Posted on 01/30/2025 3:31:15 PM PST by SeekAndFind
While we’re on the subject of school daze, our friend John Mauldin of Mauldineconomics.com wonders whether the news of China’s Deepseek AI breakthroughs means America may be facing another “Sputnik Moment.”
America has completely dominated the global tech sector for fifty years, but U.S. tech leadership now may be hard to maintain in the years ahead. This chart showing that China graduates more than five times as many iSTEM students each year is certainly worrisome.
The silver lining is that if OUR kids aren’t learning math and science skills, we can always hand out visas to the brainiacs of the world who are, and make them Americans. Or maybe we can trade our sociologists for their math wizzes.
In related news, there is a serious movement in the United States to turn STEM into STEAM (not kidding).
STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics.
In other words, take the STEM initiatives and ruin them by adding distracting and unnecessary Arts components.
Kinda like adding milk to engine oil because hey, milk is a good thing.
Sounds like a winner.
Meanwhile, roughly 30% of South Korean international students choose MIT.
North Koreans, on the other hand, are still kowtowing to Little Rocket Man.
China’s universities are not bad. They used to be but they’ve improved dramatically over the last 30 years. And they aren’t “Woke”
> And most of the ones we graduate here are either Chinese or Indian! <
Awhile back I visited my old university, and walked around campus (I was a Chemistry major there). In the engineering building there were pictures of all the engineering graduate students on a wall.
One picture really surprised me. It was the one for graduate students in Petroleum Engineering. 40 students were in the picture. One had a typical English/American last name. One had a Polish last name (!).
The other 38 were either Chinese, Middle Eastern, or Indian.
I didn’t bother to check the Poetry department. But I’ll bet it had 0 Chinese, 0 Middle Eastern, and 0 Indians. But American students everywhere.
I am glad you mentioned Taiwan. My parents had a basement apartment in our home. We were three blocks from North Dakota State University in Fargo. Many of our tenants, either married couples or single were from Taiwan studying STEM courses, but especially Ph.D. students in the Coating and Polymers Materials program.
One of those student taught me to play chess. He was very good. I pretty much topped out as an advanced beginner.
Russia and Iran actually have good numbers for their much smaller populations.
My professors used to tell me our university had a lot of Iranian engineering students before the Shah was deposed.
Letting Iran become a theocracy was one of Jimmy Carter’s greatest failures.
I’m more amazed at Russia. They have like forty percent of USA and seem to have around the same number of STEM graduates.
Kamala Harris’ husband has a new job as a partner in a big law firm.
He might bring home $4 million/year.
Only a few mathematicians for financial firms might earn that much.
People with wealth often appreciate art.
I met an engineer who helped designed some of the world’s tallest buildings while he was cramming for the exam necessary to supervise the more lucrative construction of ordinary Florida houses.
One of my favorite movie scenes of all-time, from the movie Margin Call...
“Did you know I built a bridge once?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g
My niece graduated with a mechanical engineering degree and had several job offers immediately. She earned employee of the year in her second year. A year later and she is making $150,000 a year.
Her older sister who everyone thought was the smartest one in the entire extended family was the valedictorian in her class. Unfortunately got some type of worthless literature degree.
She just quit her job at QFC where after 9 years she had worked herself up from box girl eventually graduating to cashier. But she got a new boss who gave her super crappy hours. Now she is shoveling horse poop and grooming and feeding horses at the local horse racing track.
Fortunately, she is engaged to a guy who is well on his way to becoming an airline pilot. Maybe now that President Trump is president, he will actually have chance of being hired and promoted.
Isn’t it supposed to be quality, not quantity?
I have no problem with short course. Many people would like to get additional knowledge or skills for fun even after they have an established career.
What is iSTEM?
Is that 4X before or after the deportations?
Note that Russia produces the same number of STEM Graduates (and Engineering Graduates, by the way) as the US, with the US having nearly 3 TIMES the population of Russia. Kind of explains why they keep shooting down our best missiles.
“China’s universities are not bad. They used to be but they’ve improved dramatically over the last 30 years. And they aren’t “Woke””
I wonder if Americans were making the same types of claims about Japanese and German Universities on Dec. 6th, 1941. One of the main reasons that I opposed getting involved in the Ukraine War was that I knew just how HOLLOWED-OUT our educational level was compared to the rest of the world, as I work with people from all over the world and they are NOT idiots.
The fact that Russia is not begging to end the Ukraine War right now, but instead says “go ahead, hit us with whatever you want, we’ll deal with it” should be telling us something...but not the Neocons and the others who still think it’s 1990 out there.
“Isn’t it supposed to be quality, not quantity?”
There’s a saying in warfare that quantity has a quality all it’s own. In other words, if Americans with STEM Graduate degrees (Masters and better) are 1/10th the number of Russians with the same degrees, Russia likely wins, even if their educational standards were lower than the US (but they’re not, they’re higher).
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