Black students especially women have the most student debt
So there you go. Some “tangibles”
The US needs to get rid of tuition in public universities period.
This is a matter of survival. The numbers below tell everything:
Number of Engineers and Scientists graduated every year:
Russia (Population 144 mil, GDP $2T):
561, 000
USA (Population 330 mil, GDP $22T):
568, 000
India (Population 1.3bil, GDP $3T):
2.8 million
China (Population 1.4bil, GDP $14T):
4.7 million
The USA is grossly underperforming; there is no way it is going to
compete if the best it can do is graduate as many STEMs as Russia.
The US needs to increase the number to at least 2 million a year;
and as long as tuition is $30, 000 per year, this is not going to be
happening. Germany offers free tuition, in English, in all of its public
universities, to all German and all foreign students.
The days of charging for university education are over. STEM is as
essential as road and bridge infrastructure. The US simply has to
graduate the kids with all the skills.
Already, US negligence in this area is taking a toll. There is going
to be a severe drop in the production of cars because the chip
makers in Asia, have focused their production towards the more
lucrative consumer electronics markets. Ford, GM etc were begging
Biden last week to put pressure on Asians to manufacture more chips
for cars to avert disaster later this year.
I came to this country to specialise in solid state electronics, VLSI,
chip design and manufacture. In those days chip fabs everywhere.
In Dallas alone, I knew of at least 3. There was one in Irving that
was owned by Hitachi; there was another near downtown that I
believe was owned by Motorola. Of course there are the various
fabs which are owned by TI, located in the complex where there is
Kilby, DMOS etc... There was even a fake manufacturer called Dallas
Semiconductor in Addison TX not too far away from where I got
my first home.
Then in the late 1990s, everyone started outsourcing. TI opened
several fabs in Asia. In one case, they had to make a brief return
because a brand new fab over there, in which they invested
untold millions to buy the state of the art equipment, ran a
misprocess.
In semiconductor lingo, a misprocess is where on a metal deposition
machine, you run boron, instead of say indium or copper. This corrupts
every machine in which the process was run, and spills over to any
other machines where misprocessed wafers were conveyed thereafter.
When that happens, the whole factory is a scrap, and that is what
happened. TI had to return the process to Kilby Fab for a short time,
though they may have sent it back offshore...
This is peacetime. What if there was a major war between the US
and Iran, and this chip shortage hit as it has now...And the US needs
to make 200, 000 Humvees, or whatever that expensive new vehicle
is, and one non-military, Asian-manufactured chip is in short supply?
These are the arguments that need to be made by these politicians.
The US must graduate its own STEMs and make sure that these
essential processes are alive and thriving inhouse...
I could go on railing about this issue.... but