Woopy said:
I mean, they were willing to outsource the unskilled labor overseas, why wouldn't they do the same with skilled jobs?
The difference is the country need high tech experties to be on top of the world. It is very obvious that we cannot compete in the low skilled labor market because we have unions and all the safety and environmental regulation that make the cost too high to have this kind of production in the US. Like it or not, there are plenty of people in the rest of the world willing to work for a penny to a dollar there. Nobody said it's fare, but that is the truth. But sending our high tech jobs over to China, Taiwan, India got to be the worst. They have plenty of highly educated people eager to gain experience. We are handing all these over on a silver platter. Once they get the experience, they'll never look back.
Think about in 1941, Japan destroy most of our battle ships, we were behind when we first join the WWII. But in two years, we out produced Japan and German in everything. Our armament were not the best, but we out produced Japan and German by so so much that we steam rolled them. Sadly anything happen like this again, we might not even have the infrastructure to pull anything close to like that again. I corresponded with a professor in UC Berkley on the EM class, he said they might not even hold the class that year because of the lack of enrollment. We will lost a whole generation of talent soon.
Being a Chinese originally from Hong Kong, I can assure you the education standard in Hong Kong and China is so much higher. People take education very serious unlike a lot of the people here. People there glorify science where most of the students here take the easy way out going into business major because of the money and to avoid math. I took the ODE class in those junior college and it was a disgrace. Not only they choose the best three test out of four so you can afford to flunk one. There was always a question out of 15 that asked something like "who was the first president of United States?"...I am serious! I corresponded with two professor of EM class in San Jose State. It was not pretty. One professor was kind enough to gave me the answer of all the homework and I worked through all of them. They use just about the easiest EM book known...By Ulaby. It is a good book for really really beginners, but good luck on learning EM if you attended that class. I had to get the book by Cheng and Griffiths and rework a lot of the problems to learn. Same for the PDE class offer in SJSU, they use the PDE book by Asmar which is about the easiest and they still skip all the 3D topics and the Bessel and Lagendre function. I had to supplement with the book by Strauss. Those public school worry more about people's feeling and political correctness than really educate. If people get mostly C's even with some B's in these kind of school only, they should really re-access! It's a cold world.
Sorry about all the ranting, it's just sadden me to see the new generation more into video games than anything else. A lot of people have problem with very basic math. Standard of most of the public schools are so much lower than private school even though we waste so much money on the public education system. The closest private university to me is U of Santa Clara. I corresponded with the professors there and look at their textbooks and what they cover in the classes, I can tell you it's a different world. You get a B in the class, it means something. I graduated from U of San Francisco, at the time I though it was a joke...until I enrolled a few classes in those junior colleges and corresponded with a lot of the professors.