President Obama encouraging kids to study engineering and science

by philg

According to this New York Times article, President Obama will be the figurehead for a new program to encourage American kids to study engineering, math, and science. One wonders how effective this will be, given that Mr. Obama himself has been one of the most successful Americans of all time without ever having studied any engineering, math, or science. Obama’s undergraduate major was political science. Instead of enduring six years of slavery in science graduate school, Obama enjoyed three years of professional training at a law school. Wouldn’t a kid, every time he saw Obama’s face or heard his name, be encouraged to drop tech courses and pick up politics and law?

I would be grateful if readers can fill the comments section of this posting with the names of people holding power in Washington, D.C. right now who have a substantial technical background.

13 thoughts on “President Obama encouraging kids to study engineering and science”

  1. Well, Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, has a Nobel prize in physics. The Obama administration is actually better than previous ones in terms of having people with scientific background, but that’s not saying very much.

    In comparison, every single member of the Chinese Politburo was trained as an engineer, or at least that was the case in 2005, see:
    http://www.hojohnlee.com/weblog/archives/2005/06/08/china-is-run-by-engineers/

    That said, Thomas Barnett thinks the 5th generation of the Chinese leadership will be be filled by social scientists (i.e. BS artists like economists), not hard scientists, and thus they should converge towards our level of cluelessness:
    http://thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2009/10/when_the_5th_replaces_the_4th.html

  3. Senator Tom Coburn and House Rep. Ron Paul are both Medical Doctors (both OBGYN’s). Not technical in an engineering sense but from a biological, life science perspective.

  6. Congressman Bill Foster (PHD) from Illinois used to be a physics researcher. He worked at Fermilab for 22 years.

    1998 – Elected Fellow, American Physical Society

    1989 – Rossi Prize for Cosmic Ray Physics

    1999 – IEEE/NPSS Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award

    1998 – Federal Energy and Water Management Award (Dept. of Energy)

    1999 – Fermilab Technology Award for Digital Photomultiplier Integrated Circuit

  8. Relatedly, I doubt if this will please you much: “the makeup of the [holders of business-related posts in the] current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience in the public sector—is remarkable”.
    Make what you will of the historical comparisons provided by the graph at: http://blog.american.com/?p=7572

  9. A back-of-envelope calculation tells me that between 50,000 and 75,000 Americans hold a PhD in physics. Three of them are in Congress, a fourth is in the cabinet, and a fifth is the president’s science advisor. Assuming there are about 600 positions in Washington of comparable influence (535 in Congress, plus Cabinet and senior White House and Pentagon appointees), that means 1% of highly influential people in the federal government have a PhD in physics, despite physicists being only 0.02% of the population. So physicists are overrepresented in the DC bigshot circle by a factor of fifty.

    Only having statistics for Congress, the number of lawyers is 189 out of 535, or 35%. But there are 1.15 million lawyers in the US, or 0.38% of the population! So lawyers are overrepresented in Congress by a factor of a hundred. It’s interesting that physicists are almost as heavily overrepresented as lawyers, given that physics has little clear relevance to the job of a Congressman.

    So if you want to become a Congressman, your best shot is to study law (not exactly surprising, since Congress makes laws after all). But physics seems to be a good second choice.

  10. What’s worse is that many of the people we think of as having “power” and who DO have technical backgrounds (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs) did not finish their undergraduate educations, so I’m not sure how effective they would be as spokespeople for this movement either. (They’re also not in DC, and their power comes from their amount of capital accumulated.)

  11. Bill Gates supposedly has had a fairly serious non-professional interest in learning about science and engineering from his childhood to today, for whatever that’s worth. He is supposed to have said that he’s been motivated to invest seriously in a biotechnology company partly because he found very enjoyable having the advanced biologists explain to him what’s going on in their work and the context in their field.

  12. Barak Obama is an amazing role model for young people, and they listen to what he has to say. I have no doubt that Barak Obama’s encouraging statements about science will inspire hundreds of thousands of young people to become lawyers who encourage science for others.

    Reminds me of that Onion article “Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others”.

  13. As a college physics professor, I am reluctant to encourage any of my students to study engineering. The reason is simply. There are no engineering jobs in the U.S. I know from experience. In the 1980s, I attended the Polytechnic University of New York and studied Mechanical Engineering. After getting my degree, I expected to get a job. Despite sending out over 2000 resumes and registering with over 400 employment agencies through out the country, I was unable to get a job. I went back to school to study Physics and now teach. Things are only worse now. Most engineering work is done in India, China, Russia and Korea. Virtually all U.S. companies outsource their engineering work for one simple reason; cheap labor. For example, there are double the number of engineere in Bangalore, India than all of Northern California. Until the government does something about outsourcing, the situation will only get worse.

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