@texaspg: Actually, it turns out the Thiel Fellowships have been a mixed bag (for Thiel’s claims), at best. I can’t easily tell if it’s a paywalled article or not, but in the hope it isn’t: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Rich-Mans-Dropout-Club/151703/
Wozniak and Jobs were from the area… even before SV as we know it, there were a lot of educated people in SV working in the existing tech sector… HP was a local legend/success story… non-compete contracts are illegal, making it an attractive place for ambitious climbers… Stanford was openly backing high tech research… courts and laws were favorable and knowledgeable about intellectual property issues… the state was enjoying growth and investing heavily in infrastructure, libraries, cultural centers and public education (the Cupertino high school I went to offered 5 foreign languages, with an option to add Greek or Latin) – CA’s community college system was the envy of the world - free education - literally free - with decently paid professors who were unionized and who’d received their degrees in the nation’s top universities and willing to teach in CCs in part because it was a great place to live and work. Oh, and yes, the community colleges did offer specialized tech training specifically aimed at SV, which fed the tech industry (oil, too, actually.)
Maybe we should tax endowments over a certain amount? Maybe $750 million? Or over X per student? Why do the schools get a free pass?
These schools are the super rich, right? And their endowments are not benefiting the common citizen.
If only we were all fortunate enough to be able to dump our income into our own personal “charity” like the Clintons… think of how much better off we would be!
"It was news in our paper this week that Boeing actually paid corporate taxes this year. They threaten and blackmail the state with job loss to gain significant tax breaks then complain that the Universities are under funded. "
Boeing makes me ill. They scam the state for tax breaks, and then they take the jobs elsewhere anyways. What suckers the people who write these deals must be, all they require is the promise that jobs will stay here, with no guarantee.
Maybe the answer really is to tax the rich and raise the minimum wage? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-gibson/mark-dayton-minnesota-economy_b_6737786.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
“There are more people who want to pick CS than CAN pick it due to department size constraints which translates to money constraints”
I think part of it is also keeping their CS programs elite. You take a school like the University of Washington, which is huge (almost 30,000) undergraduates, and the last time I checked…they only graduated 80 CS majors per year, about the same for CE. Unbelievable, here in the tech city of the PNW, home of Microsoft, tons of donations to the CS department from the likes of Gates and Allen, and that’s all they can graduate? They easily bypass applicants with 4,0 GPAs, because it is so competitive. And it isn’t money, it’s keeping the department elite and difficult to get into. Do they really need to have plenty of spots in Swedish, Women and Ethnic Studies when people are finding it impossible to get into a tiny CS dept?
If there’s a need, the schools need to try to fill it. There is obviously desire by the students.
I am still waiting to see a story on how much tax Harvard would be paying if they weren’t receiving the benefits of non-profit organization.
Maybe one answer is to set a reasonable exclusion amt to cover pensioners, then tax all capital gains in excess of that as earned income. Doesn’t make sense that wealthy trust fund babies get to pay a lower effective tax rate than the doctor who administers their botox treatments…
I am shocked. No wonder Microsoft can’t find people.
@dfbdfb I wonder what the businessweek/Fortune/Inc/Forbes version of the same topic would say. I expect this version of the story from chronicle of higher education. 
I guess the class size of the med school at UDub is larger than the the class size of the CS department at the same school. Am I right? Or, they play the same game at their med school to make it elite as well?
In one year, the med school at Duke reduced their class size even when its size was not large to begin with. The last time I heard of it, the med school at Vanderbuilt was rumored to do the same. The med school at Stanford is small also. (I do not want to mention another smaller one.)
Were Duke, Vanderbuilt, and Stanford, as persons, called robber barons in their days?!
“I am shocked. No wonder Microsoft can’t find people.”
Ah, but they don’t have to hire U of Washington grads. They have their pick of many, many thousands of applicants. It’s not that they can’t find plenty of people, it’s that they want the very best, in the entire world, to work their butts off for less than other companies pay. Which is why they want as many internationals as they can get. My kid had an internship there, and he said it looked like the United Nations. Very few Caucasians. Not that it matters, but the plea that they just can’t find people to hire is a complete lie.
To return to the original article, if the problem was that companies can’t hire enough educated workers, and wages are stagnant because people are not educated enough, then we’d expect that educated people’s wages would be rising (because they are so in demand) and less educated people’s wages would be falling or stagnant (because they are not educated enough to get good jobs). But that’s not what we’re seeing. Low wage workers are not getting higher wages over time, and high wage workers are also not getting higher wages over time, on average.
Economic growth is going entirely to the people at the top. The very top. The 1 percenters.
Almost 30 years ago, in the building (Santa Clara 4 building) at Intel which gave us the design of the (hardware) brain of our PCs, the employees there used the same: “it looked like the United Nations”, to describe the scene during lunch hours in the large cafeteria.
I used to work at a place that looked like the UN. It was truly a multi-national company so lots of people were all over the world on international assignments. It was a great place to work that took pride in training its people. New ways of doing things were being tested all the time. Then the street/activist shareholders/etc started the “reduce costs” campaign. My career took me elsewhere before it got too bad but those that are still there say it is a very different place. Training is much harder to come by. Everyone is stretched too thin. Big things are not getting done. I fear that a truly great company is being strangled so that the big shareholders can earn a few more cents per share. Don’t they realize that even the hamster running on the wheel needs food and water or it will die? I see way too much greed in corporate America. I also believe that if most shareholders knew what was being pushed by a few for their “benefit”, they would be appalled.
Perhaps the good professor’s thesis is faulty, or at least designed so he can make his Keynesian case for higher taxes/government spending. Sure, on a micro level, individual businesses may be looking for certain skill sets, but on a macro level are we really that short?
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201404/cait-murphy/is-the-skills-gap-exaggerated.html
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201404/cait-murphy/skills-gap-in-the-labor-force.html
Huh?
Doesn’t Krugman agree with those two links?
Our good friend Mini used to remind us (in his cynical way) that our education system works beautifully as its main objective is to ensure a huge supply of uneducated workers for Walmart and its peers. Matched with the fact that it might cheaper to import technical workers (or move the jobs closer to those folks’ bases) there is little incentive to try to keep up with the rest of the world that has actively been pushing higher levels of education.
In a way, Krugman might be right if he were to adopt Mini’s cynical view. We do not need higher levels of education as long as we develop more tools to carry the dead weight. I am afraid that he meant that if power is the proxy for higher wages it is easier to accept this inequality and demand higher levels of handouts. In simpler terms, his view is a departure of teaching to fish as a solution to hunger. What he wants is more free cafeterias run by the government.
No. Krugman doesn’t.
This is why the thread is ridiculous.
Mini was right in many ways. Mini is doing better things now…
Dstark, why is the THREAD ridiculous? Because of the content in the article or because our discussions make no sense. The beauty of our forum is also its downfall. It is hard to correctly send signals of irony and sarcasm. If Swift were still living, I am afraid that many might think he feasts on babies and lives with talking horses.
Again, I believe that one of the reasons to look at this type of oped is to realize what our “recognized” intellectual leaders are thinking about the future of our country. I happen to think that many might be looking at the Euro Nordic states such as Sweden and Finland with a little tear in the eye. However, I also think that what does NOT interest them is adopting the measures that have yielded positive dividends such as the Finnish evolution and reform their in education system.
Would it be fair to state that, in the end, the US is turning into a rudderless ship, and that our only superiority is created by the people who are not following the increasingly numerous sets of rules and regulations. For instance, we are where we are in spite of having a FDA and not because of it. And we are not here because Al set in motion an initiative to create the possibility of analyzing the possible future of the potential of a highly connected world.
We are here because there are still people who have been taught to think critically and taught how to write, read, and count. Unfortunately, too few of them.
This is about income redistribution so we can have a better system There is a lot of obtuse and nonsensical thinking on this thread. Corporate greed has gotten completely out of hand