StatGuy2000 said:
In the case of non-public information, nothing can be done about that, since neither the general public nor universities for that matter (except to a limited number of researchers) have access to this.
That's wrong.
University researchers can and do have access to lots of non-public information which they can and should filter for public consumption. Let me give you a real example. I can't post here what the research that I'm doing, because I don't know that someone won't take that information and try to make money off the stock market. Even if it doesn't happen, the SEC will can get annoyed if I say something that can be interpreted as promoting a stock.
Now, what I *can* (and in fact do) do is to talk with people in local universities about what we are working on. I can do this because I know and trust the person that I'm talking to is not going to buy stocks with that information, and from the point of view of the SEC, I'm not making a "public offering." The reason I do this is so that the professor can then take that information and then adjust their course offerings to reflect what I've told them.
There is a lot of mathematical research that we are doing that we can't make publicly available. However, we do have a set of academics that are "white gloves." We feed them our mathematical research, they make some adjustments, and then they publish. Our name is not on the papers, and we and the regulators prefer it that way.
As far as filtering out poor information that is actually publicly available, there are ways to get around this problem, through the ranking of websites, investigating multiple sources of information, checking at references, cross-checking with Wikipedia (and the references they provide), etc. Granted, all of this is time-consuming, but it can be done.
But how do you know that you've got it right?
I'm not arguing that universities shouldn't give ANY advice (including good advice). What I'm stating is that universities (or more specifically, the professors and career counselling services who are currently employed at universities) should be more honest about the advice they are giving, which includes acknowledging their own limitations or lack of knowledge.
1) One thing that's fun is that often people don't know what they don't know.
2) I don't think that bad advice is the big problem. The bigger problem involves cultural biases. Yes you *could* go into industry, but you are a rotten nasty loser if you do it.
3) One thing that I found was that getting the skills that I needed to be productive in industry made me much less competitive when I applied for graduate schools. Because I was reading marketing books, I got "B"'s in classes that I could have gotten A's in, and that seriously hurt me when it came time go get into graduate school.
In this way, students will then have a means of weighing the advice they are given, and thus be able to make better decisions about the future, and the universities will thus ensure that they maintain their credibility.
I think that assumes that people are more autonomous than they actually are. One thing that I've found interesting is that one big trick that sales people do is to give people the illusion of choice. Sales people can't point a gun at your head and force you to buy a car, but they have a lot of psychological tricks that they use to push you in that direction.
First of all, is it the case that universities in the US do not pay taxes? Certainly each individual professors and staff members pay income tax, and I thought that businesses owned and operated by the universities pay taxes as well.
Non-profit universities do not pay tax. If the universities owns a for-profit business that's taxable.
Anyways, if in fact universities do not pay taxes is immaterial to me, because universities do work for the public good, in terms of providing higher education and providing high quality research.
But by working for the public good, you are subject to higher standards. If I go to buy a car, I know that the salesman is not acting in my interests, and if the salesman lies to me and convinces me to buy the car, to some extent, it's my fault since I should have known not to trust a car salesman completely.
Because universities are supposed to work for the public good, there are higher standards. The difficulty is that universities have "private interests." Universities are businesses and they are under pressure to increase tuition. If you go to a car salesman, and ask "do I really need this car?" the salesman will say *absolutely* and then pull out every psychological trick that they can to get you to sign on the dotted line.
The difficulty for universities is that they are also under similar pressures, but the rules are different for public institutions. That means that if the provided bad advice in the past, you just can't say "your fault." You can't change the past, but having people say "I'm sorry we screwed up, what can we do to make it not happen again?" would help. I don't hear people saying that.
First of all, universities are only one of many factors behind economic growth; an important factor, but only one factor. Second, university budgets in the US are the responsibility of individual states, and their budgets (along with many other state programs) are being cut as a consequence of the budget crises affecting the states, due in no small part to state constitutions mandating a balanced budget and banning deficits.
1) It's a critical factor
2) University budgets are the responsibility of the individual states, but most of the money is Federal. State constitutions mandate balanced budgets, but there is this big loophole that states receive Federal transfer payments, and if you look at where the money ultimately comes from, it's mostly Federal.
If you really want to stop university budgets from getting cut, then the only meaningful thing that can be done is for the federal government to bail out the state governments.
Well, yeah...
But what you can do is to hold enough protests at the state level to stop cuts, that the state legislatures are forced to beg for money from the Federal government. If the state legislatures can balance their budgets by cutting state universities, they will. Whoever screams least gets cut. If you scream at the state legislatures not to do that, then the numbers won't match, so they'll have to go to the Federal government. At which point you play the game in Congress. The Federal government can do two things that state governments can't. It can run deficits and print money.
One person can't do much, but one person in an organized system can do a lot.
However, it is worth keeping in mind that many vocational training is provided by community colleges.
Which are being cut by state governments. One good thing about community colleges is that getting a two-year degree from a CC is often a stepping stone to a four year degree at a local public university.
Now what I'd like to see is to see an alliance between MIT and community colleges. Personally, I think it's a mistake for MIT to focus on creating a distance education partnership with Harvard. The institution that MIT really should reach out to is Roxbury Community College. One thing that RCC can provide is vocational training so that physics Ph.D.'s don't starve once they get their degree.
University degrees do provide "social capital" but social capital on its own does not mean all that much unless if it directly leads to meaningful employment.
But it does. If you know someone that works in a major bank, they can give you the e-mail of someone that you can send your resume to with a reasonable assurance that someone will at least read the resume. If you hang around managers, HR people, and CEO's, you figure out how they think and that gets you in the door.
Furthermore, I feel that the stigma associated with vocational training in the US is unproductive, since there is a demand in the US for skilled labor. Combined with the currently high unemployment rate, perhaps we should be re-assessing the value of vocational training.
The trouble is that when there is a high unemployment rate, the knives come out. If there are N job openings and 1.1 N job seekers then increasing training is just going to make the problem worse.
One problem with increasing training is that you end up with the Ph.D. problem. If we train 100,000 air conditioning repair men then you will likely end up with 90,000 unemployed air conditioning repair men who are worse off because they have debt.
[QOTE]You are assuming here that China will continue to maintain their impressive rates of economic growth, which is far from guaranteed[/QUOTE]
People in China are looking ahead and seeing problems and they are dealing with them. There are limits to China's current growth model, and it is going to hit them in the next few years. That's why people are working *NOW* to start fixing the problems so that you don't end up with an economic crisis in ten to twenty years.
The general belief in China is that long term, China needs to move into science and technology. This is going to take two to three decades to do, which is why people are starting *NOW*.
The thing about China is that it has a plan. It may be a bad plan, but people are thinking about what the Chinese economy is going to look like in 2050, and it's going to have a lot of science and technology. What worries me about the US, is that no one is even thinking about 2050. I haven't even heard people talk about 2020. This is bad for science. If your time horizon is two years, then science is a waste of money. If your time horizon is fifty years, then it's stupid to cut science now.
The good news for the US is that it has such a good science infrastructure that it's going to take a decade of incompetence to destroy it. People are being stupid now, but there is still lots of time to stop it before things get bad.
Furthermore, young people's higher approval of China is directly linked to the nation's ability to deliver on employment. Once that changes, I envision that public opinion will very quickly sour, and given the repressive nature of the regime, things could get very ugly very quickly, as is already evident in the number of protests in rural areas against land seizures (and these are protests that have been publicly reported).
So rather than sit back and let things fall apart, the government is actually *doing stuff*. If you have lots of unemployed people, they start getting angry and demonstrating. So what can we get them to do to avoid that. Well, there are some railroads to be built.
Employment is essential to keep the government in power, so the government is moving heaven and Earth to get people jobs.
China is currently able to flood money in science and technology because they have large reserves of cash (primarily due to the tendency of the average Chinese to save money in state-owned banks, which is due in no small part to insecurity brought on by lack of property rights). Once the Chinese economy will transition to a more consumer-based economy, that large reserve of cash will start to diminish, and China's ability to spend will become more constricted.
So maybe it's not such a good idea to move to a consumer-based economy. Singapore has high savings rates, and if through science and technology you can maintain high growth rates, you can keep saving massive amounts of money.
Savings -> science -> technology -> productivity -> more savings
The big limit is when people get old and start withdrawing their savings. How do you keep productivity with fewer workers. Science to the rescue!
Before one can even begin to organize and hold protests, or act, one needs to know what they are protesting for or against, and that begins by asking questions first. It's the act of questioning that serves as an impetus for action.
Sometimes you don't. There's something to be said for saying "we are angry, we just want results, you are the people in power, you figure out how to get us stuff." Getting people to think too much is "psychology trick #2343" for making sure that nothing happens.
