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50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

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Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#91

Post by Brushfire »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #55
kalvin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, it's a routine complaint at Stanford that all the campus job fairs are filled with companies recruiting engineers and nobody else. :p Our system also rewards engineers way more than teachers, graduates who go into public service, and-- at graduation time, at least-- anyone with a humanities degree. I'd worry about fixing compensation for teachers before rewarding engineers... Google is an engineering fi…

Compensation for teachers is fantastic, as long as you compare it properly to compensation for other workers. To begin with, multiply by (12 months worked by others)/(9 months worked by teachers). Then add in the value of the state health plan, usually fantastic. Then add in the real value of a defined benefit pension plan (chances are you only get a defined contribution plan) available in most states. Then add in th…

Most teachers are not professors. Most teachers work for public schools in the k-12 arena. Many times tenure doesnt work out.

Teachers rarely get overtime, but overtime is necessary. The best teachers I know, and I know about 20, work 7-7. They work during the summer to setup curriculum, to tutor summer school students, to select books, to setup their classroom. And they do this all without any extra pay than their salary. They also supplement poor school budgets with their own money to buy supplies the students need to learn.

They are generally pressured to pay into a Teachers union that supports the misfits in their profession, and doesn't generally help them at all. These same awesome teachers are paid solely on the number of years they have been working -- not (at all) by performance, skill, or student/parent reviews. This translates into little reward for awesome teachers over not to awesome 8:15-3pm teachers.

But I digress.

Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#92

Post by Alex3917 »

bcostlow wrote: post #87
Alex3917 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10129 The report was issued by the NRC, not the NSF, but the NSF apparently agrees because they paying for an overhaul of the AP curriculum based on the report. Also, if you do a Google search for: NSF criticism of AP curriculum You see an overview of this as the second result. Also, I couldn't find this in that Alfie Kohn book, so I must have stumbled upon it in something I r…

A direct quote from that result: "The AP and IB courses, while including some of the best education in the subject currently available at the secondary level, tend in general to be out of date, too broad, and too inflexible in their curricula." So the argument the NRC is making is that the AP curriculum needs to be improved, but is currently some of the best available. In addition, the curriculum is being overhauled.…

So what exactly is the problem with advocating increasing AB and IBO students when, even though there are problems, it's currently some of the best education available, and an overhaul to bring it in line with the NRC/NSF recommendations is underway?

First, "including some of the best education currently available" != "currently some of the best education available." What the report is actually saying is that a few components of the curriculum are good, but the courses overall suck. If you read the rest of the executive summary, it absolutely shits on the AP. This might be couched in academic language, but make no mistake about what they're saying.

Now obviously if the courses are made to be completely different then advocating them might not be a bad thing. But right now all that's happened is the NSF has given the college board a small amount of money to reform the curriculum, a process which just started this summer. Right now we have no idea if any changes were actually made, and if so what those changes are and whether or not they are really inline with the NRC & NCTM standards.

Anyway, all we know is that right now the president elect is advocating a curriculum that has kids going through the motions of science and math without actually learning the principles of either subject, and without learning what it means to think like a scientist or a mathematician. And these are just the science and math courses. There is every reason to think the other AP courses, the majority which are not being overhauled, are just as bad if not worse.

Further, even if the science and math courses are overhauled, there are still lots of problems with them. For example, the assessments are inauthentic and norm referenced, and there is no reason to think this is going to change.

Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#93

Post by timr »

blader wrote: post #89
potatolicious wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll actually be graduating soon from an engineering program, and myself and all of my classmates face the same issues. Some have been offered lucrative careers in tech, some in consulting, some in management, and some are considering MBAs. The answer? Because some of us actually like tech. There are two types of people who join engineering: those who have been doing it in some amateur form or another for years , and…

"The answer? Because some of us actually like tech." - Yep. It's true that it's much more difficult to evaluate MBA competency than engineering competency, but I do think the market is some what efficient. I've worked some pretty idiot MBAs (Harvard no less) and they haven't really gone anywhere too far. Also, at least here in San Francisco, I've met more MBAs than I can count wishing they were engineers so they coul…

The market might be efficient at something, but that doesn't mean that it's efficient at rewarding engineers.

Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#94

Post by nostrademons »

ojbyrne wrote: post #11
timr wrote: post #3

Because it's far easier for a smart person to get a business degree that pays just as well, if not better? Because a degree in engineering is a fast-track to career marginalization by the frat-boy MBAs who see technical workers as interchangeable cogs? Because engineering virtually guarantees you a minimum of social interaction in college, when your peers are actually enjoying their lives? Because you'll run smack in…

Yep. http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/ There's always hope that the complete collapse of the Wall Street institutions build by those "frat-boy MBAs" will change things. Probably not though. They'll get bailed out by that other frat-boy MBA institution, the government. Of course the fact that Philip Greenspun walked away from Ars Digita with ~ $8 million proves there are some opportunities.

The folks that took down Wall Street were mostly physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. MBAs have been largely marginalized in many hedge funds and proprietary trading desks (unless you have both an MBA and a quantitative degree, in which case you're golden), in favor of people that can value (or not, I guess) esoteric securities with sophisticated mathematical models.

Kinda an interesting change, to see lots of innocent MBAs lose their jobs because of the fuckups of a bunch of egotistical math geeks. Normally it's the other way around.

Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#95

Post by liuliu »

bluelu wrote: post #75
liuliu wrote: post #9

Well, I nearly drop out recent two years. It is unbearable in university to see so many students who are 4th year and don't have basic skills in programming (i.e. comparing two double variables in C with == operator). As playing a while with profs, I am so confident that I have all the skills and knowledges I should know in the next 3 years. It is just had to stick on CS major when you had them all. The only reason I…

That's a language issue and not a people issue. C also allows you to assign variable in if clauses, which can cause hard to find errors.

It is not a language issue. In some perspectives, you may say that it is a processor issue of handling float. But this is the fact of every nowadays processor. Languages don't have the responsibility to deal with processor's fault, people do.

Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#96

Post by lliiffee »

potatolicious wrote: post #88
lliiffee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't really an unmitigated good, though. By increasing the incentive for a foreigner to get a US engineering degree, it would increase the competition for those slots, and result in fewer US students getting degrees. Of course, if the foreign degree holders stay in the US, that might be OK, but things must be thought through carefully. For example, presumably at least some people not interested in engineering, bu…

Keep in mind that all schools have a foreign student quota - i.e. slots that will either be filled by foreign students or not filled at all. Foreigners do not compete with domestic students for college enrollment at all. I would prefer an approach that is more realistic and honest about the state of immigration - the H1B is organized as a work visa, not an immigration visa. What the US needs to do is establish means…

> Keep in mind that all schools have a foreign student quota - i.e. slots that will either be filled by foreign students or not filled at all. Foreigners do not compete with domestic students for college enrollment at all.

Well, I know that is false for grad school. (In my department, the percentage of Americans goes up during recessions, as the US applicant pool is stronger at those times. Yet enough Americans apply every year to fill all slots many times over.) I don't know about undergrad, but I would be very surprised if it were true for all schools! Where did you get this information?

Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#97

Post by strlen »

Alex3917 wrote: post #66
Alex3917 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll look it up in a couple hours when I go to the library. Basically my claim comes from Alfie Kohn's book The Schools Our Children Deserve, but I'll try to find the footnote with the primary source document.

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10129 The report was issued by the NRC, not the NSF, but the NSF apparently agrees because they paying for an overhaul of the AP curriculum based on the report. Also, if you do a Google search for: NSF criticism of AP curriculum You see an overview of this as the second result. Also, I couldn't find this in that Alfie Kohn book, so I must have stumbled upon it in something I r…

I think the real problem with AP courses is that they tend to be "at the top of a high school curriculum" but at the mean time "entry level college courses".

E.g. calculus - it's the "hardest" high school math class, but it's the most basic and foundational college mathematics course.

I took Calculus both at one of the top California non-magnet schools (AP Calculus) and a California community college (as well as took vector calculus and differential equations after transferring to a university). AP Calculus AB in high school in a way is "designed to be hard", people dropping the course, plenty of failing grades. It's the course for the "top of the class", the people "good in math". In college it's the course freshmen in any science major takes (at a community college it's the first course to be taken once the students complete remedial/"catch-up" math courses; at a university it's _the_ first math course in a math department other than finite math/statistics for humanities/social science majors).

Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#98

Post by blader »

timr wrote: post #93
blader wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The answer? Because some of us actually like tech." - Yep. It's true that it's much more difficult to evaluate MBA competency than engineering competency, but I do think the market is some what efficient. I've worked some pretty idiot MBAs (Harvard no less) and they haven't really gone anywhere too far. Also, at least here in San Francisco, I've met more MBAs than I can count wishing they were engineers so they coul…

The market might be efficient at something, but that doesn't mean that it's efficient at rewarding engineers.

It is almost certainly efficient at rewarding engineers enough, but perhaps not enough to make engineers happy.

Re: 50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

#100

Post by rsheridan6 »

emmett wrote: post #80
rsheridan6 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biology is good if your grades are good enough to get into a professional program. Not so much otherwise.

Biology is worthless as a major; as long as you take the pre-med requirements, they don't care what your major is. Granted, Biology requires a lot of the same classes, so it might be easier to be a bio major if you're already pre-med, but the biology degree itself isn't worth anything.

Some of them prefer that you have a degree, but it's true that you don't have to have it.
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