Training Scientists...another Great American MisAllocation of Capital

pushing youth to dream dreams which can not be realized is highly dangerous

The market is always self correcting.

Going into a grad program should not (some unsolicited advise for students worldwide) be entered into unless they have done some research ON THEIR OWN re: a potential sustainable market for their skills.

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Not if the market is selling hopes and dreams when the buyers do not have a firm grasp on reality

. What Obama should be doing is encouraging the best and the brightest to go into science, while warning that there are not enough jobs for the grads

What we see here is an economic system and a political system which both fail to properly allocate assets.

You really believe this

Im beginning to read that youre just bitter about something here Hawkee.

If you understood it better youd know that we train MOST of the worlds students in science and engineering

You are beginning to sound more liberal than I

but teachers are ill equipped to act as the stimulators of nascent talent.

I was always depressed at how ignorant of the subject most of the teachers were. Yet all were earth science and physics teachers.

Ofcourse it might have something to do with the fact that a large proportion of the basic research in this country comes from government funding, and there is one political party which has spent decades trying to slash research funding not just to the bone but to the point of grinding the bone into powder, and politicising and demonizing research (think stem cells). That may just possibly have something to do with the lack of jobs. Which is one reason why, if you're pissed off at the lack of such jobs, you should think very carefully about your vote this November.

as a EE major I am sure I dont understand a thing

Seiously, elites are training more foreign students than our own

Blaming one political party for the lack of jobs in unfair, because the majority of the american people would be pissed if the government spent more on basic sciences

Just 35 percent of conservatives said they had a "great deal of trust in science" in 2010, a 28 percent decline since 1974, when 48 percent of conservatives—about the same percentage as liberals—trusted science. Liberal and moderate support for science has remained essentially flat since 1974, according to Gordon Gauchat, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He published his findings in the journal American Sociological Review

We can say the same thing about engineers, where we constantly babble on about how we need more engineers but then need to notice that by middle age the economy is rewarding only a tiny sliver of those who entered the field.

Don’t follow in my footsteps.” These days, seemingly every conversation about the future of engineering includes an apocryphal story about an engineer who advises his children to find another line of work because engineering has no future. Yet until a recent set of surveys and analyses, we knew little about who stays in engineering, why people leave the field, and what happens to them after they leave.

I have read those surveys and I can tell you that engineering still offers many of its traditional rewards to men and women who pursue it, and also for those who use it as a springboard into other careers.

Our investigation into the career path of engineers grew out of similar concerns, especially about women in engineering. Members of the Corporate Partnership Council of the Society of Women Engineers were concerned about retaining women in the field. They had heard many stories about women who had left their companies to become full-time mothers or when they sought some accommodation to their family life. In addition, for years there were vague stories about women who left engineering because of mistreatment by their colleagues.

These stories seemed to zero in on women’s leaving as problematic, without understanding the larger context of job turnover in engineering. In fact, many people—men and women—leave the field, and not always under a storm cloud of hostility.
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We have learned many things from this survey. For instance, many engineers are not profoundly satisfied with their jobs. This may be because they are unhappy with their work, or because turmoil in the economy and larger changes in the workplace result in anxiety about job security.

The data also show that, yes, engineers do tend to leave the field, but we see few important gender differences in this attrition. Contrary to popular stories, it is not the case that women are more likely than men to leave the field. Instead, there are larger differences in attrition across engineering disciplines. In addition, the data show that those who leave are not necessarily less satisfied with their jobs than those who stay.

That’s an important finding. It highlights that moving from job to job in a career is a very individual phenomenon. The market and larger social forces may play a role at a structural level, but when it comes down to an individual, he or she seems to do what Americans have always done—make a move in the hopes of greater satisfaction./quote]

http://www.todaysengineer.org/2010/Feb/satisfaction.asp