
Does Engineering Education Breed Terrorists? - colinprince
http://chronicle.com/article/Does-Engineering-Education/235800
======
tzs
That's an interesting article.

One's first reaction, just from the title and the realization that they would
not be asking this question if engineers were not significantly over-
represented among terrorists, might be to think that this is pretty much
expected because smart terrorist groups will encourage young radicalized
people to go study things like engineering that can be useful for the
terrorist group. Terrorist groups aren't going to be telling young recruits to
head off to college and get French Literature degrees. Thus, we should expect
that among terrorists with a college or beyond education subjects helpful to
committing terrorism will be overrepresented.

The researchers the article writes about considered that, and showed that this
does not seem to be a big factor. A lot of the engineer terrorists were
founders of their terror groups, and appeared to have become radicalized at or
after school, rather than coming to school with terrorism in mind.

