Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Free tuition at US public Universities?

I've started to argue against myself . I'd like education financing to be largely privatized, and student lenders who thought English majors were good credit risks would be free to lend accordingly. I am wary of politicians directly trying to decide which fields of study are useful. Commentators on the right, including me, sometimes criticize the humanities, but in the data I've seen, the earnings of biology majors are closer to those of humanities majors than to the earnings of engineers. If majors are going to be criticized for having lots of low-earning graduates, the problem goes beyond the humanities and social sciences.

I can understand where the hand-wringing about the link between education and future earnings is coming from, which is why I don't like it.

Historically, it was the responsibility of an employer to train employees. A higher education simply made one more trainable for a number of more complex positions. A Harvard graduate who one day hoped to edit his own newspaper might still begin by operating the printing press, and would be expected to master that before being provided with other opportunities.

Today, that Harvard grad expects a junior editing position, and given the outrageous sums the grad has spent on education, can hardly afford to accept anything less. Meanwhile, the employee expects to hire someone at that level who is fully-qualified, which would necessarily include business-world experience. So both sides enter the relationship with unrealistic expectations, and it doesn't typically go well.

Employers hold the key here, but they are not likely to do things any differently, because the current corporate environment heavily rewards top-level management for short-term gains, and such an employer/employee relationship is a long-term investment.

Ha, ha! Bostonian, you sure do say the funniest things sometimes.

{nodding}

It's quite difficult to predict-- even for people with a lot more on the ball than those who have a political interest in grandstanding on the subject. (And by that I do NOT mean anyone commenting here, since we're clearly not in it for the glory. )

I've commented elsewhere that I think it's problematic that so many undergraduate institutions have become educational boutiques. That defeats the entire purpose of such an education, in my opinion. My problem with "sports physiology" and "queer studies" as majors has nothing to do with lack or presence of rigor, or with the relative worth of such endeavors when compared with, say, "physics" or "English."

It's the fact that I firmly believe in a general education core and that I think that undergraduate education is DIFFERENT fundamentally than graduate study. Making students happy by not making them take anything that they don't actually want to take in pursuit of a degree doesn't strike me as being very helpful to most 16-24 yo students. That's often where students are stretched the most and learn the most. I also believe in a broad education because I think it provides a better foundation for advanced study in any area, which serves a person far better for life. It also seems to me to serve the society better as "retraining" is almost never an issue if your universities are turning out lifelong learners and polymaths (at a low level generally, but nonetheless, not one-dimensional in education terms).

Well, this is an easy thing to fix.

We should stop throwing away those bright children as third graders and then maybe there would be plenty of them to go around and the engineering and math and sociology fields could all have a few of them.


PS. As far as I can tell, quantum pairing and some elements of string theory are an area of active (and ultimately practical) research which is being supported for what it may mean for quantum computing. Eventually.

Hahahahahahahaha. String Theory has a problem. It's lost its othesis. You're just reading what's left.

Yeah-- but who knows what that research will eventually spawn otherwise. Serendipity works, but it's darned inefficient to learn things that: a) nobody knew that were technically "unknown" and b) weren't really the point of the investigation.

By my estimates, though, that accounts for at least 40% of citations that a paper eventually earns in some fields.

I am just practical. Chinese supercomputers are already so far beyond the US. US are falling behind. Perhaps then research should just be abandoned here and focus on the arts so we can be more creative.

You're confusing consumption with innovation. The Chinese are now the #2 world consumer of supercomputing technology, as measured in total computing power. This is largely due to their possession of the fastest supercomputer in the world, Tianhe-2, which is capable of 33.86 petaflops/second. The next fastest computer has slightly more than half of that capacity.

The Tianhe-2 runs the Intel Xeon Phi processor. Overall, Intel (based in Santa Clara, CA) processors run 82.4% of the top 500 supercomputers. Other common providers are Cray (Seattle, WA) and IBM (Armonk, NY).

http://www.top500.org/blog/lists/2013/11/press-release/

I am, too-- but just LOOK at the arc of discovery and technology transfer for, say, penicillin. Or nuclear fission.

At some critical point, of course it is possible to cherry pick the basic research for ideas that can be driven to chosen end-use via focused development efforts (like the Manhattan Project, say), but that can't happen in the first place without the basic research that isn't "practical."

That's what I meant about serendipity. Sure, it's grossly inefficient, but it's still far better than anything else in terms of producing large leaps in technology.

There's a reason why it is termed research & development. They have to work in tandem, and usually in about that order, with a little back-and-forth at the interface. "Isn't that interesting" has to come before "what could I do with that."

The problem is that we've gotten a bit confused in the past decade or so and opted to think that development IS research.

We're about to get a major comeuppance on that score in antibiotic development, by the way. Pipeline is drying up there. Why? Too little basic research for too long, that's why.


Materials has had a similar problem-- or did, until recently.