Taking more math in school will raise your income
economist.com
Taking more math in school will raise your income
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#2Yes, I asked about this a while ago, with an interesting discussion ensuing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633540
As the submitted article here notes,
"Of course, finding qualified teachers to teach advanced maths courses will not be easy."
Not easy by far. Here is a detailed article about just how difficult it is to find elementary school teachers who know even very basic math
http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
and how especially lacking such teachers are in school districts with mostly poor students from ethnic minorities. One finding from that article illustrates the grave nature of the problem:
"in my first visit in 1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew how to find the area of a rectangle."
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#3If you sit in the front row of the classroom, you'll also get straight A's.
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#4I would imagine this to be true. I have done a quite a bit of math as a requirement for getting my CS degree, but I have never been very good at all.
This finds me balking from math heavy software development jobs because I feel like my math skills will hold me back(or at least slow me down). This is sad, because many of the most lucrative software development jobs I see are generally pretty math heavy. I would venture to guess this is the same in other fields as well.
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#5Greenspun had a good post related to this:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/08/11/comfortable-wi...
I once lost out on a job because of my Calculus grade in college.
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#6It doesn't look like this generalizes. It's true for young black males at low levels of math education based on this study, but there's nothing to suggest anything more than that. I have a math degree and I wish everybody would take more math, but I don't think there's much causality between taking math and earning more at higher levels of math education. There certainly may be correlation though.
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#7It doesn't look like this generalizes. It's true for young black males at low levels of math education based on this study, but there's nothing to suggest anything more than that. I have a math degree and I wish everybody would take more math, but I don't think there's much causality between taking math and earning more at higher levels of math education. There certainly may be correlation though.
I don't think it's about math degree levels of math education. it's about the fact that all the highest earning majors with the exception of maybe law require at least the calculus series.
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#8If you sit in the front row of the classroom, you'll also get straight A's.
Actually a study in Colorado showed that sitting in front does improve performance:
http://www.psycho.uni-duesseldorf.de/abteilungen/ddp/Dokumen...
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#9Yes, I asked about this a while ago, with an interesting discussion ensuing. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633540 As the submitted article here notes, "Of course, finding qualified teachers to teach advanced maths courses will not be easy." Not easy by far. Here is a detailed article about just how difficult it is to find elementary school teachers who know even very basic math http://www.ams.org/notices/200502…
Teach for America and Teach First (the British equivalent) are actually doing a great job at addressing this problem. They are able to recruit teachers from top universities to work in some of the worst schools, precisely by focussing on the difficulties and challenges of the job.
From a different economist article: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor... "Nearly a tenth of Oxford’s class of 2009 will be Teaching First this autumn."
I've heard the statistics are similar with a huge percentage of Harvard's graduating class going into Teach for America.
Re: Taking more math in school will raise your income
#10Yes, I asked about this a while ago, with an interesting discussion ensuing. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633540 As the submitted article here notes, "Of course, finding qualified teachers to teach advanced maths courses will not be easy." Not easy by far. Here is a detailed article about just how difficult it is to find elementary school teachers who know even very basic math http://www.ams.org/notices/200502…
Teach for America and Teach First (the British equivalent) are actually doing a great job at addressing this problem. They are able to recruit teachers from top universities to work in some of the worst schools, precisely by focussing on the difficulties and challenges of the job. From a different economist article: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor... "Nearly a tenth of Oxford’s class of 2…
Unfortunately, unions strongly oppose Teach for America: "Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. ... Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124061253951954349.html