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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The nation needs people who are good at math, employers say, in the same way motion picture mortals need superheroes. They say America’s poor math performance isn’t funny. It’s a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.

“The advances in technology that are going to drive where the world goes in the next 50 years are going to come from other countries, because they have the intellectual capital and we don’t,” said Jim Stigler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the process of teaching and learning subjects including math.

The Defense Department has called for a major initiative to support education in science, technology, education and math, or STEM[b]. It says there are eight times as many college graduates in these disciplines in China and four times as many engineers in Russia as in the United States.[/b]

“This is not an educational question alone,” said Josh Wyner, vice president of The Aspen Institute think tank. In July, the think tank warned that other nations, particularly China, are challenging America’s technological dominance. “Resolving the fundamental challenges facing our time requires math."

Meanwhile, the number of jobs in math occupations — positions that “use arithmetic and apply advanced techniques to make calculations, analyze data and solve problems” — will increase by more than 30,000 per year through the end of this decade, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. That’s much faster than most other kinds of jobs.

“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the math department at Tennessee Technological University.

But most American students aren't prepared for those jobs. In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment tests in math, or PISA, U.S. students scored lower than their counterparts in 36 other education systems worldwide. Students in China scored the highest. Only one in five college-bound American high school students is prepared for college-level courses in STEM, according to the National Science and Technology Council.

One result: Students from other countries are preparing to lead these fields. Only one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American, the National Foundation for American Policy reports. The rest come from abroad. Most will leave the U.S. when they finish their programs.

In the U.S., poor math skills could mean lower salaries for today's kids. A Stanford economist has estimated that, if U.S. pandemic math declines are not reversed, students now in kindergarten through grade 12 will earn from 2% to 9% less over their careers, depending on what state they live in, than their predecessors educated just before the start of the pandemic.

But it also means the country's productivity and competitiveness could slide.

“Math just underpins everything,” said Megan Schrauben, executive director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s MiSTEM initiative, which tries to get more students into STEM. “It’s extremely important for the future prosperity of our students and communities, but also our entire state.”

In Massachusetts, employers are anticipating a shortage over the next five years of 11,000 workers in the life sciences alone.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/americas-poor-math-skills-raise-041135854.html[/quote]

Then create more seats at the college level. There are very qualified students applying to engineering and CS programs who can't get in. [/quote]

That is not true for college overall...there are plenty of schools that accept 90%+ of their students that offer engineering and CS.  You are referencing only the selective schools.

I have read articles in the past about how in China and India...like 80%+ of their engineering and STEM graduates essentially graduated from the equivalent of Devry.  These countries have hundreds of colleges that give kids the degree, but it is literally worthless.

There must be a typo in the article.  It references that jobs requiring stronger Math will increase by 30,000 per year...in an economy that generates millions of jobs per year, that is next to nothing which seems off to me.[/quote]

Colleges with open admission are not producing the engineers who drive the economy. Selective schools could double the size of engineering and CS departments and still reject qualified applicants  [/quote]

There are plenty of quality engineers coming out of schools like Michigan State, University of Iowa and 200+ other that are not open admission, but are also not highly rejective.

My main point is that the vast majority of the Chinese engineer/STEM grads are graduating from the equivalent of correspondence schools.  Articles like this always just grab the headline.[/quote]

The issue is we as a nation do not have enough Ph.D.s in STEM to teach these courses.  There is no way to expand capacity especially at the top schools.  Places like MIT, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Penn, Cornell in Math, Physics,  CS and some engineering are relying on very strong undergraduate students as TAs to leverage the instructional network to de facto expand and now paying them very well do this.  But, we simply need more Ph.D.s and financial incentives must be in place to accomplish this.

Citadel, Bridgewater, Jane Street are too seductive for the time being.  [/quote]

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