Letters to the Editor
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China's Progress Is Remarkable but the Invention Gap Is Still Large
One measure of the pace of invention is the quantity of PCT patent applications filed by country. A PCT patent application is filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty and indicates a desire by companies and individuals to file for patent protection in multiple countries in the world.
The lastest figures show that the largest filers by country and region are the United States and the European Community. Filings from the US are about 3500/month. Filings from Europe are also about 3500/month. Filings from China are about 300/month. In 2002, filings from China were about 50 applications per month. Thus, China has made remarkable progess in a short time.
There may be more PhD Engineers and MS Engineers being produced in China than the United States. So far, however, there is still a large gap between PCT applications filed in the US versus China.
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You have to be an idiot to study engineering in the U.S.
You study very hard and take out loans.
You graduate with debt.
You get hired.
You get married, have kids.
You buy a house, now you're loaded with debt.
After 5-10 years, your skills are dated and you're dumped
in the street.
You've got bills, responsibilities, and righties shrieking at you to retrain, retrain, retrain. No one gives a sh*t.
You're on your own, no health insurance, no pension.
You should've gone to work for Wall Street.
Frankly, since only a dumba** would sign up for this,
the quality of America's engineers is bound to go down.
Due to outsourcing, the number of students in computer science has gone down by half. I guess people don't want to train their Indian replacement - go figure!
Meanwhile Bill Gates is jacking off in front of Congress saying how he wants an 'unlimited' amount of H1-B's - another incitement to Americans to go into the field. You know that a field has good pay and benefits when it's flooded with H1-B's. NOT.
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Ahhh, statistics
So in other words, the statistics and numbers provided can say whatever you want them to say. Its like the joke about the company trying to hire an accountant. The CEO ask the applicant what will does he think the company's profits be this coming year and the accountant asked the CEO "what would you like them to be?"
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Beware production figures
Where it really counts isn't the number of degreed engineers and scientists. It's in the amount of work we have here to use the talents and education of your degreed graduates. Fact is that China and India aren't so hamstrung by regulation that they have much more work for engineers to practice their craft on.
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See it everyday, first hand
My husband is a director with one of the leading technology companies in the US, or the world for that matter.
He has specific test questions he asks everyone he interviews, then the interviewee runs the gamut of other interviewers in his group, who also have very specific quizzing with very specific calculations. . . The only people even qualified for the interviews are Chinese or Indian. And my husband and his company don't want to hire only Chinese or Indians. They seriously refer to "diversity in the workplace" when they interview American engineers who could be "brought along."
It is a pathetic state of affairs. I believe our current administration and the republican congress over thepast decade have been trying to kill the public school system and this has resulted in college students being unqualified to even apply to engineering school. And with all their distractions, they certainly aren't interested in Graduate and PhD programs. The only doctorate level engineers out there are from China and India. If they quit letting their citizens come over here and get jobs, then we will be in a huge mess.
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Engineering Education -- circa 1920
As a long-time engineering educator, engineering education in the US is abysmal. It's not a recent trend-- it's caused by a profound influence by defense industries and the Pentagon who pay for most of the research that funds graduate education (this is the primary future professor base) in the U.S. It turns out professors who are focused on .01% improvement of a select group of products and processes (think long-range artillery as an example-- if you're 10' further in range with equivalent accuracy as the other guy, you win) than the adaptable Just-In-Time learning generalist professionals that are needed to truly succeed in the rapidly changing marketplace.
What other industry would put up with a 25% decline in amount of product, a 50% increase in cost, and a stagnant price? When you look at engineering graduates from U.S. schools, those are the numbers. 25% less US engineers graduated each year from 10 years ago, 50% increase in cost from 10 years ago, and reasonably stagnant starting salaries.
Where do most engineering professors point the finger of blame? At high schools-- never at themselves. The curriculum that we teach is roughly the same as what we taught in 1920-- I've seen course schedules from the early engineering schools, and they're virtually identical.
The only thing we've got going for us is that we've trained most of the Ph.Ds who are running the schools in the rest of the world-- which means that they have the same awful education system we have. But sooner or later, Singapore or China will figure it out. If it wasn't for the straitened culture biases in those cultures, as well as their difficult languages, we'd be screwed. But sooner or later, some folks in those cultures will figure out. From what I've seen, they already are.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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From Vivek Wadhwa -- You missed the point
Andrew, the point that our new research made was that the problems aren't always where they seem. Political leaders still harp on the theme that India and China graduate 12 times as many engineers as we do, therefore we are in trouble. The remedies they prescribe are to increase graduation rates, fix the education system, increase the quotas for temporary workers via H1-B visas, etc.
I have argued that simply increasing graduation rates without understanding what needs to be fixed will harm the profession. There is no general shortage of engineers and flooding the market with more will cause salaries to drop and Americans to become even more discouraged with engineering.
We traveled to India and China to understand what was going on with outsourcing and where this trend was headed. We learnt that we were right about undergraduate engineers -- companies told us there was no shortage and that they really didn't care about degrees -- even bachelors degrees were optional. For the jobs that are currently being outsourced, they can train smart people with even bad education.
What caused the concern was when we asked multi-nationals what's next. Most of them said that they expected the trend to continue and that research and design would go offshore next. We asked what skills were needed. They said that for these research jobs higher education did count.
For research jobs, they preferred PhD's but could make do with Masters degree holders with sufficient experience.
So when we looked at the supply of graduate and post-graduate degrees, we saw a real problem. Whereas 92% of undergraduate students were American born, this wasn't so with graduate and post-graduate.
What's more, the trend was alarming. U.S. PhD's were increasingly going to foreigners, and Chinas PhD production increased by a factor of 5 over a decade. Most of China's graduates aren't leaving China and an increasing number of Chinese students in the U.S. are returning home.
My recommendations are that we make it worthwhile for Americans to complete graduate and post-graduate degrees -- these are not cost justified right now. This is not a matter of discouraging students by creating a fear of jobs being outsourced -- as was the case with undergraduate degrees -- here it's all about economics.
Students can't often make up for the massive investment they have to make in higher science and engineering degrees. We should make graduate education close to free like it is in China, provide market level salaries to PhD researchers, and focus on creating the exciting research jobs that make all this worthwhile.
Instead of spending the next $100 billion on war, let's spend it on the next Sputnik like program to develop alternative sources of energy, protect the environment, cure disease, etc. Scientists and engineers can create many solutions that do good for the world.
China is doing this -- they are investing heavily in such research and they treat scientists like national heros. We offer them substandard salaries and show more respect to investment bankers than scientists.
The point, again is to focus on the real problems -- not imaginary ones like undergraduate graduation rates.
Please read the entire article in its context and understand the big picture rather than focusing on one headline as you have done.
Here is a link -- http://www.issues.org/23.3/wadhwa.html