Quote:
Originally Posted by gwilliam
American-born students often aren't interested in science or engineering, or aren't interested in working hard to succeed in the classes. So half of the places in the graduate school classes go to ambitious, intelligent, hardworking students who just happen to have been born and gone to college in another country.
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I think you are making some hasty generalizations here. I will not dispute that a business degree is the most popular at most schools and many aren't interested. However, I think you are overlooking a lot of other aspects that need to be considered.
1) Overall there are fewer students, as is the case with European countries where some are starting to experience a negative population growth.
2) There is a vast discrepancy being caused by the baby boom generation retiring throughout society (health care for example). We have gone a lot of years with these poor graduation rates but without much attention to it.
3) College is expensive. Many people I know do not pursue graduate degrees because they have accumulated a tremendous amount of debt in their undergrad, not for lack of interest or desire.
4) Do not discount leadership. NASA and the shuttle launches inspired a generation of young people. When you have a president bringing this message to the people like JFK it is hard to ignore the call to service.
5) Competition!!! Places like India and China have tremendous competition over jobs so a bachelor's degree is less powerful in finding a job there but they can come here and get a graduate degree instead. As my coworker from china just said in china you either go into a technical field or you work labor like a dog.
I think we need to stress the importance of STEM careers but I don't think blaming the American student is the correct method. There is more than enough blame to go around, try the education system, try the tax payer that has devalued education. We pay more to put a person in prison than we do to educate a person (yearly that is) which I think says something about the culture at large. I think we have something like 5% of the world's population but approximately 25% of the world's prison population.
Sorry that this took a politically preachy turn, but I take the 'change the culture' term beyond just STEM jobs and STEM curriculum.