posted June 16, 2009 06:19 AM         

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Johnny Can't Add

But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can

July 28, 2003

Maybe we need to wake up.

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.

posted June 16, 2009 06:20 AM         

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( indian); 2002, Pratyush Buddiga( indian); 2001, Sean Conley; 2000, George Thampy; 1999, Nupur Lala( indian)).

{{ an associate at the branch sends over the correspondence meant for the asian branches and clients to me to check for Asian diplomatic PC - i end up correcting her grammer and spelling, she is a senior but her job comes from CA's quota machinery }}

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.

Q.E.D.

posted June 16, 2009 12:25 PM         

that we farm out work to cheaper countries? this has been going on for a couple of decades at least...as far as the heavily asian names in those lists, many of them are probably americans. but part of obama's platform was and is to bring work home to americans rather than farm it out to the cheapest bidder abroad.

as far as those outsourced indian workers, i remember trying to talk to support about my computer once. the guy may have known what he was talking about but he couldn't speak english in an accent i could understand. i hope this sort of thing is on its way out because the consumer is invariably disappointed in this kind of service.

twenty odd years ago a friend of mine sent her (wasp) child to public school, but she made sure it was in a heavily ASIAN-american neighbourhood. why? because she knew the asian kids would be hard workers and her son would be surrounded by people who took their learning seriously. jews traditionally value education more than their wasp counterparts, who value social contacts and the old boy network more.

my point - the american public school system has not been up to scratch for decades. more and more middle-class parents have taken their kids out and put them in some kind of private school. my own parents took me out of public school at 9 (a lot more than 20 years ago!) because they were afraid i would be bored and allowed to slide like my older sisters had.
however there have always been people who managed to learn even within the public school system.

but a large portion of american parents really don't care. grades are everything so the public schools are pressured to pass more and more people who really haven't learned much. there are people on this board who claim to be "educated" who can't string a sentence together without either misspelling or using the wrong words. still they have degrees upon degrees...and perhaps the preponderance of techno and science postgrad degrees held by non-whites reflects the lack of need to excel in language and literature?

but the computer business is not the whole world and college is not everything. if you take a look at the richest people in the world a lot of them never went to, or finished, college. they used their brains to think OUTSIDE the box. and public school is definitely inside the box. it serves the lowest common denominator and those who are so self-directed that they really don't need it.

i don't know anything about where you worked, venus, but where i work there is only one "asian" - name suyehiro - who is entirely american. her parents spent world war II in an american internment camp because they were of japanese descent. so the list of names proves nothing except that we have a high immigrant population and farm a lot of work out. again, i don't really see your point? if it's that we have too many immigrants, this is a nation of immigrants, always has been. and the internet is a global workplace where english is not necessarily the first language...?