Outsourcing Science
link News from The Associated Press.
Here’s another anecdotal piece of evidence that America’s education standards are slipping badly. Over 40 years ago, NASA was able to do the math, fine tune the engineering and manage the logistics of not only sending men to the moon and then also bring them back. You would think that in the ensuing years since then, the technique of doing this kind of stuff would be pretty much nailed down.
This is not to denigrate the work and knowledge required to do this kind of thing, after all, launching something into orbit isn’t exactly as easy as turning an ignition key. It does however give hope to the skeptics who always thought the moon landing was created on a Hollywood sound stage. It appears that NASA has failed in two consecutive attempts to launch and keep a satellite in orbit. Huh? Haven’t they been launching satellites into orbit by the trainload for the past 50 years? Most banana republics have been sending up their own satellites, so the science must be pretty routine.
This may have a link to America’s educational standards. We’re all aware of the stories of college grads who can’t read or “write good”. Maybe the approach of ‘whole learning’ is not as effective as specific learning. In the old days, when asked to do a math problem, we had to get the right answer on the button. Nowadays, when you say that pi is about 3 and a bit, that’s close enough. After all, it’s not about the answer, it’s how you arrived at it. It’s the academic equivalent of, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.
Of course one may argue that things were simpler back in the day. Arguably true. Back then, most boys would be somewhat familiar with the mechanical workings of a car. You could fix almost anything with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Nowadays, most boys couldn’t tell a dipstick from a pogo stick. In our modern times, the mechanics of cars are so tied into computer technology, you’d have to be an expert in Windows to diagnose one. Still, you’d think that the body of knowledge of things would be a platform upon which to build further knowledge.
The evolution of not just what but whom is being taught in school today certainly has an impact on the resulting workforce. For instance, it’s been known that students of foreign backgrounds are more likely to populate the hard science and math classes than domestic students who veer into the social sciences. From the website, Universities in the USA.com we get the following statistics:
While overall international enrollment in U.S. universities and colleges increased by 3% in fall 2009, science and engineering (S&E) showed a rise of 4% (259,000 students). The increase in S&E enrollment accounted for a steady 44% of total international enrollment.
Notable increases in other fields are:
- Mathematics – 10.3%
- Economics – 9.3%
- Engineering – 6.5%
- Business – 2.8%
- Computer Sciences – 2.6%
In addition, another interesting statistic:
The top 10 countries of citizenship for international students in US universities both in science and engineering and non-S&E fields are:
1st – India
2nd – China
3rd – South Korea
4th – Saudi Arabia
5th – Nepal
6th – Japan
7th – Turkey
8th – Mexico
9th – Canada
10th – Taiwan
Overall, the enrollment of international science and engineering students increased from China, India, the Middle East, and Africa. Two countries-India, with 68,000 S&E students, and China, with 54,000-accounted for almost half (47%) of all foreign S&E students in the United States in December 2009.
Maybe the U.S. has gone too far in the pursuit of developing the next hot consumer app for smart phones. Maybe they need to reacquaint themselves with excellence in other areas of science and industry. It’s possible that we’ve swung too far from formerly being a production and innovation society towards being a massive consumer society. That may partly explain the decline of U.S. industrial output. If we have to one day go to some banana republic and ask, “how do you get a satellite into orbit again?” it would be a tad embarrassing.