I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott. His basic message, which I may pursue in a column down the road, was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas.This echoes what I heard when I visited the University of Houston to give a talk. I asked the professors (science and engineering disciplines all) why they didn't have American grad students. They told me they didn't get many applications from American kids, it was mostly from foreigners. They took what they could get.
The key quotes:
1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education. The problem is it doesn't match the work anymore." (That is to say, not enough students are getting science and math degrees.)
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Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Liberal Arts Degrees Are Fine, But ...
... some companies are reaching out to foreign students to find workers.
To some extent, it depends on the university. For example, Michigan Tech is primarily an engineering school. Somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of our graduate students in Chemical Engineering are US citizens. This is probably because we have a large population of US citizen undergraduates to recruit graduate students from. Our undergraduates who go elsewhere for graduate school tend to pick schools that are well-known science and engineering institutions, not to places that are primarily known for liberal arts.
ReplyDeleteSo, at the liberal arts universities, they mostly have to get as many science and engineering graduate students as they have from overseas, because they aren't cultivating them from their own undergraduates.
Is it liberal arts, or is everyone majoring in business, because if you major in business, you can work your way up the company ladder without ever knowing anything, just sitting in meetings making inane decisions and sidestepping ones that need to be made.
ReplyDeleteThe money in business if for the empty suits who've got no clue, not the engineers or scientists that do the actual work
My father got an MBA from Harvard several decades ago. Back then, the MBA program only took you if you had work experience outside of business. They reasoned that you couldn't manage any business where you hadn't actually done the work.
ReplyDelete