WhipperSnapper
Lifer
- Oct 30, 2004
- 11,442
- 32
- 91
it's pretty obvious if you do any research at all in a university (or just pay attention to the grad students) that that is how the system works. slave away for a while, get an MS or a PhD.
It's very wasteful because people end up spending 6 years of their lives training for saturated fields. The federal government and the schools also spend money on it. Also, those graduate students aren't as productive as full-time professional research scientists would be; they also have classes, oral exams, etc. The same work could probably be done by professional scientists or lab technicians earning a modest middle class income of $50,000/year.
so with this "glut" of foreigners, what you're saying is that students go into other fields like business and psychology, which are already flooded and a dime a dozen, and that's somehow supposed to give them a better ROI?
The best and the brightest will go into other fields like medicine, finance, business, etc. These fields provide a better return-on-investment in terms of time invested.
maybe instead of getting discouraged, these american kids should show these foreign students that they're just as good or better in science and engineering. maybe instead of expecting to pass a class, they should actually study and LEARN. science isn't easy, but i can't begin to tell you how many people *expected that it should be easy*
It's hard to outwork a foreigner who's willing to work like a slave. Why would someone want to do that when they could go to medical school or work for a bank? And why do that for the purpose of entering a glutted field?
what's a "reasonable" wage to you for a scientist/engineer? With an MS out of school, I started at 67k, and a friend of mine, also MS, started at 70k. I'd call that pretty damn reasonable. Perhaps people should stop looking for jobs in a 5 mile radius and be willing to relocate. I bet that is half the problem in filling positions right there.
That seems reasonable. The problem is that people aren't finding those jobs and are ending up working low-paid postdoc positions.
Did you read the article I linked to?
