China graduates more than five times as many iSTEM students each year; Don’t Worry, We Graduate More Gender Studies and Sociology Majors

Unleash Prosperity ^ | 01/30/2025 | Steve Moore

[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.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: What is iSTEM?

See here:

https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/curriculum/department-approved-courses/istem#:~:text=iSTEM%20is%20an%20innovative%20student,engineering%20and%20mathematics%20(STEM).

[PIF]

One thing to remember about Chinese education from STEM to Medicine: All lessons and books must conform to the latest CCP knowledge base. Anything outside of that is anathema. Students are not expected to ask questions and so they do not.

If a student or professional were to ask a question outside of the CCP base that called the knowledge base into question, that student or professional would be seen as criticizing the Party and be expelled or arrested. If the subject matter in the Party knowledge base is incorrect and something unfortunate happens, the student or professional is held harmless.

The Party is always right even when it is wrong.

[PIF]

The smart ones come here to get educated in our universities.

—
Because they are allowed to ask questions, something they cannot do at home.

[PIF]

That is probably true.

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Just do not say that if you visit China because they have officially solved the poverty problem.

[PIF]

"Kind of explains why they keep shooting down our best missiles."

Here's an example of the falling debris often cited by the Russians after a strike

[Svartalfiar]

Russia is decent with rocket engines, but everything there is brute forced.

And when have we ever fired one of our “best” missiles for them to shoot down? If you’re insinuating Ukraine, they have a bunch of old stuff - patriot’s PAC2, mayybe some old PAC3 stuff, which I’d bet they haven’t shot down many of, it’s a defensive missile. ATACMS ended production what, 18 years ago? If you’re looking at Iran’s Russian systems, they can’t stop anything...

[BobL]

“ATACMS ended production what, 18 years ago?”

What replaced it and why didn’t we use them in Ukraine?

[Svartalfiar]

Because Ukraine is the dumping ground for us to give away our old stuff. ‘We’ aren’t using anything there...

Nothing replaced it for a while, they just sat in inventory. We don’t use them for anything more than yearly test fires type stuff. The new Precision strike missile is currently replacing it, and the army’s long-range hypersonic guy is supposed to add even more range once fielded as well

[BobL]

“Precision strike missile”

Thanks didn’t know about that. Good to see we had something to replace them with (even if it took 30 years to finally decide to replace them). But from what I read, the ATACMs were our top weapon, at least at the start of the Ukraine War, and probably still are, until productions of the new missile is able to ramp up.