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  •  Highly recommended (4.00 / 26)

    I almost always recommend your diaries, but this one seems especially important to flag.

    France actually has an advantage in this respect, in that the most prestigious universities in the country are ALL engineering schools, so we're still cranking lots of (good) engineers, as the best students go there - and even in banking you thus have people with science backgrounds.

    The trends you mention are at work as well here in France (people like me go to work in banking) but they are less strong, for a simple reason - pay is determined more by your diploma than by the job you do. It has its disadvantages, but at least it doesn't skew work choices towards finance so much.

    European Tribune / The Oil Drum / EA2020

    by Jerome a Paris on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 04:58:28 AM PDT

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    •  Thanks (4.00 / 11)

      When I get ambitious, I'm going to dig up graduation rates in science and engineering over the last few decades and for as many countries as I can find data.  I'm willing to bet that economic growth as expressed by improvement in median income is closely related to the number of engineers and scientists going into the work force.

      by Devilstower on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 05:03:52 AM PDT

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      •  I can tell you right now that it's down in the US (4.00 / 13)

        And that's of grave concern to the scientific community. We're most certainly NOT raisng the next crops of scientists very well.  And to make matters worse, the federal government is chasing away many of those valuable boomer scientists by the inhospitable climate for real science they've created.  Finally it would appear that the Bushies don't care that they've done that -- they only care that the science conforms to their beliefs.

        I care deeply about this issue having worked for an org that cares very deeply about this. Alas Bush's caring indifference led to a dumping of my program after a 50 year relationship with a particular fed agency.  Oh well.  Am madly scanning internal job postings, there might be two I can interview for and all my friends are giving my good advice.

        Annie

        by akeitz on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 05:39:53 AM PDT

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        •  nature scientists (4.00 / 5)

          Good luck on your job search.

          Great Diary. Science in natural resources is also getting dumbed down, or the jobs are being filled by business managers, not scientists. A lot of the field work / data gathering is outsourced anyway, so there is less need to hire actual biologists, archaeologists, hydrologists in agencies like the Forest Service or BLM.

          Veterans for Peace: Life is Precious

          by CalNM on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 06:46:42 AM PDT

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          •  Thanks! Yep it's not just engineers.... (4.00 / 5)

            SIGH.  My office works with a lot of government agencies.  Right now the only ones flush with money are the ones doing research in bioweapons.  Just about everything else has faced budget cuts in the last few years.  Even traditional "guns" (versus "butter") programs have been hurting for money as the money is going to you-know-where.

            This issue is not as glamorous or easily understood but it's the seed corn for the next generations. It's really, really vital!

            Annie

            by akeitz on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 06:53:13 AM PDT

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      •  It might be interesting to include (4.00 / 4)

        data on the sexes entering engineering as well.  Living in a university town, the number of women wearing engineering jackets has grown considerably.

        How will this affect the future engineering workforce?  I do not know what the percentage of women who leave the workforce to raise children is, but this too would likely have an impact on the numbers.  The numbers of students may not necessarily be the same number as future workers available.

        "Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans... and pants to match."

        by Dave Brown on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 06:04:03 AM PDT

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        •  Women engineers (4.00 / 5)

          I mentioned before that the (warning: coal mining) company I work for offers a full ride scholarship for women interested in mining engineering.  Often -- even very recently -- there are slots in this scholarship that go unclaimed.

          If anyone has interest, email me and I'll forward the information.

          by Devilstower on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 06:07:31 AM PDT

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        •  Much hard work has been done to attract women (none / 0)

          There are many organizations working hard to attact women and minorities to engineering.  Alas most only go so far as a B.S. because (at least in the salad days) the money in industry was far too good to pass up.  So there's a dearth of women and minorities in research and teaching.

          Annie

          by akeitz on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 06:11:53 AM PDT

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        •  um...careful... (none / 1)

          you may not have "meant it that way," but this comment appears to come from the same mindset that kept women out of professional schools and jobs in this country well into the last century -- i can't waste this slot on you, you're not serious about this career, you're just going to leave to have babies, we need a man 'cuz they never make family a priority...etc.
          if people are entering the field and leaving, that is a problem for the field's numbers.  [significantly mitigated if the people come back in a few years, which the last time i checked was still the most popular option among professional American women who take leave to have a baby]. but if the pool of people for whom the field is an option has grown to include an add'l 51% of the population over  the last couple generations, isn't that good for the field's numbers?
          again, i don't mean this as a personal attack, i just want to note potential implications and misuses of the comment.

          www.beyondmarriage.org

          by decafdyke on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 06:56:32 AM PDT

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          •  I totally didn't mean it that way (none / 0)

            and I was worried that it might be misconstrued.  It's just that a higher percentage of women drop out of the workforce than men, and I was wondering how a higher number of women in scientific fields would affect the numbers of future scientists.

            I don't think that because people have a choice in staying home, it should disqualify them from whatever they want to study.  Everyone should get the best education in whatever field they want, regardless of sex or future professional plans.

            Thanks for giving me the opportunity to explain myself.

            "Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans... and pants to match."

            by Dave Brown on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 08:36:53 AM PDT

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          •  Important issues you've raised- (4.00 / 2)

            and worthy of a diary all it's own.  
            i can't waste this slot on you, you're not serious about this career, you're just going to leave to have babies, we need a man 'cuz they never make family a priority...

            That's the workplace Catch-22 for us all - if you have babies or make family a priority then you're not serious about your career.  And women (sorry, but biology is destiny until men become able to gestate and lactate) are automatically in the line of fire.

            In highly technical fields (and probably academia as well - I'm in tech and can't speak to it), just a 2 year break can be crippling to your career. If you're not there to keep on top of rapidly changing technologies or if you're not publishing, you will be at a significant disadvantage.  This plays out in myriad negative ways downstream in your life. Count on fewer opportunities for advancement or tenure because you're now 'behind' in your field compared to those who didn't leave(or perceived that way - especially by the MBA management-types who never really understood what it was you do). And, further into the future, you will have fewer dollars and years of credit going towards your pension and retirement funds(eg, 401k).  Don't get me started on the compromises more and more of us face to keep affordable health care coverage for our families, either...

            I lived all of this when I had my son in 1981.   While maternity leave,etc, is certainly better accepted and available now, as long as family/child issues are primarily perceived as women's issues, we're sunk.  Until men take breaks in their careers to take care of their children to the extent that women do, and until the workplace becomes less hostile to families(yet another diary topic!), we will keep fighting this battle over and over and over again.

            Comfort the afflicted. Afflict the comfortable.

            by FindingMyVoice on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 08:47:08 AM PDT

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      •  In the long run (4.00 / 5)

        it will be science, basic fundamental research, that will determine the quality of life for the great majority of people in a country.  America is bound by its free market mythology and thinks that all you need are tax cuts and the scientific knowledge to keep the economy growing will just materialize.  

        Combine that with a long history of popular anti-intellectualism and the slavish personality cult of the "big man" of business (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gates, etc...) and you've got a recipe for disproportionately rewarding the executive class and pissing on everybody else.  You've also got a recipe for long term stagnation and decline as more reality-friendly nations get on with the only "business" that ultimately matters, the business of dealing with physical universe.

        Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy."

        by Event Horizon on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 06:57:47 AM PDT

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        •  Gates? (4.00 / 3)

          Although very few in software would consider Gates to be much of an engineer, isn't that what he is in the popular imagination? A lot more kids went into the CS track in hopes of being another Gates than into an MBA.

          Had a relative who was educated as an engineer but became an executive. I can remember him back in the 70s, when MBAs were becoming the thing, mentioning how he'd go out of his way to avoid hiring anyone with an MBA - considered it worse than worthless, since they'd come in thinking they knew business better than anybody, when in fact they had but the scantist clue.

          Yet it seems now corporations actually like that degree. Why??

          Then again, I have a liberal arts degree and work in computer science - I'm really against "trade school" tracks for anyone but lawyers, physicians, and auto mechanics. Real minds know how to learn, and do better by looking fresh at the world than being trained in some narrow outlook. (Unreal minds like myself, even moreso.)

          by wytcld on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 07:10:59 AM PDT

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          •  Gates (4.00 / 2)

            Is Gates worshipped for his l33t 5k1llz or his business acumen though?  As I see it, Gates is the only kind of engineer or scientist that current mythology in this country values.  He starts out as a rich boy to begin with and learns enough tech stuff to be dangerous.  He quickly manages to wriggle as far away from actual technical work as possible and becomes a wheeler dealer.  A modern day Horatio Alger with a CRT.  I think a lot of what people like about Gates is actually that he managed to get into a position where he could exploit all those smart kids with nerd glasses who had to work for him.  It's still a land-grab mentality.  Get into position where you can monopolize something and dominate others.  The "land" is more abstract now and consists of "intellectual property".  The problem is that you see little respect for the people who actually create this new land.  Everybody wants to be a landlord.  No one wants to work the land.  We had a system like this back in the middle ages, I think ;)

            Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy."

            by Event Horizon on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 07:55:40 AM PDT

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          •  Gates was elected to the NAE back in the 90s (none / 1)

            Not as high profile as some other NAE (National Academy of Engineering) CEOs but he gets the issues at hand IMO and for all his robber baron ways, apparently does have a conscience <g>.

            Annie

            by akeitz on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 09:09:26 AM PDT

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            •  m a skeptic (none / 0)

              [Gates] apparently does have a conscience

              That remains to be seen.  If I was worth $50 billion, I'd surely have spent at least $49 billion of it to reduce the suffering of the most miserable on our planet.  (And I'm certainly no saint.)  Gates has given away what, less than a billion so far?  We'll see what he does with the rest...

              by mkc on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 06:14:45 PM PDT

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        •  Them As Have the Gold Make the Rules (4.00 / 2)

          Why do CEOs make 300x or more than those doing the work?  Here's two more reasons:
          (1) Lack of any reward for long term planning;
          (2) Groupthink

          There's an old joke about "long term planning on Wall Street means next quarterly report."  Outsourcing everything to India/China means they'll make their gazillion dollar bonuses and can exercise their "golden parachutes" in a few years.  Earning large salaries while running a company into the ground has gotten quite popular lately.  Anyone seen any reports of salary cuts for upper management at General Motors - or any of their executives fired ior demoted for poor long-term planning?  

          Groupthink in executive board compensation committees remains the rule rather than the exception.  Many directors and top executives in large companies live in their respective company's version of George W Bush's Bubble World. The larger the company, the less its top management tends to remain connected to reality. Dissenters are purged, sycophants are promoted.  

          In the long term, of course, US mega-companies will either move their management overseas, or fail as new overseas competitors with lower executive salaries.  The overseas companies will, of course, eventually fall into the same "bloated executive compensation" trap and the cycle will repeat somewhere else.

          As for the US?  There was once a center of learning and scientific achievement known worldwide for its weapons technology.  Unfortunately, a bunch of religious fanatics took over the various Universities and replaces science with religion.  Nothing could be taught except the "Good Book."  Today, Syria's Damascus is just another city and Damascus Steel is just a historical curiosity.

          Character is who you are in the dark! Dr. Emelio Lizardo / Lord John Worfin

          by RepubAnon on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 10:06:55 AM PDT

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        •  Pancakes (none / 0)

          Give Bill Gates some credit.

          He is an author of one technical paper with Christos Papadimitriou (one of the GREATEST CS theory researchers ever).

          Of course, the topic of the paper is pancake flipping... not exactly the stuff that billion dollar companies and operating systems are built from.

          Here's a reference for those of you who want to read the paper:

          [GP] Gates W.H.; Papadimitriou, C.H. Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal. Discrete Math. 27 (1979), 47--57.

          by Super Pretzel on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 01:16:41 PM PDT

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      •  Look for this fact (4.00 / 3)

        A few years ago, a prominent engineering academic made a statement that I haven't been able to track down...

        He said that of high school gradutes, only 15% had taken the right courses to even be eligible to apply to a university engineering school. Forget about grades, most high school graduates are locked out before they begin.

        Somewhere, somehow, we need to get a blog or thread going on ways to remedy the problem. I have some practical ideas (I am actually working on some programs at my university). I'm sure many of the respondents to this thread have equally good or better ones - but there is no focal point for discussion of the problem.

        -2.38 -4.87: Maturity - Doing what you know is right even though you were told to do it.

        by grapes on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 07:26:53 AM PDT

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      •  another demographic angle on this - one tale (4.00 / 2)

        I'm a boomer woman engineer and benefitted both from the push for science education in K-12 after Sputnik as well as all the new opportunities opening up for women in higher education.  My mom was a nurse and my dad was a chemist.  From my point of view, going into a male dominated profession was definitely the way to go.  I had a strong "social good" ethic and decided I could both be an engineer (good pay) and contribute to society (work on air pollution).  That's what I've done and I'm very happy with how things have turned out.  However, both my daughters took a look at the office enviros of their parents (both engineers) and were repulsed (I'm being honest here).  One studied micro-biology and has decided to teach kids (and will probably move into education policy later on) the other studied politics and is headed in the NGO direction.  Money isn't that important to them.  They see the coorporate-sector world of their father and the government-sector world of their mom and want something more connected on a personal level.  Perhaps being raised in Berkeley is a factor.

        try habitat restoration - good for you, good for all

        by jps on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 09:01:42 AM PDT

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      •  This is a no-brainer (4.00 / 2)

        Questions, from one of those pesky guys out there without a brain:  

        1.  India is turning out 4x as many engineers.  Don't they have about 4x as many people as the United States?  And doesn't China as well?  Aren't some of these numbers driven by demographics, not raw brain power?  And don't they have 4x as much need (or more, given their historical underdevelopment)for infrastructure given their burgeoning population?

        2.  We graduate 11% engineers in the U.S., the rest of the world 23%.  But what percentage of the population goes to college abroad compared to the U.S.?  If they have a much lower rate of college graduates, they would naturally produce a higher percentage of technically skilled graduates.  I mean, who has the means to study ethno-musicology in India?

        3. Hasn't this wonderful abundance of engineers and scientists that America produced since the end of WW II helped to contribute to the ecological imbalance which now threatens the entire planet and life as we know it--from nuclear weapons to fossil fuel extraction to pollution and global warming?  And tell me, just how do you think these well-meanining engineers and scientists will be able to guide their inspired thinking into productive, useful technologies that benefit a majority of people and are used for beneficent ends?  Especially given the corporate hegemony that makes all things in service of the bottom line and politics?

        4.  Doesn't the internet, and especially web-sites in particular, but also journalism have a bias toward "the sky if falling kind of reportage".  I mean, if I wrote that it's a nice cold morning here in Minneapolis and a beautiful light snow is falling and I had a great night last night with my friends exchanging pot-latch gifts, and our kids are getting older and another year is about to dawn and I'm sure looking forward to how things will turn out--if anyone wrote that--what attention would it attract on Dailykos or anywhere on the web?

        Not to be too critical, Devilstower, but we are drawn toward the huge, catclysmic, muckracking biggest scandal of all time, look how bad the world is now kind of story and this fits the bill.  

        Life goes on.  Hold your children.  Love them. Make a pot of soup.  Sit together and laugh.  Remember that life may, in fact, be more about the spiritual than the material.  

        And, if none of that sounds very comforting to you, just remember: that's what they are doing all over in India and China today.  

        Help new teachers to grow and love their work at www.newteachernetwork.net

        by Mi Corazon on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 10:50:26 AM PDT

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    •  I would hope that French bankers (none / 0)

      along with their science backgrounds have solid backgrounds in mathematics.

      Just sayin'.  ;-)

      John McCain is so (Ned) Divine!!

      by Glinda on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 08:27:46 AM PDT

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    •  It's too late for us, save yourselves (none / 0)

      Seriously, there's no chance that the present setup is ever going to give scientists or engineers higher salaries or even more prestige.  In most large corporations, the employee evaluation criteria have been gradually changed to favor MBA type skills. It's more important to do meetings well than have any technical skills.

      The lack of engineers may or may not be a problem (I think it will be a catastrophe) but it's obvious that the U.S. is going to try to get by on managers and marketing.

      by TJ on Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 05:49:21 PM PDT

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