U.S. Manufacturing and Engineering Work Force
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-06-07/us-manufacturing-and-engineering-work-force
The nation’s unemployment rate crept back up to 9.1 % last month, a disheartening figure for the many Americans looking for work. But there is another problem: a number of employers would like to hire but can’t find qualified applicants. The gap between applicant qualifications and the skills required for many of the available jobs is growing. Recent studies show that American students have fallen behind their counterparts in other countries in math and science skills, and this is happening as many companies, especially manufacturers, rely on an increasingly skilled workforce. Join us for a conversation about the challenge of educating for the jobs of today
Guests
Emily DeRocco
Manufacturing Institute, research arm of the National Association of Manufacturing
Gary Green
president, Forsyth Technical Community College,
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Byron Auguste
senior partner, McKinsey & Company
Michael Davidson
senior analyst, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
Comments
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Only when the Government and the people realize that having the best prepared kids is a matter of national security will anything have a chance to change. China has definitely realized that and are doing something about it! We all - businesses, taxpayers and Government - will have to agree that funding and spending right along with teaching the right way will make a difference. What good is it for a child to pass a test when the test has been "adjusted" to the lowest common denominator? Not everyone should be in college, but often times you would have to go to a post high school trade school to learn a trade and incur a loan as high or higher than if you went to Harvard. We should teach most of what one would need in life in the first 10 years of school. Grades 11 and 12 should be college prep for those who would be able to prove through meaningful tests that they are capable of higher achievement. Those who do not, should instead go to a 2 - 3 year trade school and learn something that can prepare them to be meaningful contributors to society and earn a decent wage.
Hi Diane,
Great show. I would like to ask why so much emphasis has been made for the young high school students.
I understand their plight, but what about adult students who find them selves massively unemployed and seeking retraining in engineering and advanced science and math programs?? It is literally impossible for newly unemployed experienced adult students to get the AP level course training at the high school level in order to enter the engineering, math, and science programs at university.
3 years ago I attempted to find an AP level high school course for adults locally, teachers literally laughed at me and were frustrated by the question. There are so many capable adult students!! There is no high schools that offer such training, it is reserved for the young regular students. I was left to fend for myself at the university level first year "weed out" programs amongst very well prepared newly graduated high school students who had the AP course training. Luckily I had a previous degree, and I had a bit of an advantage and graduated from Chemical Engineering recently. But I was shocked at the numbers of adults at school like myself, probably 15% of the student population at IUPUI, with little or no advanced high school education in the university system and doing adequately well with math and science courses but hard to keep up with the really well trained "young students". Where are the AP level programs for adult returning students??
JT (Indianapolis Indiana)
It might be valid, but does it really apply? We still have lots of great jobs waiting for people who have the right skills, and our graduates and unemployed don't have the skills needed to fill those jobs.
This is a myth and has been debunked time and time again. Why is it so hard to believe that Americans just don't learn math and science, and i believe reading, as well as other countries? It seems obvious to me.
Laurel, MD, WSSC employee and neighbor came home not happy due to the additions of chemicals found in Laurel's water supply said to be from the hydrolic fracking. How low do the levels have to be and still be considered 'uncontaminated'?
I question how well employers articulate the skills/aptitudes required to perform a job. I'm inclined to believe that many managers/supervisors inflate the skills required. It's easy to ask for a highly educated technician when you're not having to pay for his/her education. In many cases, the bar is raised so high that you may be training people to become engineers to do the work of a technician. I may be overstating the case but it appears that employers need to 1) be more involved in education and 2) be more realistic as to the level of skill competency truly required to perform the work.
The issues surrounding an unprepared workforce are many but the idea that employers may be inflating the necessary skills required needs to be looked at carefully. Most industry standards tend to be driven by, guess who, the industry itself. It sounds appropriate, but it may also be self-serving. The US military seems to have a very good model of performing job/task analyses, typically conducted by professional analysts, to ensure that the job requirements are well articulated and developed into training objectives.
Arthur Benjamin has an interesting point about improving math education: Change the curriculum to build up towards probability and statistics instead of calculus. Very few people actually use calculus on a daily basis, whereas almost everyone could and should use statistics. In a time where we can store and manipulate vast amounts of data, the key to understanding it is statistics.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing...
Students are not stupid. By what magic can they expect to find the kind of jobs that they have seen their parents lose? What's their incentive to study science and math when they see that engineering and manufacturing jobs have been engineered out of our economy by companies that export them for the sake of a penny or two more on the dollar?
Let's not hear any more complaints about a shortage of engineers from companies who are determined to pay American workers, blue- or white-collar, as little as possible. American corporations must bring back manufacturing to the nation that they depend on for customers. Until that happens, the United States will remain in a downward spiral of fewer skilled jobs and decreasing educational standards.
Finally, let's stop paying attention to business schools, which indoctrinate more and more students for management in companies that produce less and less.
In the countries of the world out-performing the US in critical education skills, they tend to have no summer break from school, or very little time off. How much does this negatively affect American children, who have a long break, especially considering that math skills and learning have a cumulative nature?
On what do you base your premise, that a number of employers would like to hire but can’t find qualified applicants. What companies, what jobs? Many of the job ads I see are looking for the proverbial "purple squirrel". And without a discussion of the impact of outsourcing of manufacturing, support, and R&D to India and China, and H1B visa on USA employment, this program is incomplete.
Primary and secondary U.S. education in math and science carry on to higher education in math and science. I completed my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering succeeding above average. For my Bachelor of Science courses in Electrical Engineering was mostly composed of American students where performing equal or better than the rest of the class was not difficult. I am now in graduate school for my Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering and most of my classmates are international students mainly from China and India. It is no longer plausible to score equal or better than my classmates in graduate school. Chinese and Indian students have superb math and science skills compared to me and most American students. My undergraduate in Electrical Engineering with mostly U.S. students was a breeze compared to graduate school in Electrical Engineering with mostly international students. I have been on the top of my classes for math and sciences for primary, secondary and post-secondary education when competing with the U.S. student but the international student has much more education in math and science and make it almost impossible to earn above a B in any Electrical Engineering graduate course (Where most professors grade on the curve). I have never seen such high achieving students; I can only compare my Chinese and Indian classmates to my undergraduate peers who earned a 4.0 in Electrical Engineering.
Primary and secondary U.S. education in math and science carry on to higher education in math and science. I completed my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering succeeding above average. For my Bachelor of Science courses in Electrical Engineering was mostly composed of American students where performing equal or better than the rest of the class was not difficult. I am now in graduate school for my Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering and most of my classmates are international students mainly from China and India. It is no longer plausible to score equal or better than my classmates in graduate school. Chinese and Indian students have superb math and science skills compared to me and most American students. My undergraduate in Electrical Engineering with mostly U.S. students was a breeze compared to graduate school in Electrical Engineering with mostly international students. I have been on the top of my classes for math and sciences for primary, secondary and post-secondary education when competing with the U.S. student but the international student has much more education in math and science and make it almost impossible to earn above a B in any Electrical Engineering graduate course (Where most professors grade on the curve). I have never seen such high achieving students; I can only compare my Chinese and Indian classmates to my undergraduate peers who earned a 4.0 in Electrical Engineering.
Our daughter is a studying Mechanical Engineering at a top private math & science college, despite a lack of support for her goals by her high school. Her HS guidance counselor had no recommendations of colleges when told that our daughter wanted to study engineering, despite the fact that she qualified, based on her grades, for free tuition at AZ State Univ. We are doing a disservice to our brightest students by not channeling their energies toward math and science careers. Schools with proven results in educating and placing our future engineers in careers should be rewarded and their educational models copied by other schools.
Diane made one of her very rare missteps today. The first caller (the one from San Antonio) raised a great point, which both Diane and her guest Emily DeRocco ignored. The caller commented that when you teach to the test, you're not teaching, say, "math in context" but teaching "math to take a test," which is exactly the kind of teaching that the other guests said several times was wrongheaded. But instead of addressing the issue, DeRocco sang the praises of a high school in San Antonio, perhaps because, as seemed apparent in many of her comments, she doesn't much question the value of tests, such as the National Career Readiness exams.
I'd love to see Diane do a show on the power and influence of the test-making companies, which spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying federal and state governments. It's interesting to note that at least two of the guests' ideas seem to conflict with our test-taking culture (and the values of today's testing industrial complex), driven in large by the millions that for-profit and not-for-profit companies make and use to influence legislation. (Just because they don't have shareholders, that doesn't mean that Educational Testing Service and ACT don't benefit from legislators' and consultants' passion for requiring more testing.)
Diane,
I am very disappointed that you did not address the fact that many of our jobs are being given to cheap immigrant labor by use of the H1B visa, the L1 visa, the B1 visa, the OPT visa, and many many other visas.
Recently the GAO reported that over half of the people granted an H1B visa are cheap entry level workers from third world countries, primarily India and Communist China. Our employers want to hire cheap immigrant workers on the H1B visa instead of US workers.
Almost half of our college graduates since 2006 still have not found full time employment because our employers do not want to hire US workers.
I really wish that you would address this issue.
"kathleen wrote:
How can a kid in Glouster Ohio (who has I believe around 8500 a year spent on them) do as well as a kid in Dublin Ohio (has I believe around 12 thousand spent on them) not do much much better. The way funding for schools is distributed in Ohio has been determined to be unconstitutional three times by Ohio Supreme Court. Strickland was on his way to changing that. Not going to happen now that Kasich is ruling Ohio"
Kathleen:
Money is not always the case. Washington DC spends $12,000 per student in minority neighborhoods and these kids still do not learn. They had that Asian Administrator who went up against some of those bad teaches represented by those teacher unions who she wanted to fire because of incompetence and she was the one who got fired.
If you care so much about education why not go for vouchers like some of those parents in DC had before Obama came in and scrapped that program to please the unions.
My comment regards the three-year disparity in scores between students in the US and students in Shanghai. I have taught an elective foreign language class at a well-funded, suburban high school in the US with every technology possible. I've also taught both at a school in a small city in China without even a copy machine and in Germany. What it took 45 minutes to teach in the US the Chinese students had mastered in 10 minutes. Why? Because the Chinese students worked hard outside of class to master each day's material and returned the next day ready to learn more. In the US the first 15 minutes of each class, at least, were consumed by reviewing the previous day's material. Many, but certainly not all, US students are quickly developing a "factory mentality" toward their education. They attend school regularly - what your guest referred to as "seat time" - and do very little once the school day is over. Stand outside a high school during final exam week and you will see many students enter the building with no books. Students in other countries are not smarter, but they work harder at learning. They have to rely on knowledge, not athletic ability, to gain entrance to higher education. The comment about the US education system not improving until the math team was valued as highly as the football team was perfect. Our students will not have the same level of academic achievement as those in other countries until our culture values that achievement.