Johnny Can't Add: But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can

This is a tad long for FOE, for which apologies, and first appeared in The American Conservative.

The other day I went to the Web site of Bell Labs, one of the country's premier research outfits. I clicked at random on a research project, Programmable Networks for Tomorrow. The scientists working on the project were Gisli Hjalmstysson, Nikos Anerousis, Pawan Goyal, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, Kobus Van der Merwe, and Sneha Kumar Kasera.

Clicking again at random, this time on the Information Visualization Research Group, the research team turned out to be John Ellson, Emden Gansner, John Mocenigo, Stephen North, Jeffery Korn, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Bin Wei, Shankar Krishnan, and Suresh Venktasubramanian.

Here is a pattern I've noticed in countless organizations at the high end of the research spectrum. In the personnel lists, certain groups are phenomenally over-represented with respect to their appearance in the general American population: Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and, though it doesn't show in the above lists, Jews. What the precise statistical breakdown across the world of American research might be, I don't know. An awful lot of personnel lists look like the foregoing.

Think about this: Asians make up a small percent of the population, yet there are company directories in Silicon Valley that read like a New Delhi phone book. Many of our premier universities have become heavily Asian, with many of these students going into the sciences. If Chinese citizens and Americans of Chinese descent left tomorrow for Beijing, American research, and graduate schools in the sciences and engineering, would be crippled.

Jews are two or three percent of the population. On the rough-cut assumption that Goldstein is probably Jewish, and Ferguson probably isn't, it is evident that Jews are doing lots more than their share of research-and, given that people named Miller may well be Jewish, the name-recognition approach probably produces a substantial undercount. I asked a friend, researching a book on Harvard, the percentage of Asian and Jewish students. Answer: "Asians close to 20%. Jews close to 25%-unofficial, because you are allowed to list by gender, ethnicity, geography, but not religion. Our last taboo."

None of this is original with me. In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences released a study noting that over half of U.S. engineering doctorates are awarded to foreign students. Where are Smith and Jones?

Why are members of these very small groups doing so much of the important research for the United States? That's easy. They're smart, they go into the sciences, and they work hard. Potatoes are more mysterious. It's not affirmative action. They produce. The qualifications of these students can easily be checked. They have them. The question is not whether these groups perform, or why, but why the rest of us no longer do. What has happened?

It is not an easy question, but a lot of it, I think, is the deliberate enstupidation of American education. Again, the idea is not original with me. Said the American Educational Research Association of the NAS report, "Serious deficiencies in American pre-college education, along with wavering support for basic research, were cited by the panel as major contributors to this problem."

Consider mathematics. In the mid-Sixties I took freshman chemistry at Hampden-Sydney College, a solid school in Virginia but not nearly MIT. It was assumed-assumed without thought-that students knew algebra cold. They had to. You can't do heavy loads of highly mathematical homework, or wrestle with ideas like integrating probability densities over three-space, or do endless gas-law and reaction-rate calculations, if you aren't sure how exponents work.

Remedial mathematics at the college level was unheard of. The assumption was that people who weren't ready for college work should be somewhere else. No one thought about it. Today, remedial classes in both reading and math are common at universities. We seem to be dumbing ourselves to death.

I recently had children go through the high schools of Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington. I watched them come home with badly misspelled chemistry handouts from half-educated teachers, watched them do stupid, make-work science projects that taught them nothing about the sciences but used lots of pretty paper.

The extent of scholastic decline is sometimes astonishing. So help me, I once saw, in a middle school in Arlington, a student's project on a bulletin board celebrating Enrico Fermi's contributions to "Nucler Physicts" (Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee champions: 2003, Sai Guntuyri; 2002, Pratyush Buddiga; 2001, Sean Conley; 2000, George Thampy; 1999, Nupur Lala).

It appears that a few groups are keeping their standards up and the rest of us are drowning our children in self-indulgent social engineering, political correctness, and feel-good substitutes for learning.

Some of our growing dependency is hidden. We do not merely rely on small industrious groups in America and on foreigners working here. Increasingly the United States contracts out its technical thinking to Asia.

If you read technically aware publications like Wired magazine (and how many people do?), you find that major American corporations have more and more of their computer programming done by people in, for example, India. In cities like Bombay, large colonies of Indians work for U.S. companies by Internet. This again means that counting names at American institutions underestimates the growth of intellectual dependence.

The Indians, and others, have discovered the suddenly important principle that intellectual capital is separable from physical capital. To program for Boeing, you don't have to be anywhere near Seattle. Nor do you need an aircraft plant. All you need is a $700 computer, a book called something like How to Program in C++, and a fast Internet connection. Crucial work like circuit-design can now be done abroad by bright people who don't need chip factories. They need workstations, the Internet, and engineering degrees.

This too we would be wise to ponder. Americans often think of India chiefly as a land of ghastly poverty. Well, yes. It is also a country with about three times our population and a lot of very bright people who want to get ahead. They're professionally hungry. We no longer are.

People speak of globalization. This is it, and it's just beginning. Where will it take us? How long can we maintain a technologically dominant economy if we are, as a country, no longer willing to do our own thinking? If we rely heavily on less than 10 percent of our own population while employing more and more foreigners abroad?

It's not them. It's us. I've heard the phrase, "the Asian challenge to the West." I don't think so. When Sally Chen gets a doctorate in biochemistry, she's not challenging America. She's getting a doctorate in biochemistry. Those who study have no reason to apologize to those who don't.

The Mathematical Association of America runs a contest for the extremely bright and prepared among high-school students. It is called the United States of America Mathematics Olympiad, and it "provides a means of identifying and encouraging the most creative secondary mathematics students in the country."

An unedited section of a list of those recently chosen: Sharat Bhat, Tongke Xue, Matthew Peairs, Wen Li, Jongmin Baek, Aaron Kleinman, David Stolp, Andrew Schwartz, Rishi Gupta, Jennifer Laaser, Inna Zakharevich, Neil Chua, Jonathan Lowd, Simon Rubinsteinsalze, Joshua Batson, Jimmy Jia, Jichao Qian, Dmitry Taubinsky, David Kaplan, Erica Wilson, Kai Dai, Julian Kolev, Jonathan Xiong, Stephen Guo.

Not stupid. And not really lazy, either.

The underlying problem is that a great many people want a free ride - high grades for nothing. Add in that everyone in America is afraid of conflict, so no one will enforce rules or standards.

If there are few consequences for doing nothing - and little reward for hard work - what results can we expect?

Long term we're in trouble. And I see nothing on the horizon to suggest we're willing to fix it.

We might also ask why we have massive immigration from Mexico. Could it possibly be that we aren't willing to mow our own lawns, clean our own houses, and pick our own crops? What is the difference between an unwillingness to do such things and an unwillingness to learn one's algebra?

He is right on the mark. In 1968 when I was working on my MBA at Santa Clara University (SCU) the college used Stanford MBA professors to teach in the evening division. SCU upgraded its program to give greater emphasis to statistics and higher level mathematics. An intense graduate level Calculus course was added as a requirement for graduation. I was impressed with the students at the time, most of whom were senior engineers trying to move into managment.

Happily I am able to report that SCU still requires Calculus for graduation. But the school has a national ranking (# 11) and many of its students are Indian, Chinese, or from other foreign countries that place high priority on math.

In general, there is a lot of truth in this posting. Proportionally, more East Asians in America tend to study hard and are highly achievement oriented. Americans don't achieve as well, because of the intentional destruction of our capitalist work culture by the left, the impact of mass media entertainment, and the degradation of our educational system by the left and teachers unions.

But there is a lot more too it: India in particular has realized that a lot of money is to be made by importing American jobs. And Asians in general make up a large number of folks in research in the US, and hopefully they stay here.

However, regarding programming in India, there is something else going on. There are lots of smart, unemployed programmers in the US. I am fortunate to be an employed one.

But the Indian programmers work for a few hundred dollars a month. It isn't that they are harder workers or smarter, it's that they are much less expensive. This same observation applies to engineering.

In other words, what happened in the past to manufacturing jobs is now happening to service and knowledge jobs, including engineering. This is primarily a result of the telecommunications explosion, not a change in cultures.

On the other hand, my father is a professor (emeritus now) in engineering. He has lamented, for at least 30 years, that too many of his graduate students were foreigners (often Iraqi's, Red Chinese and Iranians, btw). He didn't have a problem with these folks, except for the ones who took their skills back and used them in WMD programs. His concern was the lack of Americans reaching that level - too many of the smart Americans were becoming, sigh, lawyers. And too many weren't up to the hard work that an engineering education requires. The dumb and leftist ones were becoming teachers.

Notice that this is not a new situation. What is new is the massive export of service jobs, and more recently engineering (especially programming) jobs to India. THAT is a result of telecommunications and price competition, not lack of educated Americans.

And now, other, even cheaper countries have caught on and are stealing business from India in these areas!

John (Useful Fools BLog)

Kids aren't lazy, and they aren't stupid.

The truth is, teens would do really well in school if they were just given the challenge. But the way public schools seem to work is that instead of working with a poorer student to get him/her up to the level of the smartest people in the class, they bring the smartest people in the class down to the poorer student's level.

I wish they would stop worrying about all that emotional stuff and get serious about education. This is school, not the feel-good-about-yourself place. If teens have a serious emotional problem, that's what the on-school counsellors are for. Please, focus on the reason you're there: to help the kids learn.

Like I said, the teens aren't lazy--they aren't being challenged. The teens aren't stupid--they're being brought down. Public schools need a big reality check and fast, or America will be the land of the free and the home of the ignorant.

I'm actually going to disagree on this one, I have a bit of a different perspective. After I got out of the service and went back to school, I lived with a foreign student. I hung out with his friends, mainly other foreign students. As an undergraduate I took a number of math courses with a lot of foreign students. Then in graduate school in the CS department I associated with a lot of asians. But this is what I learned...

1st of all, in many nations not everyone goes to college. Most people drop out by the 8th grade. So high school is only a subset of kids, mostly smarter or richer. Then colleges are a lot more competitive, most kids don't go to college. So again, the richer/smarter kids. Often you are now down to 10% or so of the 18-22 year olds, way different than in this country. If they come over here either as undergraduates or as graduates they are often the very best their nation has to offer. They are often sponsored on national scholarships, and are expected to return to their home countries after a number of years to pay back their debt to their nation. So we are comparing apples to oranges here -- the top students of other nations against our whole population. We get the high end of the bell curve coming over -- of course they are good.

In the 2nd place, they tend to gravitate towards math, engineering, and science. This is because (a) math is an international language and can be taught with chalk and slate in some jungle schoolroom (really), thus the math geniuses can be identified and supported; and (b) their nation's are not planning to invest all that scholarship money in them to come over here to learn European medieval literatur or law. Therefore -- they tend to focus on those fields. What does the above article discuss? People who have aggregated into those fields. I bet if you looked for the ethnic composition of law schools and law firms in the US you would not find nearly so many asians (although, I admit, you will find a number of Jews).

Comments?

No kidding. My kid with advanced degrees in math, physics and engineering was the single caucasian in the classes most of the time. Worse, the school was cited because of the lack of diversity in the higher level science, engineering and math courses.

The Gubmint lumped all the ~Asian~ (read Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, etcetera) as white.

We have some kids out there who just aren't pushed enough to take the tough courses and way too many kids taking psych, sociology, political science, and silly sciences that are agendas, not disciplines.

The truth is, teens would do really well in school if they were just given the challenge.

Umm...a small quibble. If the schools were permitted to give them a challenge, and if there were rewards for success (high grades) that could only be obtained through mastery of the material, then - as you say - many teens would do well.

However, when Johnny (or Julie) don't want to do the work, don't want to come to class, don't want to do much of anything - and still get high marks in order to avoid screaming tantrums by the child and the child's parents - then a different state of affairs exists.

Ahh, but we can't have that, now, can we? It might injure their abundant self esteem.

Asian challenge to the West."

If the Asian cultures continue to value male children above female children, the challenge to the west will come in about 10 years, when China's One child policy, and India's practice of 4th month abortions on fetuses appearing female on ultrasound, leave a generation scrambling for mates.

Nature usually provides for more males than females in the general population-but not in these countries.

Suresh Venktasubramanian may be able to add, but may not be able to multiply.

You are correct about the top 10%. But there are other factors.

In Japan everything in your future depends on periodic competitve exams and parents spend a fortune to send their kids to special cramming schools. Wealthy parents whose kids tried hard but failed to make the top 5% or 10% will spend BIG bucks to send their hard working son and daughters * to schools over here. I see these kids everyday going to college happily knowing for the first time in their life they will be getting top grades. Asian kids with big smiles on campus !

It is the same in India, Hong Kong, Pakistan, and most of the rest of the world.

I spoke with a web site "designer" a couple of weeks ago. He was sent over here by his family from India. He has an undergraduate degree in computer science and an MBA from UCLA. He has his own company now. Most of his employees work in India. They are prepared to make huge moves in the area of biz-to-biz consulting. He has been biding his time and stashing his money away. His family is happy because he is free to travel back and forth.

The Asians, Indians, Pakis and Arabs are getting ready to eat our lunch -- and our dinner -- and breakfast -- in a few years.

American education is a joke at every level except for the university. The teachers unions are to blame for this sad state of affairs. And, of course, the Dems.

________

Daughters who experiment sexually and cross racial lies face terrible consequences. I knew a Japanese student who was disowned and stranded in the U.S. when her father found out she was sleeping with a black basketball star.

Like I said, the teens aren't lazy--they aren't being challenged. The teens aren't stupid--they're being brought down. Public schools need a big reality check..

I agree - many aren't being challenged. I worked with a group of teens, slightly older than my son, last year through my church. The advanced Literature course I took in hs involved 10 books to be read and reported on (better use good grammar and spelling!) outside of class in addition to 2 large reports and the regular class work. This same advanced class now does 4 required 4-5 pg reports. In class. And I'm told the teacher is fairly lenient on spelling and such, even though most of the kids have computers with Word and spell and grammar check!! And almost everyone gets an A. I was lucky, most of the kids in my group were well motivated and all were bright. Clearly not challenged though, but they did respond to the challenges we presented. However, other teens are so highly underchallenged and overindulged that I don't know - it would take a lot to get them to change. You know the one's, I teach a class for second graders, and even with them, there are the one's who have an excuse for events that haven't occurred yet or assignments with no particular due date. And parents eager to make it 'easier'.

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