I don't know how old you are, but if you are old enough, you will be able to personally see historical trends in higher education. I have been watching higher education around the world for at least 50 years and have some very simple observations. Here goes.
There has been a trend in the USA over the past 50 years where more and more of our kids have gone to college. On the surface, this is good, but when you look in more detail what we see is that many of the kids studied social science rather than more demanding technical courses. We all know that the Twentieth Century was the technical century and that this major trend was going to not only continue, but increase in speed. Isn't that what has happened? If that was the case, then why did so many of our kids go into the social sciences rather than engineering and science? I don't have the answer. All I can do is to point out the facts. At a time when our economy needed more people with technical degree's, our kids were taking easier majors in our colleges.
During the 1930's thru the 1970's, we had a brain drain from around the world. Even the famous Edison who invented the incandescents light bulb was eclipsed by Tessla. Do you recall that Edison wanted the standard power system to be based on DC current and Tessla wanted AC current. Who won and why? This is a very big deal and if you look at yourself as person who is up on things, you would know the story in detail.
Who were the engineers and scientists who built the first American atomic bomb? How many were born here? Not very many. Are you starting to see what has been happening? The problem is that the brain drain has reversed. Try this. 80% of the post graduate students in the areas of Chemical engineering and Material sciences were born out side the USA. What does that say about our kids? About 50% of the advanced technical degrees from colleges and universities are earned by students not born here. Further, 60% of our top kids taking technical majors in our colleges and universities who were born here are children of recent emigrants. Have you watched the national spelling bees and noticed who the kids are. Many of the top participants in the national spelling bees are not even born here.
One of the things that I look for in trends are trends that have at least "two" drivers. As I have blogged in the past, the number of engineering graduates hit its peak in 1986 and has been going down ever since. That is only one of the problems, the other is that the number of foreign born engineering graduates have increased. If we adjust for that, then the rate of decline of our kids earning engineering degrees had gone down even faster. That is the problem. What is wrong with our kids? We have to ask that question. Where is the problem? It isn't just our kids, it is us parents and in my case a great grandparent.
There is a simple principle when dealing with trend that you want to change and that is, before you can start going up, you have to first stop going down. That is our problem. How do we slow and stop our downward trend? Sorry, but I do not see anything that is going to change the trend. I was just reading about schools on military bases. These are kids whose parents are often gone or the family has to move around a lot, but in spite of this, these schools do better than our average public schools. How is that? What is so different about schools on military bases?
I don't know, but should find out.
I have proposed that we reduce or eliminate the worthless degrees in our colleges and universities in favor of the technical degrees, but I don't think we have the will. We are gutless and will allow these negative trends to continue until the USA is in the scrap heap. Sorry, but those are my views.
