In the 21st century, differing from the 20th in the widespread impact of computer technology on all fields of life and civilization, it is paramount for the United States to be a leader in STEM subjects. Yet unfortunately Asian countries such as China and India are leading over the United States by the percentage of STEM students in their Universities. Even though the population of those countries is much greater, the percentage of University students who study STEM subjects is measurably higher. Good for them, but the United States have to keep up the pace to avoid falling behind these other countries.
I am qualified to speak about this topic because I graduated from the California State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science several years ago. Therefore I can speak about this topic from the inside out. My perspective can be of use more than someone who is looking from the outside in. I will now describe what are the problems that I perceive in American universities, based on my own experience.
By far the major problem is that STEM students in American universities have is that they are burdened with a huge load of General Education classes. I’d say from my own experience, that STEM classes such as Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, and Computer Science require at least three times the amount of time, effort, and studying compared to non-STEM classes, even if they have the same amount of credits! Completing an assignment takes a lot of studying and researching, steps that are absent in non-STEM classes. Furthermore, any STEM student who is passionate about the subject is studying not just to pass the class, not just to get his degree, but he is studying in order to fully absorb the information, because these are the skills that you need to know in order to have a successful career as an engineer. So the time spent studying a subject often times is even more than what is assumed on the syllabus. So not only are STEM subjects more information-dense than non-STEM subjects, we also devote much more time on our core subjects in order to learn the fundamentals because we need that for our careers, if we are to be successful scientists and engineers.
We are being hindered from progressing in our studies because in addition to the required courses for our major, we are also required to take a whole bunch of non-STEM courses, the General Education classes! These are a very unreasonable burden that has been thrown onto our shoulders by puffed up beurocrats who assume that a 3-credit STEM course is roughly equivalent to a 3-credit non-STEM course. It’s not. We STEM students have to spend extra hours each day on completing homework assignments for these General Education classes, in which we learn nothing useful, only sapping our time and energy out of us, that would have been better invested into us learning our core STEM subjects better.
Even worse, these General Education classes are not only garbage classes, they are also spreading the wokism ideology. The new President-elect Mr. Donald J Trump said that wokism is one of the plagues of American society, and in a large part it comes from these General Education classes that are pushing this shit into young people’s brains. Those like me, who just want to get it over with, and continue our major studies. However not everyone is so mentally resilient, and some people end up getting their mental health damaged by these General Education classes. Imagine if a future engineer in training gets his mental health damaged by wokism, then he would be performing poorly on the job, contributing to workplace accidents and an overall decrease in the quality of science and engineering. So not only are the non-STEM classes sapping our time and energy, they are also detrimental to our mental health. We have seen meltdowns of students from Ivy League universities after the election. It is due to a large part the detrimental influence of non-STEM wokism classes.
STEM students need to be supported, and to be freed to do their best work in academia and industry. We need every single hour that we can get, invested into learning our main subjects. Even if you get a B- and still manage to pass the class, in reality what happens is that you failed to fully learn some theorem, algorithms, or core concept. You learned it just enough to pass the class, but you didn’t fully learn it. And if this knowledge is never reviewed again, it is forgotten. That extra two to three hours that a student was forced to spend on his General Education garbage classes, would have been better invested into his STEM classes, which would have made a difference between learning a subject in depth, vs only learning in on the surface level just enough to complete the assignment. And in the very hectic schedule of university, most students are just in “survival mode”, learn just enough to complete the assignment or to pass a test. We study just what is required to “get by”, not really having any time to delve deeper into the fundamental concepts. And I feel like homeworks and tests are really not sufficient to evaluate whether a student has really mastered the subject or if he just memorized the pattern that’s necessary to answer the questions right.
In my personal experience in the California State University, there were many compulsory mandatory General Education classes that I had to take. Meanwhile many of the Computer Science and Mathematics classes that I wanted to take, because I had a genuine scholarly enthusiasm towards them, and because I had used the internet to research what are the skills that a Professional Engineer ought to know, were just classified as “electives”. I think that such a classification of these courses as “electives” is doing a disservice to STEM students. Because in order to have a timely graduation we have to do two to three of the STEM classes that are required for our major, plus one or two of those General Education classes that are required to graduate from the University. So if I wanted to take those elective STEM classes that really interest me, I would have to take them on top of a full semester course load! I know personal experience that if you have too much stuff to do, if you spread yourself too thin, then your overall quality of studies diminishes. So if I were freed of the burden of having to take these stupid General Education classes, then I would have had ample time to take those elective classes that I wanted, that I know would have benefitted me in my career.
I was doing a Computer Science degree. I wanted to take those electives Embedded Systems classes, Computer Vision, Robotics, and some classes in the Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering department, and also Linear Algebra and Differential Equations. However since my credits were taken up by General Education classes, my hands were tied. I would have had to stay for another year or two to finish my degree. I graduated in the Summer of 2020, with significant knowledge gaps, due to not having the opportunity to take those electives courses, and also due to not fully learning the materials of my required STEM subjects, despite getting an A or B at it, according to my self-assessment there are several things that I quite didn’t fully understand. If I would have stayed for another year or two, then I would have been forced to get a covid vaccine in order to continue my studies within the state of California, and that is something that I did not want to get, and one of the biggest factors why I decided to graduate early instead of sticking around for another year.
Since we are the ones building the future, the by puffed up beurocrats who are forcing us to take non-STEM courses can be considered an act of sabotage upon the United States technological and economical progress. If you ask STEM students, it’s clear that no one really want to take those garbage classes. The wokists who are in the non-STEM subjects are social parasites. No one would take their classes if they were not have been outright mandated by the beurocrats. If you don’t take those garbage classes, then you won’t be able to graduate, so you have no choice. The famous American scientist and philosopher Jacque Fresco said, “In the future, there should not be any courses that are designed to torture and burden people. Instead, you should have the right to study any subjects that you are interested in.”
There are those naysayers who claim that General Education courses are necessary for making a student more “well rounded”. However Liberal Arts don’t make an individual well-rounded, they just make you into a liberal, or into a traumatized survivor of narcissistic liberal mind-games. What does it mean for a STEM student to be “well-rounded”? It means having knowledge in a wide range of engineering disciplines that can be combined together in the field. For example, if one is a student of Computer Science, then to be more “well-rounded”, he should also be taking courses on related integrated fields such as Robotics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, even Physics, because the engineering of the future will be highly interdisciplinary, combining different fields of engineering together, such as SpaceX rockets, drones, robots, and industrial automation. In addition, Computer Science students should be required to take classes teaching basic computer skills, such as how to repair computers, and how to use Microsoft Office products. To this day, I don’t even know how to use Microsoft Excel since I never had the chance to take those classes, because they weren’t part of the Computer Science curriculum. Computer Science students should also take classes in business, entrepreneurship, and economics in order to be more “well-rounded” as engineers.
Another problem is that STEM professors, at least in the California State University, are paid less than the General Education professors, who have basically captured the University into their hands, and are dictating their whims onto everyone else. How come STEM professors are paid less than General Education professors? And I’d say that these professors ought to be paid at least as much as employees of prominent tech companies such as Microsoft and Google! That’s the main reason why so many talented and knowledgeable STEM graduates go into tech jobs instead of professors, because they have to provide for their families, and in some occasions they would be paid over five times the salary in a Tech company as opposed to a STEM professor at the University. However STEM professors are more important, because a single engineer he is only just one guy. However a STEM professor creates thousands of new engineers during his career because he is sharing knowledge and inspiring people. We need STEM professors to be very highly paid. We need to tax Tech companies, and give that money exclusively to funding the salaries of STEM professor in American Universities. Because these companies didn’t do any efforts for training their employees. They have a very high list of requirements that students ought to know in order to be employed at their company. The burden of training falls onto the shoulders of the students themselves, and on the shoulders of the STEM professor who teach the students. These tech companies are just using the benefits of the American educational system without contributing anything in return. In this aspect, they function like parasites. And they are not held accountable to anything. They steal the data of American users, selling it to foreign countries. And they have very high requirements of entry into their companies for prospective employees. And if American students cannot get in, due to a lack of skills lack of training, these tech companies import foreigners such as Indians via H1B visas, claiming that they don’t have enough qualified employees. We don’t need to import any more H1B foreigners. We just need to hold the tech companies accountable, and we need them to contribute a tax to pay for the salaries of the STEM professor at American universities, because these tech companies are using the American universities as a resource of graduates without offering anything in return. They should be funding the STEM departments. Employees of tech companies should also be required to teach at American universities as professors, at least part time, to share their knowledge with the students. Because we are having a rift between industry and academia in the STEM subjects. The tech companies are using new innovations such as Bitcoin, Blockchain, Web3, new programming languages such as Rust, advanced robotics, but these subjects are not usually taught by American Universities. Many American Universities STEM departments are teaching outdated technologies, sometimes 10 to 20 years behind where the industry is going. The burden of learning all these new fields of study falls onto the shoulders of recent graduates. So after graduating from University I have to take my free time to study these subjects on my own, I have to buy books, I have to pay for extra trainings on the internet. once again these tech companies are doing nothing to teach people, the burden for learning all falls on the engineers themselves, many of which are self-taught.
If this keeps ongoing, then the United States will fall behind Japan, China, India, and other Asian countries in these high technological fields, which are the future. And this constitutes a national security risk. Therefore it is paramount to make some reforms in American Univeristies, such as freeing STEM students the burden of having to take General Education classes against their will, removing the wokists from academia, turning American Universities into predominantly STEM schools just like the Chinese Universities, increasing the pay rate of STEM professors to be comparable to that of employees in Tech companies such as Google, taxing these tech companies to pay for the salaries of the STEM professors, and forcing tech companies to teach their own proprietary technologies to the students at the undergraduate and graduate level, so that the students would receive the necessary skills to perform well in real life engineering roles, as opposed to merely theoretical. It is paramount, the goal that we need to set, is that a Bachelor’s degree ought to prepare a STEM student for entering into any technical domain and feel confident and be able to “hit the ground running” and immediately contribute to innovation and research for the prosperous future that we are about to enter.