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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

The article sounds as though there's a lot of pressure on colleges to lower their standards in order to produce the required number of engineers. I was a math/CS TA for several years, and I don't think the problem is with tough freshman classes, low grades or a focus on theory.

Fundamentally, the main problem with students that come from the US educational system is a lack of background in math. The prospective science major who's having trouble with fractions and basic algebra is, unfortunately, a disturbingly common presence on college campuses these days.

It's hard to fix K-12 in this regard (especially as everyone wants to fix it in a different way). But if colleges really want to solve the problem, they should put more effort into remedial math classes, instead of lowering the standards (and reducing the theoretical content) for those classes they already have.

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> educational system is a lack of background in math >

I think the whole "math is tough" point of view is not defensible, yet a large percentage of the non-technical population believe it. Yes, math is tough if you are 8 years old, but when you are 20+? Really?

Rather than standardized aptitude tests, I think we need good math textbooks for adults. Not for dummies, just regular explanations focusing on the applications.

On that note, I want to shamelessly add a plug to my upcoming book, in which I explain //all// the high-school math in 50 pages. I decided to add this section, after I saw many of my students struggling to find t in equations like: 3(t+4) = 4(t+3).

Email me if you want to see, and be a test reader. Oh yeah, the book also covers university-level Calculus and Mechanics in 150 pages.

I think the remedial math courses that presently exist at the college level are probably sufficient. The problem is that there's a perceived stigma among young people in taking them. I retook pre-calculus and trigonometry when I started college after the military, and I doubt I would have graduated as an engineer if I hadn't.

Make them mandatory if you can't pass a screening test.

I think the issue is the stigma; when one fails out of Calculus and the alternatives are taking College Algebra or switching majors, the stigma has the influence of shifting preference to a different major.

My first degree was History. I went back for engineering and failed Vector Calc and Electro-Mag both twice before finally understanding the material and getting an A in each. I was 30 when I took those, and was too proud to take the remedial.

I'm living through this right now. I'm struggling through pre-calculus, attempting to learn material I was never exposed to in high school, and the main emotion I'm feeling is profound shame.

Luckily, I've had some amazing research experiences so I know I can do the science; that said, I can easily imagine how differently things could have gone if that wasn't the case.

I lived through that myself and I want to encourage you to keep at it. It can be extremely frustrating and depressing especially if you have talented colleagues.

Here is my example in case you can benefit from it. I was studying EE and I had classmates who were able to skip Calc I, Calc II and one guy even clepped out of Differential Equations! Me? I was failing Pre-calc and I had to drop down to College Algebra. I was even failing that, unfortunately. I went to talk to the teacher, who unhelpfully stated, "In my 12 years of teaching I have only had a single student manage to pass considering where you are starting from." That seriously pissed me off. Fortunately, the next test was on exponentials and logorithms, which I just "grok". I got a high A on it. From there I dedicated even more time to the materials and I scoured the library for better math reference books. I found some books that took a practical approach to problem solving and used them to understand the process correctly. In the end I ended up with an 89 for the class. Considering that I had a 60 when I talked with the teacher, I was very proud of it.

I ended up having to add a year to my University studies and therefore added an extra major but it worked out well. I graduated with my EE degree and ironically some of the people that were exempted from the Calc series dropped out since the program was "too hard".

Change the way you are studying if your struggling. Look for other reference materials, try out a few different tutors. There are different ways to learn things, and you just need to find out how you learn and then you push it for all it's worth.

Nah, the real problem is just that other degrees, MBA, Law, etc, are just plain easier AND result in higher social status plus frequently more money.

Maybe in-demand engineers make more than the average lawyer, not sure about that. Maybe an MBA isn't really that much easier? But I'd say higher social status, especially in the USA holds true.

Can't speak much about new MBA grads, New grad lawyers are doing pretty awful these days (IANAL, but I have several friends who graduated from decent-but-not-amazing law schools this year, and had/are having a hard time getting fulltime jobs as supposed to temp/contact work.)

Things might not be so great right now or for the next couple years, but being a US lawyer is likely to continue to be an excellent job: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos053.htm#earnings. Even if median salaries drop by half from 2008, lawyer income will still be better than about 60% of the US population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

And I doubt there'll be that kind of a bottoming out. That said, I'm a 3rd year Cdn law student and programmer looking at a career in law that at least in the next few years will probably be less lucrative than being a programmer.

P.S: I also have a science degree so this post particularly caught my eye!

At the top 10-15 law schools, more than 50% the class will get a six figure job to start, and a big fraction of the remainder will have wanted to do public service to begin with. Even just a bit below that, at some of the top 30 schools like UIUC that drops to maybe 10%. At the same time, salaries aren't distributed normally, and the next mode is somewhere in the $50k range.

Engineering is both less segregated (people at MIT aren't all making Google salaries and people at Penn State can get still top jobs) and less bimodal (the top jobs don't pay 3x as much as the median job, and even people who do poorly grades-wise can often find some sort of employment).

So if you're looking at a top engineering program like Berkeley versus doing a bullshit humanities degree followed by a top law school, you'll likely come out ahead monetarily pursuing the latter option. On the other hand going to a decent state engineering school is probably a better bet than aforementioned humanities degree and a decent state law school.

That being said, even someone who went to aforementioned state law school and is working in "small law" for $50k can make a lot of money if he can bring in business. And if you went to that big firm and can bring in business, you can get paid millions while still doing legal work. On the engineering side, you either have to go the startup route, get an MBA and go into management (which involves not being an engineer anymore), or be content hearing "we couldn't possibly pay an engineer as much as a manager!" It's changing a bit with the Google's and Facebook's of the world, but is still the basic reality for most non-software folks.

MBA is definitely much much easier than getting an engineering degree. Went out to the bars 4 nights a week during my MBA and only did the same once a week during my undergrad. Everything is softer, the said part was that they had to dumb down a lot of the data modeling, quant, finance, econ, etc because most of the class struggled with algebra let alone calculus. We never touched a diff eq in the MBA program.

http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp

Median starting and mid career salaries by undergrad major. Engineering dominates the top salaries.

> I was a math/CS TA for several years, and I don't think the problem is with tough freshman classes, low grades or a focus on theory.

Eh. Math illiteracy is a problem, but I came into college having taken calc/physics/quantum mechanics, had nearly perfect math SAT's/SAT II's, etc, and I still hated engineering school.

I think engineering is just plain taught the wrong way. I'd say 80% of my classes were literally just the professor deriving some formula in some tortured fashion, doing a token problem, then going onto the next formula. This might be an adequate pedagogical style for a PhD candidate, but at the undergraduate level this just rewards the kids who have the longest attention span.

As a practicing engineer, you need to understand some of the origins of the formulas, sure, but more than that you need to see how the formulas work in practice, how they interact with each other, how they fit into the big picture. Professors give barely token attention to any of that. In fact it even goes beyond the theory/practice distinction. Playing with concepts and seeing how they interact, rather than laboriously grinding out every mathematical detail, is a great way to teach theory too!

The basic components of good communication are universal: you tell your audience what you're going to tell them, you tell them, and then you tell them what you told them. Engineering professors can be ridiculously inept at doing this, and it's no surprise people tune out and leave the programs.

Some students might do better to take physics instead of engineering. There is a broader perspective in physics and the origins of concepts and formulae are usually considered relevant topics for discussion.

The prospective science major who's having trouble with fractions and basic algebra is, unfortunately, a disturbingly common presence on college campuses these days.

I'm a grad student in English lit, and, if it makes you feel any better, the prospective humanities major who's having trouble with comma rules and simple grammar is also distressingly high. More of them than you might imagine end up thinking humanities classes are too hard, which leads them to business or comm, which leads to problems like the ones discussed here: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/07/student-choice-employment-ski... .

And I've talked to a lot of my peers who say they simply won't teach basic grammar and writing principles, even briefly, because students should "already know them." Which seems rather unfair if the students have already been fouled by the K - 12 system.

I was lacking in math background going into college, though it wasn't the fault of my schooling. I just wasn't ready for it yet. I struggled with algebra, which may or may not have been teacher related. I hadn't taken trig at all, and I ended up taking calculus my first semester in college. I didn't quite fail, but came pretty close.

I took until late in my sophomore year before things started to click for me. I can't point to any one specific thing that did it, other than I had matured a bit and my brain was now ready to learn the more difficult subjects.

I went from C's and D's to mostly A's and a few B's and double majored in Computer and Electrical Engineering with a Math minor of all things.

I don't think everyone is ready for college the minute they graduate from high-school. I suspect if I had taken a couple years off and did some blue collar work for a while before heading off to college, I would have done better and gotten even more out of it than I did.

Now I never switched majors, but the thought did cross my mind those first two years. I wonder if slightly delayed college entry would be helpful to others.

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