- #31
ZPlayer
- 35
- 0
The good part is that you worry about this gunk now, when it is not too late. Your graduate education will be looked upon as a burden for your employer because they will have to pay you a hefty salary. If you don't have enough experience in the work setting, your advanced degree will make your candidacy look undesirable and unwieldy as opposed to person with experience and no formal education. Such person can do a lot for the employer for relatively low money.
Here is essay I promised some time ago.
The perceived meritocracy of scientific establishment in the U.S. is the primary reason for the dismal career prospects facing an average science graduate today.
Let me elaborate.
Scientific skill was once considered a talent, a gift, something rare and very much in demand. This is because it was actually rare to find an engineer or a scientist. Science majors would typically attend expensive universities because the tuition was paid by their middle class parents to begin with. Thanks to their rich parents, these kids would have good education in high school and would be able to spend time to learn the science, prepare for admission tests, etc. And, of course, sea of opportunities was available to such kids long before formal graduation from their top-notch school.
Another way into prestigious school was and is through scholarships. To get a scholarship, you have to study very hard. However, if you have to work a part-time job because your parents do not make enough money, you won't have time to pursue education. See the problem in this picture?
By the way, the reason why people from top schools get better jobs is because they get to make the best connections, not due to their "outstanding training." In fact, some argue that Ivy-league schools today tend to produce lower quality graduates because the school faculty keeps artificially high grades to justify the tuition paid to the school.
In our day, educational institutions capitalize on apparent superiority of scientific talent to every other facet of human intelligence. You have city universities offering doctorates in sciences like chemistry, biology, engineering, etc. Some of the schools offering science degrees today were community colleges/vocational training schools just two decades ago! As a result of the unforeseen popularization of science, more families are ready to shell-out big bucks to university faculty for science education because parents believe in the discovery channel stuff they watch on TV. I see a business proposition. I see supply-demand dynamics in this situation. I see people believing in science education and willing to pay for it, and I see people ready to give that education and take the money.
However, there is one problem here. Some kids are smarter than others. So how can a science school accommodate influx of students who flunked basic algebra and/or scared of word 'calculus'? What can we do with the people who spell 'you' like 'u' and just don't know and don't want to know any better? Or, for instance, what are we going to do with all these fractions and irrational numbers? Here is the favorite solution: water-down science curriculum. Have biology taught without any statistics. Have college level physics courses with emphasis on simple algebraic formulas. Remember the differentiation/integration routine? Don't bother with that too much. Just use TI-89! Will sell you fancy science textbooks with computer graphics illustrations and simple formulas, will fill those textbooks with useless CDs full of junk to raise the price. Today the standards of scientific education have gone down to an extent when biology graduates hear about box-whisker plots after graduation and chemistry students don't know what an outlier means. The hardest concept for any science student to grasp is the normal distribution! And when you 'remind' a chemistry grad that reaction rate is actually a first-order derivate of the concentration as function of time they go 'ahhh... is it some of that calculus stuff again?'
So now we got a market flooded with these 'new generation' scientists. So what happens to their salaries and career prospects? Look here: http://www.biocareercenter.com/article/slaves_to_science.html .
Z. Player, M.A.
Here is essay I promised some time ago.
The perceived meritocracy of scientific establishment in the U.S. is the primary reason for the dismal career prospects facing an average science graduate today.
Let me elaborate.
Scientific skill was once considered a talent, a gift, something rare and very much in demand. This is because it was actually rare to find an engineer or a scientist. Science majors would typically attend expensive universities because the tuition was paid by their middle class parents to begin with. Thanks to their rich parents, these kids would have good education in high school and would be able to spend time to learn the science, prepare for admission tests, etc. And, of course, sea of opportunities was available to such kids long before formal graduation from their top-notch school.
Another way into prestigious school was and is through scholarships. To get a scholarship, you have to study very hard. However, if you have to work a part-time job because your parents do not make enough money, you won't have time to pursue education. See the problem in this picture?
By the way, the reason why people from top schools get better jobs is because they get to make the best connections, not due to their "outstanding training." In fact, some argue that Ivy-league schools today tend to produce lower quality graduates because the school faculty keeps artificially high grades to justify the tuition paid to the school.
In our day, educational institutions capitalize on apparent superiority of scientific talent to every other facet of human intelligence. You have city universities offering doctorates in sciences like chemistry, biology, engineering, etc. Some of the schools offering science degrees today were community colleges/vocational training schools just two decades ago! As a result of the unforeseen popularization of science, more families are ready to shell-out big bucks to university faculty for science education because parents believe in the discovery channel stuff they watch on TV. I see a business proposition. I see supply-demand dynamics in this situation. I see people believing in science education and willing to pay for it, and I see people ready to give that education and take the money.
However, there is one problem here. Some kids are smarter than others. So how can a science school accommodate influx of students who flunked basic algebra and/or scared of word 'calculus'? What can we do with the people who spell 'you' like 'u' and just don't know and don't want to know any better? Or, for instance, what are we going to do with all these fractions and irrational numbers? Here is the favorite solution: water-down science curriculum. Have biology taught without any statistics. Have college level physics courses with emphasis on simple algebraic formulas. Remember the differentiation/integration routine? Don't bother with that too much. Just use TI-89! Will sell you fancy science textbooks with computer graphics illustrations and simple formulas, will fill those textbooks with useless CDs full of junk to raise the price. Today the standards of scientific education have gone down to an extent when biology graduates hear about box-whisker plots after graduation and chemistry students don't know what an outlier means. The hardest concept for any science student to grasp is the normal distribution! And when you 'remind' a chemistry grad that reaction rate is actually a first-order derivate of the concentration as function of time they go 'ahhh... is it some of that calculus stuff again?'
So now we got a market flooded with these 'new generation' scientists. So what happens to their salaries and career prospects? Look here: http://www.biocareercenter.com/article/slaves_to_science.html .
Z. Player, M.A.
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