
Intel CEO: U.S. faces looming tech decline - evo_9
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20014563-38.html?tag=topStories2
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skowmunk
Its really surprising to see people mention 'education system' in one breadth,
as if there is a problem with the entire education system.

Being a fan of using specificity where it should be used, especially when
solving problems (generalization is such a killer, love the phrase 'root cause
analysis'), i would say the policy makers and such industry leaders should be
more specific about what part of the education system it is that has broken
down.

When they are more specific, there is a higher chance of citizens
understanding exactly what is the problem and throwing their weight behind
measures to solve those problems.

Having been exposed to two very different education systems (US and India),
and education being one of my favorite topics for analysis (err....nothing
serious, just armchair analysis) this is how I would characterize this issue:

American universities are of very high standard (cannot emphasize that
enough). They are of such a high standard that American schools (primary
education) are not able to provide enough input (students) of the required
high standard.

Students come to the universities, unable to take the pressure and stress that
the high standards of the universities put, they downgrade their goals or
still, start off with less tougher fields as goals. And of course the less
tough fields aren't usually science and engineering, which is requried to keep
the technological and manufacturing leadership of a country.

Now don't get me wrong, non-engineering fields are also critical to a society,
but end of the day, enough of BOTH are required.

On the other hand, in education systems like that of India, the quality of
knowledge (as in providing the latest and greatest knowledge) is horrible. But
they make up for it by putting the students to such stress and forcing them to
learn to perform and strive in that stress ( of course not all do, but the
high base volumes puts out enough output), that they can strive anywhere, not
the least in American universities.

So, one supply route, American schools (primary) has been struggling to keep
up the demand for science based students in American universities which in
turn is a supplier to the American industry.

Now, the immigration policies are creating another bottleneck for the American
industry. With such a drying up of supply routes, no doubt American industry
will face challenges in keeping up its technological leadership.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't find fault with Americans or Indians. Baring the
outliers, I strongly believe the average person is a product of the system and
its the system that needs to be changed, tweaked or whatever. ( of course
systems themselves are an accumulation of people's desires, thoughts, opinions
and decisions over time)

The American education system has supported American industry well so far, but
there is a book called "Who moved my cheese".

America would do well to make its primary school system require more hardwork
so that students get aclimatised to more hardwork required at the higher
education level, not to mention that required in the industry.

India would do well to inject more arts into its school systems, not to
mention more contemporary technology ( and not just in computers!)

With the very little exposure I got about the Chinese system (through chinese
classmates), I think their's is sort of in between the Indian and American
systems, but closer to the Indian system than to the American system

~~~
hga
Very interesting set of facts, observations and analysis.

One thing I'd add are the forces of supply and demand. Here are my
facts/observations about those in the US:

I'm not sure about other STEM professions, but the demand for programmers
_skyrocketed_ in the '80s with the supply of capable and necessarily cheap
microprocessor based computers. It's hard to express what a sea change this
was, from wiring together discrete logic to being able to put an entire CPU on
a single chip which massively decreased cost, increased reliability and in
time allowed for very high preformance (compared to their discrete ECL high
end competitors; for the most extreme example the initial Cray-1 announced in
1975 ran at 80MHz).

At the same time semiconductor DRAM allowed an explosion in the size of
programs and all together these allowed an orders of magnitude _preformance_
escape from the constraints that had been with us since, say, the very early
60s.

There were a variety of supply based responses to this including the 1990s?
H1-B visa program; their success can be judged by the inflation adjusted wages
earned by programmers and the post-dot.com crash in CS major enrollment (don't
know about other schools but MIT lost more than half, in a department that had
had steady and very high enrollment (40% of the undergraduates) since the
beginning of the '80s or earlier).

I was personally on the science track in the late '70s (high school and first
term of college) and I could by the end of that decade see the supply of
biologists starting to outstrip the demand. Chemistry might be weird since it
became politically unfashionable by the end of the '60s, but physics certainly
had an oversupply by the time that the US Superconducting Super Collier was
canceled in 1993 (at least one MIT department had a line of students
transferring out of the physics department into it on that day).

Yet starting sometime in the '80s the NSF began a _major_ "We don't have
enough STEM workers!" campaign that continues to this day. Similarly we see
executives like Bill Gates and Intel's CEOs (not just this one) demanding more
foreign workers at a time of high unemployment and wage stagnation at best in
the fields they're recruiting from. One should also note that the last time I
checked Intel has a policy of firing the "bottom" 1/10 of their employees
every year so if they're still doing that (and officially or not, it would
have become part of their culture) their annual recruiting requirements will
therefore be rather extreme.

(That said, the very best are always scarce and hard to find, recruit and
retain, but that relative handful is not what we or they are talking about.)

Anyway, I believe that due to the above supply and demand mismatches, prior to
the start of the Great Recession the US was seeing a _major_ drop in US
originated students in STEM college majors (by that I mean not including say
the children of 1st generation immigrants who often weren't clued into these
major shifts, I'm assuming 2nd generation and beyond recognized what was
happening) and it was far worse in graduate programs.

Of course the Great Recession is looking to be a great game changer as ones
often are. STEM careers may suck, but they could easily beat paying out of
your own pocket for a law degree in a market that's crashed or for a doctor's
education when we're at the brink of a "fundamental transformation" of
America's medical system that includes a major obsession with decreasing costs
(as it is, the government is already paying for almost half the nation's
medical care...).

