Free tuition!
Aug 23rd 2007Wallabynerd alert & rants
A senator (D, of course) has proposed a $25 billion education package that includes “free tuition” for students majoring in science, math, engineering, and “technology”. (Whatever kinds of “technology” are not included in “science” and “engineering”, that is. Air conditioning repair?) It’s not entirely “free”, since there’s a string attached: “Students must work or teach in a related field for at least four years after graduation to qualify.” (Well, presumably he means that they’ll have to work/teach for four years or be forced to pay back the loan. So it’s not really “free tuition”, merely another loan package – one that gets forgiven after you’ve worked for four years.)
Sounds great! What’s the catch?
Of course, I’m a little skeptical that the price tag is right – that would only buy education for 250,000 (at $100k each) to a million (at $40k each, which probably limits them to in-state schools only) students. And this is only one part of the spending in the $25 billion barrel, so it won’t even stretch that far.
The senator’s proposal is based on the idea that the US urgently needs more scientists, etc. to “effectively compete” with Asia and Europe. The urgency depends on how you measure this “competition”, although most statistics that I’ve heard about (percentage of US patents awarded to US inventors, journal articles published per country per year, etc.) do seem to indicate that there’s a trend towards the US doing a smaller share of the total work.
Thing is, I’m not convinced that the answer is “more scientists”. I taught undergrads at a major research university (Top 25 in just about everything) for four years. These were – presumably – some of the “best and brightest” that the Midwest + New York had to offer. Some of them could barely read and follow directions in the lab manual. Others did not know how to do basic algebra to prepare solutions at the proper concentration. They did not know how to calculate dilution factors. Too many of them could not draw an obvious conclusion from their lab results – stuff like “if solution A requires 10 mL of titrant, and solution B requires 25 mL of the same titrant, then B must be more concentrated than A.”
So I’m not sure that the looming problem in science manpower is going to be solved by getting more of these students into science. (Indeed, many of them went to medical school. Isn’t that reassuring? Your doctor may not have been able to read his/her undergraduate lab manuals.) And these are the ones who already made it into a prestigious school – presumably the “free tuition” deal is designed to attract students who would not otherwise have been able to attend. There’s many reasons for that, but it does sort of suggest that they aren’t likely to be achieving at a much higher level than the ones who are here now.
Perhaps a more useful solution is to start off much younger – so that they learn by high school how to read and calculate and think, rather than shipping them off to college at taxpayer expense. That’d mean teaching “hard stuff” instead of the easy stuff that comes naturally, like sulking and sex…