Today China is the world leader in number of STEM graduates. The World Economic Forum reported that China had 4.7 million recent STEM graduates in 2016, and India had 2.6 million new STEM graduates, while the United States had only 568,000. These numbers speak for themselves and they are terrifying. This article also contains confirmation of reports that I have seen which say that too many Chinese postgraduates return to China while many are deliberately sent here from China to our universities for STEM courses to gain the STEM expertise only to return with it to China and turn it back against the USA.
They can then take that knowledge back to China to build similar programs aimed at undermining our national security—not to mention engage in “extracurricular” activities such as spying and intellectual property theft from their professors.
Couple this with the threats to our employment base from artificial intelligence and we begin to perceive only one dimension of a huge looming wave which might be impending on America. Just to increase the pessimism, this is coming at a time when America is beginning to recognize the huge betrayal done to America by the education establishment, the very institution we need to address this problem.
Finally, it is quite apparent that Democrat presidential candidates like Andrew Yang and others have identified this problem as a viable issue for the upcoming election. His solution is typically socialist, $1000 per month gift to every American, but the point is that he and other leftists are addressing the problem and proposing solutions. In today's market of ideas, giveaway solutions garner votes, no solutions generate stay at homes.
It is the very people in the rust belt who elected Donald Trump who will be addressed by the likes of Andrew Yang with his giveaway solutions to their dilemma. When this approach, or one equally mindless but equally attractive to those suffering in the rust belt, is adopted by other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Kamella Harris or Joe Biden with big followings, they might well cut into Trump's winning margin in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Indiana and that would mean flat-out defeat.
If this threat is real, and it appears to be very real, the Democrats are in a win-win situation: if the country is cast into a cauldron of depression and unemployment, they win by radicalizing everything. If the problem of widespread unemployment is solved, the history of the Great Depression tells us that it will be misperceived in the public mind to have been solved by government, and the Democrats win again.
There IS an upside to the Chinese stealing all of our technology, and taking it home. More like, while the US is drifting to the Bottom, China is racing.
When they get back to the safety of China, Lysenkoism is waiting for them. This is politically approved science, that actually believed, by government edict, that rye could transform into wheat and wheat into barley, that weeds could spontaneously transmute into food grains, and that "natural cooperation" was observed in nature as opposed to "natural selection. It's "Climate Change" writ large.
Science is not politically correct. And, stealing what you barely understand, while trying to apply it under government demands of predetermined results is not the fast way to a new technology.
I earned my BS and MS in a STEM major at one of the Schools shown in the graph in this article.
I am probably the worst student to ever graduate from my Alma Mater with a STEM degree. I was accepted because I developed a passion for computers, would do anything to get enrolled, worked hard, would not accept no for an answer and it helped that few people wanted to enroll. This problem in STEM recruiting has existed for decades.
I'm not an education “theory” expert but my wife, who has an Engineering Degree and was one of the hardest working and smartest woman I ever met spent the last 15 years as a teacher in a private school. She stayed at home with our children until our youngest entered school in the first grade.
She worked as an Engineer in the private sector for nearly 15 years; I was an IT worker for 33 years.
We agreed when we were married that who ever earned the least amount of money and had the lowest Net Present Value in their future career at the time we had children would stay at home with the kids until they entered school. I guess I studied harder than I thought. (LOL)
Both my wife and I took a lot of advanced classes. We pulled all our children from a quote “Good” Public school system after 2 years and enrolled them in a private school because we were shocked at the poor quality of the teachers, curriculum, administration and policies of one of the better school districts in our State.
To obtain tuition discounts, my wife became a teachers assistant and after a few years she became a certified teacher by taking graduate classes at night. She has been an assistant teacher or a full time STEM teacher for more than 20 years now.
We've discussed the problem in education for many years always with the goal of giving our kids the best we could. The problem has several complex dimensions that need to be addressed. I will discuss only one of the multiple dimensions here. I will discuss the level and depth of education in the foundation and fundamentals of mathematics! Even in a private school, with students who have all the advantages that one could ask for, more than half the students fail to grasp the most basic mathematical concepts.
Half the students struggle with simple fractions in the 7th or 8th grade even though they have been promoted into algebra or even higher level classes. Those concepts must be mastered to go any further. A STEM education that uses advanced math is impossible without a solid foundation in the fundamentals of mathematics.
By the time children reach High School many are lost. They struggle through the classes but they are given passing grades and passed along. Their education is very broad on many subjects but only inches deep.
The fundamentals are poorly taught and poorly understood by many of the elementary school teachers themselves. By the time kids reach middle school, they are already behind. This is true even for some of the students whose parents are quote “professionals”.
Many Parents refuse to believe that their child is anything less that an Albert Einstein and blame the “system” for their child's failures. Many parents are incapable of helping their child by the time they reach the 7th grade.
Most parents tell the schools and their children that quote, “I never needed math in the real world” and they demand that their child be passed along.
Childhood Development experts will disagree with me but I am convinced that students who are not drilled in the memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables and children who don't spend a great deal of time reading by the time they reach High School will be hopelessly lost in the “New Economy”.
Instead of the fundamentals, children are given in the State Mandated curriculum at best a very broad and meaningless set of survey courses, with little depth and at worst they are given “State” driven propaganda designed to scare the crap out of kids into the “correct” political ideology. i.e. The world will end in 12 years if we don't ..... (Vote Democrat)
Even my Church has given up on an Apocalyptic world view as an incentive to believe. It's counter productive when the apocalypse repeatedly fails to materialize.
I've noticed several posts about the availability of calculators and computer based “algebraic” and “mathematical” software that are capable of solving most of the “mundane” mathematical tasks. I'm a firm believer that if you can't do the mundane by hand you don't understand what you're doing. There is a big differences between minimally understanding the mechanical processes of a concept and understanding the fundamental building blocks of a concept and being able to derive by yourself the fundamentals to arrive at the mechanical process by yourself.
Memorizing the basic fundamental formulas of Calculus from a text book is not the same as learning how to derive the formulas from scratch. The difference is as simple as knowing the difference between the “What” versus the “Why” of a phenomena. Without a knowledge of the “Why” you can't advance, you can only remain in place. If you can't derive what has been you can't derive what will be.
Don't get me wrong, there are excellent students coming out of our schools but they are kids who would have done well if you just left them in a library by themselves with a little bit of attention and direction.
Our failure has been to not expect our children to live up to their potential and to be content with them achieving the average. We are teaching to the least common denominator instead of teaching to the greatest common multiple.
Caveat: I spent more than 30 years in IT. I learned the full syntax and grammar of innumerable programming languages, multiple operating systems, multiple design methodologies, software frameworks, user interface API's and integrated development environments over the course of time. Without the theoretical underpinnings of my chosen discipline my career would have been significantly shorter and the list of "tools" I learned to use even shorter!
My knowledge of the syntax and grammar of multiple programming languages is significantly greater than my grasp of English grammar rules and especially punctuation.
Be kind. I believe my intent is understandable in spite of my spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes.