuming you don't care about recruiting minorities or women. According to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 30% of incoming college students state science and engineering as their intended major. Almost half drop out. If half did not drop out, we'd clearly have way too many graduates in those fields to be supported by the economy right now. So why do employers complain? The article discusses what they call the "Monster effect" meaning the job board site. Employers can recruit nationally and internationally and don't need to settle for local candidates. Ronil Hira, Associate Professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology said the following:

"In the old days," he explains, "companies expected engineers to stay around a long time, so they paid for professional development. Now, they want somebody to hit the ground running. They've turned engineers from an asset into a variable cost."

Hira states how this means engineers and IT workers tend to train themselves, and therefore don't focus on specialities that are too specific and not as marketable in a larger job field. The article discusses the disparity present within colleges as well where business expect graduates to be good at project management and communication and so colleges shifted over to focus on these broader more transferable skills instead of focusing on hands-on technical knowledge.

 

If there was a real shortage, you'd see engineering salaries rising. But instead in the same timeframe average salaries for electrical engineers rose 10% and aerospace rose 9% while management climbed 14% and lawyers 12%. And a whopping 16% of US engineers are foreign born. On the surface this may not be significant, but it's much higher than the 11% of managerial/professional workers in general and I'm sure higher than less educated fields.

 

Is there a non-cost advantage to bringing in foreign workers? The article includes an anecdote from an employer who brought on at least one US entry level worker and has said he will hire no more because they were more project management focused and could do the actual design and execution of the design that he needed. He compared that worker to interns he brought over from Germany whom he claimed were much more hands on and strong with machine design and tool making.

 

I'm sure there's some selection bias involved here in bringing over what are likely the top of the crop of German engineering students looking to move to the US versus what might be a local candidate who is not at the top of the US pool of potential engineers. But I also thought of Fluxor's recent post on the disparity between the on paper qualifications of an entry level engineer and their actual design and hands on skill. And there is perhaps something to note in the differences between German engineering (as well as other more hands on local programs) versus highly ranked universities. I've noticed schools that rank higher in the engineering discipline tend to be pretty strong on theory and analysis which makes sense if you're training the next crop of students to be research focused PhDs but less sense if you're training them for the workforce.

 

I agree with the article's quandary that engineers must now train themselves in these specialized skills whereas 20 years ago companies would generally provide that training for you. I think anecdotally about my own experiences of going out and learning CAD on my own and paying my way through local programs before I ever even started my engineering program. Most of the older designers I work with were taught AutoCAD or Solidworks or ProEngineer through workforce programs that don't exist anymore. When there are a plethora of candidates with these skills that you can pick and choose from, you don't need to train anybody yourself anymore. Even my school learning of these programs along with whatever on the job training I could snatch up was not quite enough to qualify me for a job and a title. The old problem of entry level jobs requiring experience, but how do you get that experience. In a field like design, I feel like I have the skills but because my title isn't what a potential employer thinks it should be it isn't counted. They assume if I actually had the skills I would have managed a title change but there's no incentive from an employer to recognize an employee who pays for outside education or training. Especially if they can get that employee to do the work without the title.

 

So I think we can assume there is no shortage of engineers. I think we can also draw some conclusions that employers can now be way more picky than before, and that that isn't always fair but it is the reality. Future engineers will have to graduate with a strong grasp of the theoretical fundamentals, communication, writing and project management skills, as well as strong hands on design and machine knowledge. Only so much of this can be learned from University alone and I suspect as time goes on training at community colleges as well as individually motivated on the job training and increased pressure for internships prior to the first full time job will become the status quo.

 

No longer can an engineer go through college and expect to derive all of her knowledge from that experience but will need to stay knee-deep in school projects, reading some current research and manufacturing papers on their own, self-taught review of the fundamentals for the field in which that engineer decides to apply for jobs, and career-focused technician classes at night. I hope to see some of these hands on programs snatched up by larger research and state universities, but I do not expect it. It is the only way western engineers can remain competitive with their foreign colleagues.

What About the Boys

This probably makes me a bitch, but I don't like mansplaining with my coffee. Even if it's from a woman. I'm not sure why I started watching the video over at Machines Like Us. It's offered with no commentary, so it's hard to say what the poster's intent was. But the video coming from the American Enterprise Institute should have clued me into its being a load of crap since the rest of their videos are all libertarian mumbo jumbo about how taxes are what's wrong with this country. I really wish our elected representatives had to take an up or down vote on a public option and those that voted no wouldn't receive healthcare from the government. If they're so sure it's a bad idea, I'm sure they won't mind buying their healthcare on the "private market" like they suggest for the rest of us.

 

But this doesn't have anything to do with healthcare. This is all about why aren't there more female scientists? The video is snippets from some panel mostly with Christina Hoff Summers who thinks women choose to go into other fields even if they are equally apt because other fields are more fulfilling. She's also the author of a bunch of bullshit books about how there's a "war on men" (like the war on Christmas right?). I agree with some of her concerns, but achieving parity between the genders in college attendance is not something I'm going to freak out about. Does this really mean fewer men are going to college now or just more women? We didn't worry about it in the 1950s when there were way fewer men, so why start a national movement to freak out about a few percentage lower men attending some colleges now? And anyways, her goals are all wrong. It's not because we've "forgotten" about the menfolk or that we're rigging the system in favor of women. It's because while women are making gains, inner-city and poor men are losing ground. So this is hardly a gender thing so much as a class thing. And I agree we should make more of an effort to support inner-city and disadvantaged youths, male or female. But reaching out the olive branch to the middle class, educated white men who read her books or follow her bullshit is going to gain us nothing in further educating anybody.

 

Where does she get off talking about women in science anyways? She has an unspecified BA and a doctorate in philosophy. So she's been in the folds of academia and liberal arts her entire life. Maybe when she gets a job in a math or science career or talks to more than one woman in the scientific field without holding her preconceived notions I'll give a damn about her.

 

Her ignorance is further amplified when she suggests there's a severe shortage of scientists and engineers in this country and that it's the NSF's responsibility to recruit people, both men and women (though I assume she means men since women choose to do other things). I guess she doesn't know about all the hoardes of scientists and engineers that are out of work right now. How there are all these PhDs in science who can't find jobs or have to live separately from their families or take extremely low pay just to keep working supposed to contend with even more people competing for the same low number of jobs. I mean if she's even part libertarian she should know that if there's a market demand for these jobs, people will go into these careers. If we start creating companies that produce things and need scientists and engineers, people will start training in that instead of becoming lawyers or working on wall street.

 

Luckily for my blood pressure, someone sent me this article from 2006, Male Scientist Writes of Life as Female Scientist. Dr. Ben Barres is a neurobiologist who was once a woman and is now a man.

After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's."

And as a female undergraduate at MIT, Barres once solved a difficult math problem that stumped many male classmates, only to be told by a professor: "Your boyfriend must have solved it for you."

"By far," Barres wrote, "the main difference I have noticed is that people who don't know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect" than when he was a woman. "I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man."

Barres underwent a lot of criticism for writing on gender differences, or lack thereof, and even though most of his writings focus on studies and data people assume he is taking things "too personally."

Some of those who argue against him tried to bring up a handful of studies again, the typical ones that argue that a man performs better at the highest echelons in math than women even though on the average, men and women perform about the same. Or other studies that suggest women are better at "verbal" things and men at computation. One of Barre's colleagues, Dr. Spelke, responded to the interview and has argued against making conclusions from such data that would imply genetic differences between male and female brains. Coming back to Ms. Sommers and her hackneyed theory that women "choose" to go into other fields and that is why they are absent, I love the quote from Dr. Spelke:

"You won't see a Chinese face or an Indian face in 19th-century science," she said. "It would have been tempting to apply this same pattern of statistical reasoning and say, there must be something about European genes that give rise to greater mathematical talent than Asian genes."

"I think we want to step back and ask, why is it that almost all Nobel Prize winners are men today?" she concluded. "The answer to that question may be the same reason why all the great scientists in Florence were Christian."

So non-Christian scientists or Chinese scientists in the 19th century European theatre probably just chose to do something else, something more fulfilling, right Sommers?

Engineering Groups and the Biggest Loser

I don't have cable programming anymore and past the first season of Survivor however many years ago and an occasional guilty pleasure with Project Runway I don't watch a whole lot of reality television. So I guess it's surprising I watched a little of this latest season's Biggest Loser.

I don't want to talk about what I think about the whole competition itself (though like most reality programming I feel drawn to it like people are drawn to watch a car wreck). But what I did find was interesting was they started the program with teammates. Two people competed together as a team unit. About nine episodes in they drop the partner scheme and they are back to competing as inviduals.

What I thought was interesting was the individuals' perspective on the change. Most were disappointed. Even though the individual work counted, that second person was someone you could fall back on for support and coping.

And I started to think about my engineering groups. Usually I rail against school-based group projects. Somehow you have four people and you would think that means you each only have to do one quarter of the total work but somehow it ends up being more like four times the work for each person.

I'm a shy person. And I don't mind working with others in the workplace, but it always came off as too forced and too social at school. But you know what? I realized I would never have met these people or formed these pseudo-friendships with them otherwise. I'm a self-sufficient person. I'd like to think I don't need to "make friends" (don't I have to pay some reality tv show guru for using that phrase?) That I'm there to get my degree and I honestly don't have time to be hanging out with these people so what's the point in being super friendly.

But it's nice to meet up with members from groups past. And have that common ground where you struggled on the same team for a goal. Where for some reason you care a little bit about their success and you know they care a little bit about yours. Someone you can casually wave hi to or who it's nice to see when you show up alone at the lab and recognize a friendly face.

So even though up until this point I'm usually pretty negative on how school groups function on projects, and I still think it's nothing like the "real world", there's something really beneficial about it. I don't know how you'd incorporate that better into an engineering curiculum because when I think back on the early and smaller engineering group projects I did not form bonds with those people or remember them past project completion. But there is something to having someone there who cares a little bit more about you than just anyone and knows exactly what you're going through.

the growing divide

If you're looking for a scapegoat in public education teachers unions make a good one. Most people don't understand how they work so charges of lack of accountability or costly pensions or healthcare (paid by your tax dollars) are more likely to go unchallenged. The WSJ has an interesting article on two latino students in Oklahama City. One goes to a public high school and one a charter school. They compare how many are eligible for free lunch (95% at the charter, 96% at the public) and numbers of college bound (62 out of 71 seniors at the charter, 40 out of 147 at the public). Both students miss a month of school to go to Mexico at some point, but only one student is working two jobs. One is college bound with scholarships, the other got one scholarship but will keep working locally.

 

I question their supposed implication for who is really successful. The charter school student, not having to work, got to participate in a lot of great high school programs. He left his gang days behind and instead "took to wearing straight-leg jeans and fashionable glasses." Do clothes make the man? Does imposing a uniform set of dress that society does not associate with hoodlums actually do anything for the "reformed" youth? And when he graduates in four years with a degree in whatever liberal arts discipline interested him will he be better off than she is as she continues to work?

 

Besides teacher unions, distracted parents are also blamed for the struggles these students go through. Often it is their teachers who are encouraging them to get into college. I can't help but wonder if that isn't imposing some western ideals on families whose definition of success might be different. I do think education is a great thing and that every student should have the opportunity to go to college. But maybe sending away the community's best and brightest without clear goals of what kind of degree is necessary to succeed, having them break ties with their neighbors, and not preparing them for what a college degree is actually worth these days is selling them a rotten deal. First generation college students, or students for whom very few members of their network went to college at all, may not realize what the struggles are. And we're only preparing them to get there, not showing them how they can then use that opportunity to leap to greater success.

 

The real heroes of the story appear to me to be the community leaders. The ones who stayed, invested in scholarship programs for these students, and organize the community events that both of the students were involved in.

 

I also dislike the comparison between a charter school and a public school. Besides the obvious, a charter school not having to "deal" with unions, laws, and many state or federal mandates on how to spend their money, the article sweeps over the difference in extra funding charter schools often get. All the benefits of public funding without any of the mandates, usually a much newer school than the public (this one is nine years old) and often with significant private funding. Yes I do think charter schools are useful to try new things that might get incorporated into public schools, but a school with private funding that gets to cap its enrollment is definitely more likely to help its students succeed than an overflowing public school that may have less freedom in booting out the less academically successful students. You'd think the conservatives over at the WSJ who applaud charter schools and their innovations could move pass the obvious teacher's union strawman and realize that more money means a better school.

 

We are left feeling the public school student will be less "successful" in terms defined by a white, middle-class business-centric authorship. I hope she is happy and satisfied with her life and that she still finds opportunities and challenges that she seeks, even if they aren't the ones the authors would consider important.

Everyone's in School

My community college class is packed. Apparently all sections are full and my undesirable evening class is still getting ok attendance a month or so into the semester. Summer classes were cut by 50% due to budget restrictions but I think the classes now are the normal load. Just that there are suddenly a lot more students. And not older, unemployed students (though there are a few of those) but young, fresh out of high school students.

 

The US Secretary of Transportation posted recently on his blog about his experiences at a community college as well as a future White House Summit on community college. From my personal experience, more students are utilizing community college programs, students from all walks of life. I know an aerospace engineer who after graduating started at his local college in the A&P program (airframe and powerplant) usually meant for technicians. You know when engineers are pursuing this they think it's important in this economy. And it could be cutbacks at other colleges have meant more students flowing into community college, some that planned to to save money or some for whom it might have been a second choice.

 

My university classes appear to be at the same capacity, despite the fact that tuition is measurably higher this year and I think there are a few more students than normal trying to cram in their final year right along with me. One of my professors used the word interdisciplinary about ten times, so I know what message is being pushed down from the top. For engineers who really ought to be thinking about specializing in the future of their careers I'm not sure how this will play out in the class. I wonder though if it isn't part of the overall grant/research effort and for the university to cover their asses on funding they lost from the government. Hard to say whether the ploy will work, or what affect all this will continue to have on the students.

The more things change

"From the minute I got there, they told me 'You will succeed, you will be a leader,' the Yale slogan-- you could taste it in the air." Two years after graduation she was still hunting fruitlessly for a nonsecretarial job.

No it's not another commentary on this recession's luckless graduates. It's a quote from one of the first women to be admitted to Yale in 1970. It's from the book I've been reading, Games Mother Never Taught You. The author, Betty Lehan Harragan, is using that quote to warn women against accepting the idea that the lack of a degree, a credential, is the only thing barring them from equal success with their male colleagues. Besides a few outdated things lacking mentions of email or calling out corporate switchboards, the nearly 40 year old book is still surprisingly accurate on the pressures of sexism in the workplace. Or more importantly, what women are not, as members of society, taught and therefore how this lack of knowledge prevents them from competing with The Boys at work.

Here's more on how eerily accurate Harragan's suggestions are to current economic realities.

A doctorate has become very nearly minimal to obtain a college teaching post; the BA's and MA's are scholarly rejects or incompletes as far as academic employers are concerned. Business employers have no alterante use for this academic overlow, so neither undergraduate nor postgraduate degrees in liberal arts categories lead to indstury jobs...Competitive companies can't afford to take chances with such noncommercial thinkers, and the proof is strewn over the landscape in the form of unemployed PhD's.

What this boils down to is the reverse of the statement that a college degree is a passport to a well-paying job. For women, a college degree in any of the stereotyped female teaching or teaching preparotry fields is equivalent to no degree. The effort adds up to at least four and probably seven years of wasted time and money so fars upgraded admission into the business world is concerned. Allwomen liberal arts graduates eventually come face to face with the cruel trick that was played on them but, significantly, I have never met one who recalls being told beforehand that her nonspecific college degree will have no marketable value.

Except now it's men and women picking up on this economic reality. I suspect up until recently the well connected middle class white male could still get by on his network alone. But now this is so common the NYTimes doesn't even have to come up with new ideas any more, just publish another whiney diatribe on the woes of wealthy young hipsters turning down $40,000 a year jobs because they thought their BA in Philosophy would get them farther. Of course these articles overlook the countless people for whom this fairlyand middle class lifestyle is a goal not a current reality. But it's intriguing that forty years ago Harragan saw women being fed this myth that all they needed was some education and they could be treated equally and she called it out for what it is. However, she doesn't speak too highly of engineering degrees either warning women can get stuck as specialists rather than move up at work. And here's another bit of advice that could have been written this year;

It is au courant these days to advise women to get undergraduate degrees in special fields where men predominate, such as engineering, chemistry, mathematics, and sciences. The advice is well intentioned and based on a logical principle: that jobs will be awaiting women who have credentials in occupations that were formerly closed but must now legally seek qualified females...Hidden on the underside of the BS advisory coin is a traditional pitfall for unwary women-- the downgrading of once respected professional credentials when women acquire them. I have no wish to see a young crop of women engineers and scientists replacing non-degreed men as drafters or engineering and science technicians rather than full-fledged professionals.

It is interesting that when a woman cooks, it is a hobby. But when a man cooks he is a Chef. Or when a woman sews she is a seamstress, but a man is a tailor. We're very good at separating what a woman might be able to do equally as good as a man as "woman's work" vs a well paying professional occupation. I'm sure some of my colleagues in the sciences have seen this happen to them. Achieve the same educational achievement and there is an effort to push them into technician or support roles. Once women start to achieve any sort of parity in any great number it seems that profession loses some of its societal recognition and certainly its pay and respect. Men who have natural aptitudes in these areas, and being from a generation that like Harragan's was told a degree was a passport to a good job, can now feel conned that they too can't get a decent job or decent pay because teaching or nursing is no longer something we as a society reward. And I've certainly seen my superiors attempt to put me into lower level positions despite having more education and experience than my male colleagues. Their being male automatically qualified them for a profession but my hard work and education readies me only for the non-degreed positions they are leaving behind. Harragan continues to have an uncanny description of how the workplace, and education, still works almost four decades later.

Predicting the future

I agree with plenty of other people that higher education has been incredibly overpriced. It's gone up way faster than inflation, most graduates go into the workplace with way too much debt, and the financial worth of a degree rarely is equal to its cost. But I don't know whether it's clear what will be the outcome. However, that doesn't stop people from making predictions the higher education bubble will burst.

I talked about some guy who calculated the actual cost/benefit before and determined it was better to invest the money in stocks or in starting a business rather than going to college. I thought a lot his assumptions to get there were pretty flawed and I think the same can be said for people trying to compare college to the housing market. If you can't afford your mortgage, you lose your house. If you can't afford your student loans, they don't take your degree away from you. Yes it's very bad and yes you might spend the rest of your natural life making payments on an education loan that never paid off for you. Maybe you got a degree in art history and then ended up being an insurance salesman in a rocky job market. However, they can't take your diploma from you and they can't suck that knowledge you gained back out of your head.

The author of the latest bubble theory, Michael Barone, makes some valid points. He links to this College Dropout Factories from the Washington Monthly about colleges whose costs are skyrocketing but whose graduation rates are plummeting. So people aren't even graduating and are still saddled with extreme debt. This is not dissimilar to the PBS Frontline show College Inc. that covered for-profit institutions who lure in working adults with cheap, subsidized federal loans without necessarily arming them with the skills to succeed and graduate from those pricey "career" programs.

Barone argues whether students shouldn't attend affordable community colleges at home the first two years then transfer to a four year institution. I agree with that and have tried to convince family to at least consider that option. But then I am reminded of this article in the NYTimes about helicopter parents dropping their students off for college. How the "going away" experience is not only a big deal to kids eager to go into the world but to parents who either treasured their first experience of independence or who did not get the same opportunities and want better and more for their children. Even when older generations chime in on the helicopter parent debate they like to cite their own examples of moving away to college and not knowing how to do laundry and learning from their peers or surviving off of ramen for several years at a time. The "college experience" is so crucial to parents who want better for their kids but also adults who criticize how children are overly protected these days. Staying at home is either too easy for kids or too lame of an experience.

I suspect the federal government will eventually have to cut back on the free flow of federally subsidized student loans. Once that happens the landscape of higher education will change. But whether that will mean more private loans, more aid to students who need it, a stagnation of college costs while continuing to cut back on services, or a complete crash is difficult to predict. Any opinions? How did the "college experience" change you and what do you recommend to your family and friends? Is college worth it these days?