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<p>Really? Then somebody needs to tell that to all of those firms who hired Berkeley physics graduates in 2010 for average starting salaries actually higher than that of many Berkeley engineering disciplines.</p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Physics.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Physics.stm</a></p>
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<p>I would like to know exactly who are these employers who would rather train high school graduates? If any demographic is truly being devastated by this economy, it is those with only high school diplomas. If such employers truly exist, then somebody needs to tell the millions of unemployed Americans with only high school educations to apply for jobs at those employers. Please name those employers so that those unemployed people can get jobs with them.</p>
<p>Or as Sheldon Cooper would say, </p>
<p>“Engineering - this is where the semi-skilled workers realize the work of better minds. Hello, Oompah-Loompahs of science.”</p>
<p>Seriously though, I think the OP is pointing out a disturbing reality in the trends. It is worrisome that it may be difficult for our highly gifted and highly educated minds to make a living. The fact that it’s hard for the high level math & physics folks to find jobs doesn’t prove that they’re useless - it is just another symptom of a society that isn’t investing its resources in the future, but rather trying to make the most of the advances of yesterday. </p>
<p>Engineers are great - I’m related to many. But they aren’t mathematicians and they aren’t physicists. Every single thing they are trained to do can be traced back to its more theoretical roots.</p>
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I don’t know about “STEM”, engineers and technologists seem to be doing quite well these days and an engineering degree can almost always lead you to a middle class salary. It is scientists and mathematicians who are being affected the most. </p>
<p>Maybe we should change “STEM” to “TE”? Since, after all, most employers consider scientists to be truly unqualified to do any engineering job, so much so to the point that engineering and science are completely different fields such as the stark difference medicine and finance. Now, I can’t imagine anyone wanting an investment banker to be their doctor.</p>
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<p>Seems to me that MIT physics and math graduates are doing well for themselves (see p. 23 of the pdf). Heck, the math majors seem to be outearning every single engineering discipline at MIT except apparently for nuclear engineering - which would seem to be ironic considering that MIT is supposed to be the world’s premiere engineering school. </p>
<p><a href=“http://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/graduation09.pdf[/url]”>http://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/graduation09.pdf</a></p>
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Once again, one link to Berkeley’s career website is not indicative of the statistical facts. I could point to Harvard’s career website for history graduates and will probably see a good number going into finance and earning a middle class salary, but does that mean you’re average history graduate from a state school has any remote chance of working on Wall Street? The average is high for physics majors graduating from Berkeley because many of them go on to work on Wall Street, which would obviously drive the average up. However, the average physics graduate from a good state school has no chance working on Wall Street, just as the average history graduate from a good state school does not. </p>
<p>As for the HR reps that told me their employers would much rather hire high school graduates than physics BS graduates, these are not some unknown companies, but rather some large firms. Of course, it was hyperbole. They were telling me if I ever I want to get an industry job, then I should switch my major from physics to engineering. I truly doubt any high school graduate’s resume would ever be read by a human and make it past the computer filters, in the first place.</p>
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<p>[How</a> We Recruit – On Formal Credentials vs Experience-based Education | Zoho Blogs](<a href=“http://blogs.zoho.com/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-experience-based-education/]How”>http://blogs.zoho.com/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-experience-based-education/)</p>
<p>Arguably, these people are based in India. Also, I think this type of hiring and training is more likely to work for “web 2.0 software engineering”, where most of the (software) engineering design work has already been done, or is done by other people (because it’s part of the server platforms these web sites run on).</p>
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Again, MIT’s math majors are not representative of all math majors in the country, seriously. Are all of the history majors from Harvard who work on Wall Street representative of all history graduates? </p>
<p>The engineer with the worst GPA and from the lowest ranking school will always have better job prospects than the math major with an average GPA coming from an average school.</p>
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<p>Actually, even that doesn’t satisfy the question. The issue is not whether there are firms who may train high school graduates, but rather are there firms who would actually prefer high school graduates over those with degrees (even in physics). In other words, while I might be able to believe that some firms inhere little, or even zero correlation between competence and college degree, what I would like to find are those firms who actually inhere a negative correlation - that is to say, that having a degree would actually hurt you in the recruitment process.</p>
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<p>I’m simply taking your original argument at face value: “What if every American school closes down their math and physics departments?” You said nothing about the lower-ranked departments or even the average math/science departments, but were talking about every department. </p>
<p>Now, if you want to change your argument to say that average or lower-ranked math/science departments could probably shut down with little harm, I might actually agree, but I would go further to say that plenty of lower-ranked schools as a whole could probably shut down with little harm. After all, the average American Studies graduate surely doesn’t produce much value for society.</p>
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But, the American studies graduate from Harvard does? Come on. Going back to your Berkeley link, the majority of those companies that hired physics graduates really didn’t require an extensive knowledge of physics to do the job, the finance ones didn’t require any knowledge of physics. As for the photonics firm, the reason they currently hire physics majors is because the EE curriculum (last I checked) does not cover it much, but as more schools start integrating it into their curriculum, you can be sure photonics jobs will only be reserved exclusively for EE’s from then on. </p>
<p>In essence, the only reason physics graduates from top schools are getting those jobs is because they graduated from top schools and went into fields that had either little or nothing to do with what they learned.</p>
<p>Projectile,</p>
<p>I think you are under the impression that there are a ton of people running around with BS’s in Math or Physics. In reality, very few people actually graduate with those specific degrees. And most that graduate with a Bachelors in Math or Physics go on to graduate school in that field. The cutting edge work in Math and Physics is being done by people with PhD’s, not BS’s. If you went to college for a degree in Math or Physics without planning to go to grad school, you are probably on the wrong path, imo.</p>
<p>The employment opportunities for someone in a mathematical or physics field with only a BS are extremely limited. That’s not the same for someone with a BS in an engineering field. So in reality you could probably cut actual undergrad degrees in Math and or Physics, and have very little effect on the economy.</p>
<p>However, you would still have a high demand for the teaching of math and physics to fulfill the requirements of several undergrad degrees.</p>
<p>There is a lot of irony in your whole argument because in reality Engineering is just Applied Mathematics and/or Applied Physics.</p>
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Incorrect, I remember reading a statistic that showed only 1/4 of every math and physics graduate goes on to graduate school (I’ll dig it up, shortly). And no, the cutting edge stuff is done by a very small minority of physicists (tenured professors). The rest are research slaves AKA “post-doctoral fellows”. </p>
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<p>The employment opportunities for someone with a PhD in math and physics are extremely limited in the U.S, let alone a B.S. If physicists and mathematicians had as good job prospects as engineers with only a B.S, then why are so many in academia working in dead-end post-docs in the hopes they’ll “win the lottery” and become tenured professors? I’ve personally asked physicists myself in my department who have been doing post-docs for more than a decade now, and the truth is they really don’t have anything better.</p>
<p>But a B.S in physics is valuable in many other countries, especially American physics degrees. I know many Chinese, Indian, and middle Eastern students who are in my program and planning to leave as soon as they earn their degrees as they have jobs lined up for them already. In the U.S it may be seen as a useless degree, but definitely not in other countries.</p>
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Again, high school math and physics can be taught by engineers. Logically, why should a teacher take quantum mechanics and real analysis to teach simple derivatives/integrals and algebra-based Newtonian mechanics?</p>
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<p>For one thing, the teacher may be teaching calculus to future mathematics researchers, and it would be good if the teacher understood not just the “how”, but the “why” of calculus. In real analysis, one is taught this.</p>
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<p>Yes, so what? The truth is, the overwhelming majority of college students will not take jobs that are closely aligned with their major. Let’s face it: the overwhelming majority of sociology majors will not become professional sociologists. The overwhelming majority of history majors will not become professional historians. The overwhelming majority of poli-sci majors will not become professional political scientists. {And yes, even many engineering majors will not become engineers. For example, nearly half of all MIT graduates who enter the workforce take jobs not in engineering but rather in finance or consulting.} I don’t know why you’re singling out math/physics.</p>
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I am pretty sure you don’t need an extensive knowledge of lagrange multipliers and manifolds to teach the “why” of basic high school calculus (tangent and area under the curve via approximation). I don’t know of any high school calculus class that requires proofs, so most engineers can competently teach calculus at the high school level.</p>
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That truth isn’t indicative of the choice most physics/math graduates (the ones that didn’t attend a top 10) have when it comes to job prospects. Most math and physics graduates would love to work in their fields, but they aren’t given a chance too and will either have to go to graduate school or retrain in a completely new field. Engineering majors always have jobs waiting for them in industry, but they decide to go into other fields for their own personal reasons. That’s the difference. Engineering graduates have a plethora of options when it comes to jobs, math/physics graduates don’t.</p>
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Who’s going to teach real analysis? Engineers? I think the assumption that engineers have as good an understanding of modern mathematics and are as capable of extending it as mathematicians, can be wholly discarded. You seem to be implying that engineers can’t do proofs (I mostly agree with this), so why in the world do you think that engineers can do what mathematicians do? Or do you persist in your erroneous belief that mathematicians don’t do anything useful? What about computer science? Mathematicians made it. The information age (probably) wouldn’t have been possible without their work (at least not as quickly as it happened). Please try to convince me that we didn’t need mathematicians to have computer science.</p>
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Who’s going to need real analysis once you close down all math departments? Last I checked, there are no applications of real analysis to engineering research or engineering in general. Probably CS majors who are looking to get into research might use it, and I’m sure CS professors are more than qualified to teach it to their students.</p>
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Funnily enough, if those mathematicians were to leave academia, they would be considered unqualified for computer science jobs. I’m not saying engineers can do the work of mathematicians, but you have to admit that the research most mathematicians do is quite useless in the grand scheme of things (I’m a math major and I’ll admit to this). However, there are many engineering researchers who make use of the useful advanced topics in mathematics to aid them (topology, differential geometry, complex and functional analysis, etc). If all mathematicians were to be forced out of academia in America, that wouldn’t be a problem as math research in Europe and Asia would continue. Engineering researchers who read the journals these mathematicians publish in could use whatever discovery made to aid their research. </p>
<p>Closing every math department in the world would be a major problem, yes. But, closing every math department in America wouldn’t have such a profound impact as you say it would. </p>
<p>Outside of academia, what are mathematicians useful for? If all of these math departments were to close down thus forcing mathematicians into industry, would the vast majority of them even be able to get any jobs without retraining in a completely different field?</p>