Free Republic

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...

Certain F-1 students who receive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees may apply for a 24-month extension of their post-completion optional practical training (OPT). If you are an employer who wants to provide a practical training opportunity to a STEM OPT student during their extension, you must: Be enrolled in E-Verify, as evidenced by either a valid E-Verify company identification number or, if the employer is using an employer agent to create its E-Verify cases, a valid E-Verify client company identification number. Remain a participant in good standing with E-Verify, as determined by USCIS. Have a valid Employer Identification...

The H-1B visa program, created by former President George H.W. Bush, allows companies to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers — primarily from India and China — to take white-collar American jobs under the guise that there is a “labor shortage,” particularly in STEM occupations.For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.Research, published in the September issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, reviewed wage data that...

By hiring weak leaders with failed track records and prioritizing equity over merit, Michelle Reid destroyed Fairfax County schools.Last month, Ann Bonitatibus announced that she was resigning from her position as principal of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), a magnet school located in Fairfax County, Virginia, the state’s largest school district.Before her leadership, TJ was the top-ranked high school in the nation for about a decade. Bonitatibus aided in the overhaul of TJ’s selection process in 2020 from merit to equity, thereby compromising the once highly prestigious school’s rigor, and sinking its ranking from first to...

Toyota announced Thursday it will no longer sponsor LGBTQ parades and events and will no longer make efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Toyota told employees it will no longer participate in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index and other corporate surveys. Instead, it will “narrow our community activities to align with STEM education and workforce readiness,” the automaker explained in a memo to its 50,000 employees and 1,500 dealers. The change follows after conservative activist Robby Starbuck started a social media campaign highlighting the company’s prior support for LGBTQ events and other woke policies.

Christina Westman dreamed of working with Parkinson’s disease and stroke patients as a music therapist when she started studying at St. Cloud State University. But her schooling was upended in May when administrators at the Minnesota college announced a plan to eliminate its music department as it slashes 42 degree programs and 50 minors. It’s part of a wave of program cuts in recent months, as U.S. colleges large and small try to make ends meet. Among their budget challenges: Federal COVID relief money is now gone, operational costs are rising and fewer high school graduates are going straight to...

Wow! Two high school seniors solved a mathematical puzzle that has stumped mankind for 2,000 years. "60 Minutes" did a nice feature on the pair, and earned themselves a Community Note in the process. Two high school seniors solved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. @BillWhitakerCBS reports, Sunday. https://t.co/mEN4CWeXMW pic.twitter.com/iPhsZiERsc — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 2, 2024 Readers added context they thought people might want to know This puzzle was solved 15 years ago… I studied physics and this isn't a discovery, it was published in a paper over 15 years ago, they've just...

U.S. innovation fuels our economic strength and is vital for our national security. Released last earlier this month, the National Science Board’s congressionally mandated State of U.S. Science and Engineering Indicators report shows that an accelerating science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) talent crisis is imperiling America’s economy and security.Let’s start with a bit of perspective. The U.S. STEM workforce is now one quarter of the total U.S. workforce – 38 million people at all degree levels who use STEM skills in their jobs, including 19 million skilled technical workers without a bachelor’s degree. That number will only rise as...

The declining interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields among women and girls is an ongoing discussion, and researchers have had knowledge of the gender gap for generations. The gap continues to exist today, with a 2023 Gallup survey finding that Gen Z men are nearly 20 percent more interested in pursuing STEM careers than Gen Z women. Why is the gender disparity in STEM interest and career choice so apparent? Studies suggest the lack of interest may not be the only problem. As of 2021, women make up a third of the STEM workforce in the U.S.,...

The University of North Carolina system oversees 16 state universities. Campus locations include Chapel Hill, Wilmington, Charlotte, Asheville, and Greensboro. UNC-Chapel Hill, originally called the University of North Carolina, was founded in 1789 and is one of the oldest public universities in the United States. According to Wikipedia statistics, some 245,000 students attended UNC system universities in 2021. One of the schools in the UNC system, UNC-Greensboro, is in the news these days because of a decision by Chancellor Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. to cut undergraduate and/or graduate programs in physics, mathematics, computer science, anthropology and nursing, citing “university direction,...

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. (Gray News) – A 14-year-old from Virginia was crowned America’s Top Young Scientist for inventing a soap that treats skin cancer. According to a news release, Heman Bekele, a ninth grader at W.T. Woodson High School in Annandale, won the 2023 3M Young Scientist Challenge last week. Heman developed Melanoma Treating Soap, a compound-based bar of soap designed to treat skin cancer. Over the next five years, he hopes to refine his innovation and create a nonprofit organization that will distribute this low-cost solution to communities in need. The final product came out to a shockingly cheap...

After a year of remote algebra, Diego Fonseca struggled with advanced algebra. Despite a week at George Mason University's Math Boot Camp, the would-be computer science major failed the math placement test to qualify for calculus four times. He didn't know the basics. Across the country, more students are placing into pre-college math, reports AP's Collin Binkley. "At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents." At George Mason in Northern Virginia, fewer would-be STEM majors are getting into calculus and more are failing, he writes. “We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and...

ZOMG! Have the brainiacs followed the yellowoke path to diversity, equity, and inclusion mediocrity?Caltech drops calculus, chemistry, physics class requirements if your school doesn't offer them, allowing you to take Khan Academy instead. Doesn't seem that crazy. Until you notice they also got rid of the SAT, so it's all about diversity over merit. https://t.co/NcCtGXSC2u— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 31, 2023Ehhhh…not quite yet. Jury’s out.What they’re planning sounds like a reasonable work-around for particularly gifted, but educationally deprived students who aspire to greater things. The young lady the reporter begins the story with went to a school that didn’t offer...

Some students wrote that their gender was “Apache attack helicopter” in response to a survey about “engineering culture,” which prompted accusations from the academics that “fascism” is on the rise in America. The researchers wrote a paper that described their experiences while working on a survey about LGBT students in STEM in the Summer 2023 edition of the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, housed out of Northwestern University. Titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interesting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences,” the paper reported on “individuals exercising discursive power in their...

Crucial science topics will no longer be taught to a large swath of Indian students, according to new government guidance. Most young learners in India will no longer be exposed to key science topics in school textbooks — unless they voluntarily major in science in higher classes. On June 1, India cut a slew of foundational topics from tenth grade textbooks, including the periodic table of elements, Darwin's theory of evolution, the Pythagorean theorem, sources of energy, sustainable management of natural resources and contribution of agriculture to the national economy, among others. A small section explaining Michael Faraday’s contributions to...

The medical school at the University of Buffalo earned high marks for its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion from the Association of American Medical Colleges and has incorporated aspects of critical race theory into its curriculum. The University of Buffalo's Jacobs School of Medicine's responses to the AAMC's diversity, inclusion, culture, and equity survey were obtained by the medical watchdog group Do No Harm ... The replies to the survey show the school achieved a score of 90%, indicating "substantial diversity, inclusion, culture, and equity efforts." The medical school affirmed that it ensured a "diverse" student body by implementing...

In September 2022, three researchers published the provocatively titled article, “Do Introductory Courses Disproportionately Drive Minoritized Students Out of STEM Pathways?” That article got loads of social media publicity for its conclusion that unequal withdrawal rates from STEM degree tracks are due to systemic racism. Co-authors Chad Topaz (“Data scientist/mathematician and activist” and co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity) and Nate Brown (“Math faculty like me can be a major barrier to diversifying STEM fields”) added to their scholarly research an opinion article that provides a guide for “How STEM Faculty Can Fight...

The increasing use of “diversity statements” in hiring and faculty evaluation has provoked considerable concern from free-speech advocates and defenders of academic freedom. An American Enterprise Institute study last November found that these statements were required for 19 percent of academic jobs and were especially common at prestigious universities. The danger of the trend is perhaps best illustrated by a University of California, Berkeley, search that filtered applications in the biological sciences for “contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion.” This eliminated 679 of 893 nominally qualified candidates on DEI criteria alone. Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression...

A new paper in PNAS Nexus, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that minority students who earn low grades in introductory science, technology, engineering, and math classes are less likely to earn degrees in these subjects than similar white students. There is a persistent disparity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education outcomes in the United States. In 2018, women earned 58% of bachelor's degrees, but only 36% of STEM bachelor's degrees. In 2017, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people comprised 30% of the U.S. population, and 34% of STEM-intending incoming college students, yet they earned only 18% of actual...

Are STEM students from the People's Republic of China jeopardizing our economic and national security...The number of students from the PRC at U.S. universities has skyrocketed in recent years to 317,299, representing more than one-third of all foreign students.