<p>@poetgrl, I agree. Our country is woefully bad about ensuring that people can do math and have some technical literacy. I have often found it interesting that people at cocktail parties (or elsewhere) will proudly say that they don’t do math or computers. I don’t think people would proudly say “I don’t do writing” (though if they did say it that way, they’d be credible).</p>
<p>@Iglooo, let’s add another trend that is not explicitly about technology: Increasing conflict and increased need for effective negotiation and conflict resolution between governments, companies and individuals. Hierarchies have flattened. Authority is less dispositive. Lawyers have gotten better and better about suing. Entities need to work out deals and settle conflicts to get things done.</p>
<p>I am not disputing there are non-technical jobs. Just that we are neglecting the prospect of technical job opportunities for the next generation. It is our job to vanguard our kids’ future and dissing STEM seems short-sighted. I am not suggesting we force kids to do math when all evidence points lack of math aptitude. Just that I strongly suspect properly guided, many more kids would take STEM. And that would open up many possibilities. </p>
<p>Eh, maybe. I think the best bet for a kid is if he/she is encouraged to become creative and entrepenuerial. This next generation is going to have to recreate their own economy and create their own jobs.</p>
<p>Is that any different from manufactured goods are getting cheaper now that most manufacturing is done overseas? If you want to correlate labor shortage to wage increase, you will first have to close up the border and see what happens then. Without seeing how the study was done whether they countered the influx of labor force, I wouldn’t draw any firm conclusion. As I said before, one look at graduate math/science department will show you the landscape. And it isn’t because American students aren’t interested in going to a math/science grad program.</p>
<p>@dstark, thanks. My son only applied for a few jobs as a college senior as he was contemplating an entrepreneurial venture. When he applied for a few finance jobs, they asked for SAT scores and, I think, GRE scores. I suspect the finance firms are seeking Math SAT scores of 800 or at least 750. I assume the management consultants also asked for them but I didn’t see him do that (and he only applied to one and didn’t think they were very interesting). @blossom will no doubt know more.</p>
<p>I’ve got to go teach at a business school tomorrow. A friend’s father is having an emergency operation and remarkably I had nothing scheduled after 9:30 AM. So, I’ve volunteered to fill in. The students should all know who I am as they’ve read some of my stuff (hopefully they still are positively disposed).</p>
<p>:). Shawbridge, have fun tomorrow. You are intelligent. Informative. You have a sense of humor. The class will love you.</p>
<p>Thanks for the test info. It is brutal out there for young people. It sure wasn’t this tough for people our age. If it was, I traveled in different circles.</p>
<p>I think the math SATs were recentered or rescaled so that they became easier. I did a little search and found the stultifying article below, which I would not recommend reading unless you have insomnia. However, Figures 12 and 13 on page 11 show that for verbal, the whole distribution was shifted over and it looks like anyone who would have scored 730 or above on the old SAT would get an 800 score on the recentered SAT (it is a little hard to read the figure precisely). Secondly, it looks like anyone with a math score of 730 or above on the old SAT gets a higher score on the recentered one and anyone at 775 or 780 on the old test would get an 800 on the recentered version. As such, it looks like there is compression at the top for both Verbal and Math. </p>
<p>So, while it is highly competitive, a 750 or even an 800 cutoff might be a little easier that it seems. But, of course, back in the dark ages when I took the tests, no one studied for them.</p>
<p>Teaching should be fine. My first job was teaching at a business school. </p>
<p>We have a family friend (recent grad) who was a psych/philosophy major who’s at a major SV company. They loved the logic courses in her phil major. S1 finds that being a math major who writes well has opened many doors for him. Has had published papers and given presentations internationally to more senior folks in his field. DIL has revealed all kinds of talent for mentoring and project management (also a SW engineer). I suspect this is what they mean by incipient leadership – more than tech skills, but the ability to think big picture, motivate and communicate effectively.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that Back is ex-McK. He wouldn’t even have a chance to interview at McK if he didn’t go to a select list of top schools. Also, he wouldn’t have gotten in if he didn’t have sky high analytical skills. McK doesn’t care at all about writing skills in the interview process, they care about quant, analytical, and core problem solving skills, plus soft skills as being able to influence others, taking initiative, leadership, etc.</p>
<p>The McK BAs I worked with were almost all with a STEM background, and all from the likes of HYPM (for east coast offices). I did work it some BAs with a non-STEM background and they all bombed big time. If you can’t do analysis and quantitative thinking on your feet you wouldn’t survive at the top echelons of management consulting.</p>
<p>However, I am sure that there are many other careers where this is not true. I am only speaking of this one because Back is ex-McK.</p>
<p>Note that pay disparity between the consulting and outsourcing companies ($60k to $80k per year) and the companies hiring for their own technical work ($100k to $130k per year). For reference, new graduates with master’s degrees in CS from San Jose State made $97,501 (2013), while those from MIT made $95,000 (2012). New master’s degree graduates are the most likely comparison group for H1B visa employees in the computer industry, although some pay increase with experience up to the length of the H1B visa can be expected. However, it is likely that many of those hired by the consulting companies do not fit the usual direct hire pattern of having a master’s degree from a US university.</p>
<p>According to the chart in UCB’s link, Google. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and a few others all pay over $100,000 to H1B hires. That is not paying less by any account.</p>
This is an affinity group (albeit not necessarily an important one), exhibiting Kahan’s “motivated cognition”. There is nothing evil or immoral about it. They are simply looking after their personal self-interest, while empirical evidence is totally against them. </p>
<p>
A friend told me some years ago that her prof called our grade 12 calculus course the “invisible sieve”. I can not see the average student taking it, but all of our competitive programs ask for it at the time when mine were applying.
You may also be interested in the Rede Lecture, delivered by C P Snow in 1959:</p>
<p>“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had”. </p>
<p>
I mentioned that at a previous thread and it was not well-received. I guess I made the mistake of asking who winners and losers are. </p>
<p>@dstark and @ubcalumus- “If you don’t have at least 750 on the math SAT, you’re out. The most common score is 800. Math plus verbal scores should be well over 1500, and typically over 1550. GRE, GMAT, and other scores should be scaled similarly”. This is for consulting. @User51969 -Perhaps McKinsey is different but I doubt it. As you can see, Bain and BCG are willing to go down the “list” quite a bit. What they are not compromising on is SAT scores and analytical courses. I think their approach is the correct one.
Personally I think this is the best selection system I have ever seen. @blossom Can you see how that can be improved?</p>
<p>There, we already lost in competition. That’s why firms go out and hire H1B’s. Calculus in this country is such a big deal. In many other countries, every high school student takes calculus whether they are going into STEM or not at an earlier grade often starting at 9th grade. The standard for STEM major is high. You can bury your head in sand and claim that they hire foreigners because they are cheap or begin to demand we do a better job teaching kids math. </p>
<p>Well, the kids my kids knew, and my kids, all took calculus in high school, and a lot of them went into the humanities in college. Most of them have really well paid jobs, and the ones who don’t are in professional programs (Med/Law/PhD), or are working non-profit for ideological reasons. </p>
<p>I think we have a really divided education system.</p>
<p>But, we are also graduating STEM majors at either 100% or 200% of what we need. The answer isn’t more people going into STEM. The answer is to make STEM literacy AS important as we consider history or English Lit. </p>