ChapterZero

I know I’ve kvetched on this point before, but now I have more hard statistics (source: “Mathematics in Public” opinion piece by Richard Schaar, Notices of the AMS Vol52):

• 53% of incoming college students will take remedial mathematics or English courses; over half will never graduate.
• 56% of engineering Ph.D.’s earned at U.S. universities in 2000 went to foreign nationals.
• Between 1995 and 1999, engineering degrees awarded in China increased 37%; in the US they declined 20%.

I have a personal anecdote to the second statistic: in the grad. Stochastic process class I’m taking, 70% of the class is Indian, 30% is Chinese, and there is one white guy and one black guy. I’m not surprised, at all, by the last one– in fact, I’m surprised the discrepancy isn’t higher. But, more than 50% of our students don’t graduate? That’s ridiculous.

Why is all of this so? Borrowing from Richard Hofstadter, I think there are two reasons, both manifestations of the ever-present American anti-intellectualist tendency: 1) unreflective instrumentalism, and 2) unrestrained hedonism. The first is the idea that abstract ideas are no good, only practical skills are relevant; accordingly, math and science are only interesting (rather, tolerable) at a so-called practical level, which precludes research. The second is the consumer culture mentality that says basically, work is good only for getting money to buy the things you want. So why spend the time and effort getting a technical PhD when you could just go into, say, business?

America’s in a sad state. We’re so damned lazy!

Possibly relevant posts:

• Stochastic Processes are fun! (9/13/2005)
• Math skills vs. programming skills (1/25/2005)
• And so it begins, again (1/18/2005)