Because it doesn’t see the need yet. IME, the link between shrinking funding and interdisciplinary training is not yet understood by the generation of scientists that is currently making the decisions. The resistance you see from scientists to your arguments about framing are also evidence of this.

However, the drumbeat of “Not enough jobs for you! Not enough jobs for you!” encourages young scientists to consider “alternative careers,” and doing that means gaining interdisciplinary skills. As a young scientist who sees that wider training can help my career no matter where it ends up, the existing plans–such as courses in communications in graduate school–are laughable. Modeling them on the ethics training won’t make a big impression on those who aren’t already interested. Short courses (full-time, one to two weeks) are a common training paradigm, at least in my field of biology. Sending one’s trainees off to one of those would make a much bigger impression on them: it’d send the message that “this is actually important” even if one’s mentor tried to undermine that impression. And that impression could be made on the mentor if the cost is subsidized or if incentives for doing so can be built into the grant or tenure system somehow.

If the Congress really wants to be effective about attacting students to the SE field, then they would be better off addressing the demand side of the economics. Defense is a good way to do that, but seems to have a baffling connection with questionable bloodshed.

It is also disturbing that this government is comparing itself to other governments like China (I think I read somewhere that they were churning out 100k SE grads a year).

I also recall reading a quote from the CEO of some major corporation that professed to eat sleep breath its company 24 hours a day (how he gets by without REM sleep beyond me) and that we should be nervous about competition from China because they were willing to work on a Sunday.

Personally, I have been in the position of working with engineers from the asia-pacific region and from my experience, they are just as likely to enjoy their time off as any American. I remember attending a meeting where the entire gaggle of Japanese managers fell asleep… and rightly so… the presentations were pretty much a bunch of American managers that were pontificating endlessly about how great their approach is (in the guise of managing resources). The American confrontational style was eating up endless resources for the sake of egoism masked as ‘rugged individualism.’

I am not sure how the meeting affected the end product, but who can ever remember? Seems like they never do. It seems like the end product is usually affected by a couple of engineers getting together and saying lets get this working… then making it work. Of course, then there are meetings where managers pontificate about who’s management skills made it work. It seems that the lessons of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard have long since been lost (e.g., ‘management by walking around’ etc.)

All that aside, I am a little baffled why policy wonks would ever promulgate concepts of ’shortage’ as if SEs were commodities on a market. Besides, basic economics says there is no such thing as shortage, just supply and demand. Given that the hourly rates of lawyers for top partners with Ivy League credentials are in the 750 an hour range, who is going to argue with a smart and driven kid giving the NSF the finger and doing the Ivy BA and Ivy JD path? I’d say he was pretty shapr for figuring out the game so soon.

However, in a fit of altruism from decades of brain washing I suspect that this kind of incentive differential (engineers salary v. partner billable hours) is not in the interest of this country. Some of these ‘top partner’ types appear to be supoenaed and also appear to be effectively giving the finger to Congress. Is this good or bad for the country? I feel okay with saying this gesture that apparently is bad for the country. But here we are, so what do we do about it?

My suggestion is to quit treating kids like commodities and start asking more fundamental economic questions related to demand.

Specifically, I am tired of reading policy statements which treat the scientific and technical community of the country as a means to and end.

If we want to develop scientific expertise, we should recruit young people into science; if we want to improve the ability of the country to address technical, engineering problems, then by all means let us encourage the youth of this country to become part of the solution to those problems.

But it is false and hypocritical to tell students that they are called upon to focus on science so that the United States should become or remain “competitive” in some vague way in scientific and technical entreprises. There is a massive disconnect there between the policy problem and the ability of the student of science and engineering even to address it. The problem is not susceptible to scientific or technical analysis in the first place: it is a political problem.

You cannot recruit a college student into the exploration of the planets by tellling him or her that that exploration depends upon their choice of career; the public opinion will allocate the resources it chooses, based upon to a large extent the public perception of the alternatives. The student may succeed or not in advancing the exploration of the planets of the solar system in the course of a life devoted to that pursuit; the student will have negligible impact on the political decision by the political institutions of the country on the priority given to planetary exploration.

As citizens, in other words, scientists and engineers are participants in choices made regarding the policy selections in science and engineering. But as scientist and engineer they are working within a framework already settled by forces external to science.

Tell ALL of the students who are undergoing education to privilege science and technology, then, not just the science majors. They all have the same or similar voice in the matter. — but then, that audience might well respond with genuine resistance, saying they have other priorities and have no intention of setting them aside.

We should not and cannot use our students of science and technology as pawns in some sort of international power struggle, in other words; their choice of science has very little impact on the struggle, which involves a host of other variables, and in the second place we have already agreed that in a democratic republic the choices are made as a result of public opinion.

This is by strict definition – impossible!