Here is the link to the article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/global/chinese-automakers-quietly-build-a-detroit-presence.html?ref=todayspaper
The article starts, “Chinese-owned companies are investing in American businesses and new vehicle technology and ….hiring experienced engineers and designers in an effort to soak up the talent and expertise of domestic automakers and their suppliers.”
I worry that, for reasons I give in the following comment, we are losing a competitive edge.
Here is what I wrote.
I wonder if the abandonment of our commitment to training new “very good, but not MIT type” engineers is going to cost us dearly. The Chinese have not abandoned this “very good” class of engineers. As someone who has taught math in a university for many years, it is my judgment that if you don’t go to MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Caltech, Stanford, or just a very few other schools, you will not get a good education. If the Chinese can hire our top engineers (top through education and/or experience), they can find plenty of their own engineers who can work with, and assist, those top engineers.
When I asked my Chinese Teaching Assistant why the Chinese students did so well in my course – making an overwhelming percentage of the A+’s – he said that when an American student doesn’t understand something he/she blames the professor; when a Chinese student doesn’t understand something he/she studies. Unfortunately, the administration seemed to want me to cater to the American students who did not want to work, robbing those who would work of the education they needed and deserved. The administration even pressured me to make a course that gives engineers basic thinking skills into a “cookbook” course.
The highly regarded Clark Kerr said in 1980
“…This shift from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction in all the history of American higher education…”
This reporting indicates how much we need to put it back into forward.
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