Rudd’s Maths and Science Strategy Doesn’t Add Up
I am currently two subjects away from completing an Honours degree in Applied Mathematics with a minor in Physics. While I’m not a genius, I’m more or less what Kevin Rudd would like more of: people well trained in Maths and Sciences. Part of the so-called “Education Revolution” is halving the HECS debts of anyone who wishes to pursue these fields at university as well as bolstering the number of postgraduate scholarships. This will be ineffecutual in achieving Rudd’s aim in light of a rather perplexing move by the government’s razor gang.
Rudd plans to cut the budget of the CSIRO by one quarter. How on earth does he expect more Australian scientists with foolish moves such as this? How does this environment play out in the real world? Personally, I think that my situation is a great example of what is happening with science graduates, so I’ll share.
On the verge of completing an honours degree, it would be easy for me to simply continue onto a PhD and become a fully fledged mathematician. Given the bleak prospects for science graduates in comparison to other fields such as mining and finance, this is a path many would-be mathematicians, such as myself, are not taking. Job prospects in Australia for mathematicians are uninspiring. Every article I read about maths in the Higher Education supplement of the Australian seems to be about a funding or staff cut in some university mathematics department and I won’t even start on the maths jobs (or lack thereof) in the private sector.
I have been putting an immense amount of my time into study with the goal of getting into medical school next year; I see a much brighter future for myself in that field. Compared with the sciences, the amount of debt the average Medicine student racks up is astronomical, but this does nothing to deter prospective doctors. From my own experience and observation I can say that there are far more people working hard to get into medicine than there are places at universities for them. Each one of these candidates knows full well the exorbitant HECS-HELP debt they will accrue by undertaking this degree. Employment prospects and salaries, though, are substantially better in the medical profession and as such the associated fees are just a little financial blip for most medicine students.
Essentially, it’s quite clear that HECS and HELP debts and other fees are a relativley small consideration when people choose their career paths. Job security, quality and salaries are far greater concerns for the average tertiary student.
In a previous blog post, I argued that the economic success of the United States over the last few decades probably is not disjoint from the incredible amounts of government spending in universities, science and research. I’m not the only person who considered a career in maths, then realized that other fields in Australia have far more to offer. Rudd should be putting money into more scientific projects and jobs if he wants more people trained in those fields. If we want better scientific endeavours, innovation and ultimately a better country, let’s invest our money into Australian science.
Great article.
It’s not just maths and science where this ‘brain drain’ exists at present — Australia is just generally behind the eight ball when it comes to opportunities for people entering the workforce from a post-graduate position. There is a lot of evidence out there that Australia’s job environment is dominated by ‘Old White Male’ syndrome where there is very little opportunity for advancement within careers from journalism to engineering, compared to equivalent positions overseas.
From what I’m aware of, even with the higher costs of living, academics are far better compensated in the States and Europe, and more importantly for those of us just entering the workforce, they get a lot more opportunities to prove themselves and work on cutting edge science/policy/whatever.
Personally, I’m doing my Ba. Social Science Mj. Development, which will inevitably take me overseas anyway, but I think I’ll be leaving early on and trying to get work overseas, simply because there’s more opportunity. It’s the same with Education degrees — a lot of the top teachers are being lured over to Qatar because the remuneration is so much better.
I’m not sure what the solution is, honestly — it would most likely require a total refresh of the people who are currently running industry and government and serious increases in funding. The government keeps talking about the knowledge based economy and how we need to prepare for it, but I think they’re all too conservative make the decisions that need to be made… they’ll just hope that we can keep the economy afloat through coal exports and mass consumer goods until the next election, I suppose.
Providing a decent grant system is probably the first step. From what I’ve read and heard, the RQF is an absolute mess of a system and was more of a political move to replace the ARC with system whereby the Education Minister could veto grants.
Australian universities are under a lot of pressure to pump out commercially viable research which can be sold off to industry rather than doing the work which has long term benefits (such as basic scientific research).
It’s going to take a lot to reverse this trend of anti-technical populism which was started by Keating (when he canned a heap of projects towards the end of his term) and embraced by Howard as he slashed university funding and allowed higher fees.
If Australia’s going to retain its best and brightest the government needs to ensure there are plenty of opportunities for Australian science graduates. Renewable energy projects to retain the physicists and electrical engineers; weather/climate modelling projects to retain the mathematicians and computer scientists, etc. Perhaps we need a new “Snowy River” type scheme not to attract immigrants but to retain emigrants.
Anonymous post from lecturer!
Very true – there are bugger all maths jobs out there. Well true maths, there is plenty of work in stats, data analysis, financial analysis etc, but it’s not really maths (most of the time). My first job was as a “mathematical modeller” with Ed Qld… translation – statistical data and survey analyst – code monkey, etc. I wasn’t there long.
Unfortunately, that’s the way it is here – we are very needs focussed in Oz. We have lots of minerals to get out of the ground, then we NEED some miners, engineers, etc. We have a tradey shortage, we train tradeys. There is rarely a grand forward thinking, novel vision (although some have had them and they went tragically wrong!). If Rudd wants a revolution, there needs to be a revolutionary change – sounds crazy I know… but how about putting an absolute shiteload of money into a world’s best institute of some type (doesn’t matter what really, but something). Not just some existing place where we bring in some old croneys to increase the profile – a truly new, huge, world best that would actually attract people from overseas, keep people here and inspire younger smarties to have a go in that field too. Sam’s renewable energy is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Regarding academics and pay – I worked in the states and it was a lot easier and I was in LA in a high cost of living area on a relatively low salary!
RQF is now dead (well basically) and yes it was to put the power with the Educ’n minister.
Oh well… we can dream, but most likely, it will be a waste of a good sleep!
Ok… as someone with real ‘maths’ job I feel compelled to make a comment …
and it’s this
I’m damn lucky. Truth be known I’m in this job largely by fluke. My position only exists because of the foresight and vision of a few people who see value in my company having it’s own modeling capacity. My boss has agitated for years and genuinely stuck his neck out to create the team I am in. I believe that in time we will be able to produce the same outputs as expensive consultancies at a fraction of the cost.
I love my job. And I am grateful for it.
And I never dreamed that I’d actually be doing anything nerdy. I expected to have to do something slimy like finance.
But the future is perhaps not as grim as you might suppose. I believe that my boss is progressive rather than nuts. Maths graduates are great. They can knock up software; analise data; build models; resolve logistical difficulties and even do some stats (if we have to and are asked very nicely). In short mathematicians solve problems. All kinds of problems.
In this country maths ability is dwindling, or so we are told. If this is the case then then insightful companies, across all industries, will hire teams of maths graduates. They will give them powerful machines to work with and they will treat them well. This in turn will encourage more people into the field.
The problem will perhaps solve itself. Without government.
mmm…
I must be very tired…
I’ve just made an economically rationalist argument…
…and posted it online
…with my name attached to it
excuse me everyone one while I throw up and then flagellate myself
Mathematicians are probably “lucky” in that maths will never be the boom degree that Business, IT and Arts all have been. Maths, particularly high level maths, is hard. The struggle mathematics graduates face in terms of landing that job at a forward-thinking company is having forward-thinkers inside who recognise that what they need is a mathematician.
If maths ability is dwindling, as Dan suggests, then we’re probably more likely to end up with fewer mathematicians employed rather than more as companies turn to IT grads to program, “born (micro-)managers” to handle logistics, Engineers with a stats unit or two for data analysis, etc.
It would be great to see all those people with a competency for maths drawn to the field but the chronic underfunding of maths departments across the nation is going to have to come to an end if these new enrolments are going to graduate and perhaps go on to post-graduate study.
I read heard an interview the other day with a CEO from an American company claiming that mathematics and engineering qualifications were in desperately short supply over there at the moment.
Incidentally, I’m confused.
First, you say there aren’t jobs in maths.
Then you say we should be putting more money into maths.
So we should be aiming for more graduates, when there aren’t enough jobs already? That doesn’t make sense at all. Surely you mean one of these two:
There’s lots of jobs in maths, and not enough graduates to fill them.
Hence put more money into maths.
There aren’t many jobs in maths, and too many graduates to fill them.
Hence maths is producing too many graduates, and doesn’t need as much money.
Any other combination doesn’t actually follow.
The second one should read:
There aren’t many jobs in maths and so we need to fund science and maths research in Australia. Maths in universities is chronically underfunded and undervalued.
I don’t see how that follows at all.
If there aren’t many jobs, then demand will be low and extra funding is unnecessary. We should ideally be channeling funding to areas where there are lots of jobs and not enough graduates, surely?
What you’re saying is we should direct money to places where there aren’t jobs? Presumably in order to obtain more graduates, to fill the jobs that don’t exist? How does that make sense as an economic decision at all?
Chris, the money goes towards funding jobs. CSIRO could always do with some more maths graduates and there’s also the issue of grants to pay for postgraduate maths students to do research at universities.
I agree that university maths faculties need more funding, but that’s because plenty of places want to hire students with mathematics qualifications. Just not to do the things that they may imagine they’re doing while they get a maths degree.
I just disagree completely with the reasoning. There aren’t enough jobs for philosophy graduates, either. Should we fund more jobs for them, just for the sake of it? The reasoning that “there’s not enough jobs for graduates of a certain type, so we need to direct funding there” is specious at best.
There are plenty of reasons to fund areas of investigation. However, I don’t think “there’s not enough jobs in this area” is alone a satisfactory reason. A much better reason is “this is an area which we stand to benefit a great deal from as a society”.
It’s not funding it for the sake of it, it’s funding it because the government’s identified it as an area that is important to the future of our nation. Rudd’s said that he wants more maths and science graudates so we can tackle problems but his slashing the CSIRO budget means removing jobs in which these graduates would have worked and hence we’re likely to lose more people to other nations where the prospects are better.
Maths enrolments continue to go up while philosophy enrolments continue to go down. We should be providing more funding and resources for maths at university because more people are enrolling in it than previously.
To all the people who have posted, I’d like to say a big thank you. There has been some very constructive and diverse feedback for this thread.
Chris, I’m sure you’ll appreciate the fact that in a blog post, it’s hard to make a water-tight argument given that a decent post is about 500 words. I will refine my argument with a few more words.
Even you would have to admit it is a good thing to have more people trained in Maths and Science. Take a look at Dan’s post for example. Rudd acknowledges that this is a good thing and he wants to produce more graduates.
But if you want to attract the best people, you have to make sure that the salaries and positions are commensurate with the caliber of people you want.
We want more mathematicians because they are useful. If we want more mathematicians, we need to give them jobs and money. We’ll have better mathematicians if we have better training (given by university funding increases).
To specifically address your argument Chris, Rudd wants to have more Maths grads but there aren’t even enough good jobs for the ones there are now.
We need more maths grads and more jobs at the same time. Rudd has only addressed the former.
Your economically rationalist argument would imply that we should curtain tertiary departments such as History and I don’t think that would be a good thing (I’m thinking of the ignorance of the public on the Stolen Generations issue as I write that…)
I’m not saying we should curtail anything. I’m saying that there need to be better reasons than “we want more maths grads and maths jobs”. I gave a fairly good reason at the end of my last post.
Sam’s argument that it should get more funding because enrolments are going up is also flawed, as it was argued quite frequently that it should get more funding when enrolments were going down as well, which it has been doing continually for many years, only turning around this year (finally).
As mathematicians, we’re a little bit biased in this discussion. We all believe our job is of vital importance, and more money should go to it. But there are very reasonable arguments that if there are enough graduates to fill the available jobs that have been produced naturally, spending money messing around with the balance is counter-productive.
Frankly, I believe that mathematicians contribute a great deal to society, and mathematics departments need more funding in order to ensure that the mathematicians that are produced are of top quality. I think this is an issue where quality is more important than quantity.
Chris, enrolments going up and down isn’t simply evidence of enrolments going up and down. When looked at in the broader context of society, where we’re heading, which technologies are being developed, etc. the reduction in Physics enrolments vs the reduction in Arts enrolments mean two very different things.
The government has identified fields which it deems important to the future of the country. As such it is prepared to offer a financial incentive to those who choose to study it. The problem, though, is that there’s no career incentive to study it if there are so few jobs in the field. This is the crux of the argument. Rudd is simultaneously increasing the number of graduates and decreasing the number of jobs available.
What good is it pumping out more graduates if there’s nowhere to put them and they go overseas?
Funding jobs/enrolments isn’t a simple supply-demand curve where everything else stays constant and every place is treated equally. Mathematics has significantly higher overheads per student compared to Business because of things like computer requirements (both hardware and software) and we’ve been chronically underfunded for years. Labor education Minister Dawkins (in the 1980s) converted our tertiary education sector to a “one size fits all” funding model which funds students equally (rather than equitably) and this is part of why maths is in the tank when it comes to funding.
I know you’re not stupid but you seem to be missing the point on everything that others are saying.
Maths enrolments have been going up and hence need more funding because there are more students which need to be catered for. Increase in demand, simple.
Arts enrolments have been going down because they underwent a boom a few years ago and the “education market” is undergoing a correction. Funding should be reduced in line with what their needs are and the long term trends need to be watched. Decrease in demand, simple.
Physics enrolments have been going down because there simply isn’t the same amount of money available to Physics graduates as there is to Economics graduates. If Australia took science seriously we’d be pumping more money into Physics research at our universities and public institutions like the CSIRO, BoM, etc. Physics hasn’t had a “boom” recently (and I doubt it will) and so it’s very different to the drop in Arts enrolments.
Maths and the sciences have had university resources taken away from them and re-allocated to the Business schools of the nation because Business was the boom degree and needed the money. Unfortunately, the previous government didn’t respect science and maths as vocations nor as tools with which we can view the world. Instead of going “Wow, there’s a disaster called climate change looming and we need to do more atmospheric modelling/renewable energy research, get more people!” or “Wow, we’re living in an increasingly technological age and need to develop new technologies even if they’re not immediately commercially saleable” they sat back and let the sciences go to shit.
Rudd’s realised the role science has in the continued prosperity of our nation and has committed to funding more students. You can hardly blame the mathematicians on the blog for getting excited and hoping that more money for research is on the way.
Hmm… I don’t have all the stats but at QUT maths numbers don’t really go up… we are reasonably stable with some fluctuations from year to year. This year we returned to more normal levels after a slack year in 07.
Incidentally, I think this is a good place to point out what is going on at USQ… many of you will be interested. Check out Terry Tao’s blog for some info:
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/
I got the email yesterday and signed the petition. Anyone know anyone at USQ who’s likely to lose their job over this?