The Indoctrination of Evil? Studying Engineering in Capitalist Societies

[cyu]

[Similar to http://www.revleft.com/vb/indoctrination-evili-studying-t126110/index.html ]

http://news.rice.edu/2013/11/20/engineering-education-may-diminish-concern-for-public-welfare-issues-sociologist-says-2/

The study found that engineering students leave college less concerned about public welfare than when they entered.

Participants were surveyed each year and 18 months after graduation. students were asked to rate the importance of professional and ethical responsibilities and their views on the importance of improving society, being active in their community, promoting racial understanding and helping others in need. In addition, students were asked how important the following factors are to their engineering programs: ethical and/or social issues, policy implications of engineering, and broad education in humanities and social sciences.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

Article doesn't link the original study. Most likely a simple correlation, which doesn't necessarily imply that an engineering curriculum causes diminished empathy (correlation =/= causation). Do you know what variables the original study accounted for, if any? Socioeconomic status? Parents'/Guardians'/Siblings' scores on the same test? I'm curious how the study was actually constructed.

[cyu]

Participants were surveyed each year and 18 months after graduation.


I assume this implies that students became less concerned as they progressed through their education. If true, and it's not their classes causing it, what else do you believe may cause it?

[PC LOAD LETTER]

I assume this implies that students became less concerned as they progressed through their education. If true, and it's not their classes causing it, what else do you believe may cause it?
I'd wager socioeconomic status had a lot to do with it. Engineers are predominantly white males who make above-average income. Most of them will come from well off households as well, as early childhood education quality is associated with better performance in school later in life, something more well-off families are more likely to be able to provide (time, money).

[cyu]

How would you explain the decline as they progressed through the curriculum?

[PC LOAD LETTER]

It could be a multitude of things. The sample size was tiny, 300 students, and it is nothing more than a single correlation at the moment, so these findings aren't an indication of actual trends within engineering students. Really, it could have been anything from "the curriculum is getting tougher as I progress so fuck all of you guys I'm only worried about me right now" to a confirmation bias regarding 'hard work' because they're in a nice degree program.

[cyu]

I'm not sure I understand your explanation. Are you saying the students aren't becoming less concerned about public welfare? That does not appear to be what you're saying. So if students are becoming less concerned about public welfare, don't the results speak for themselves? That is, if you want to make someone less concerned about public welfare, here is one way that is likely to be successful in doing it.

[Red Commissar]

Universities definitely have a way of crushing people by the time they exit it, even if they are unaware of it. I think PC's explanation here is on target though- a lot of students after finishing their education, especially if it has a reputation of being challenging, usually get into the mentality that they are entitled to better work and shouldn't be brought down by others since they "put in the time" or what ever.

I've noticed this is the case among students too, there is usually a lot of back and forth over whose programs are more challenging and what is more "productive" to society. I used to have issues with some of my peers in my biology program because they used to trash the liberal arts and social sciences crew thinking that they weren't pursuing "real" subjects.

I would argue though that most if not all jobs with some requirement of a college education tend to do this to their graduates. There are some fields which tend to push people to disengage from politics- I can say that from experience- but on the whole tend to encourage the notion that the social ladder is scalable.

As for whether this is an intentional thing, I'm not sure, I think this falls more under the purview of passive stuff like the civil society, the more informal ways ruling class sentiments are propagated. At least in my book.

[tallguy]

How would you explain the decline as they progressed through the curriculum?
It could be any number of things.

The socio-economic cards they brought to the table could have just been playing themselves inevitably out as they entered adulthood. Their place on the course being merely a correlate. A simple way to test the above hypothesis would to have had a matched-pairs study where another group of people of similar age, sex and socio-economic background, but who did not study on an engineering degree, were compared before and after as a control group. Maybe this happened, If so, I would be interested to see the results. If it didn't happen the results are not worth much and certainly could not be legitimately interpreted in the way they were.

However, even assuming the course did have some kind of a causal relationship with concerns with public welfare, I would firstly like to know precisely what was meant by the authors of this study by the terms "concern" and "public welfare". In other words, I would like to know how that concern was measured. Was it with a questionnaire? if so, I'd like to see the questions.

Secondly, assuming the questions were not loaded or otherwise caused the results to be skewed in favour of a particular result, this still doesn't say what it was about the course itself that caused the change in attitude nor does it say how big that change was. It may even be that the change was due to something as innocuous as the need to inculcate in the students an entirely factual/mathematical based approach to specific problem solving.

So, instead of focussing on macro solutions to public policy they may have been trained, instead, to focus on practical solutions to specific real world engineering problems as they were presented to them. That being the case, whilst it might provide some evidence that the curriculum in engineering needs to be broadened a bit, it does not necessarily mean that the current curriculum is somehow deliberately biasing students against a caring attitude vis-a-vis public policy. It may just be a function of the needs of the job requiring/promoting a certain type of personality/approach.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

I'm not sure I understand your explanation. Are you saying the students aren't becoming less concerned about public welfare? That does not appear to be what you're saying. So if students are becoming less concerned about public welfare, don't the results speak for themselves? That is, if you want to make someone less concerned about public welfare, here is one way that is likely to be successful in doing it.
My point was that this study is not rigorous enough to determine a real trend in undergraduate academia, especially considering the small sample size and lack of replication. And my point was also that IF this were true, there could be many explanations for this trend that the study did not examine (variables they did not control for). Red Commissar summarized my position on that last part well.

[cyu]

this study is not rigorous enough to determine a real trend in undergraduate academia, especially considering the small sample size and lack of replication
Would you say that research journals would be wrong to publish this, or that if you were in charge at Rice, you would try to disassociate Rice from this study?

[Jimmie Higgins]

I have no facts to back this up and it's just speculation, but if this is really a trend then I wouldn't be surprised that these attitudes could thrive in certain professions. People are in a bubble when they are going into such a specialized field, but more generally the "bootstraps" view of society is very much in line with the subjective experience of people in skilled elite professions. Engineering students work hard, sacrifice (time if not lots of money and debt), compete with eachother and so of course they would project their class experience on the rest of everyone else... I did it, it was hard, but I made the effort... why don't all these poor slobs stop complaining about their poverty and problems and do the same thing?

Teachers and possibly some kinds of Doctors might be different because I'd imagine that a degree of empathy is built-into the ethics of those programs and the daily interaction with people and trying to help them. I'd also hope that at least at some point and to some degree someone who becomes a doctor was motivated by a desire to help people. But other professions are a little more insular and don't involve any service to the public (and may require a lot of sucking-up to rich investors) and so create a sense of entitled elitism IMO. I'm pretty sure every architecture student has probably read Ayn Rand's "the fountainhead" and many might identify with it.

[cyu]

Teachers and possibly some kinds of Doctors might be different because I'd imagine that a degree of empathy is built-into the ethics of those programs and the daily interaction with people and trying to help them. I'd also hope that at least at some point and to some degree someone who becomes a doctor was motivated by a desire to help people.
Interestingly enough I never knew this until I watched http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_%28film%29 - from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen

"Sun studied medicine at the Guangzhou Boji Hospital. Ultimately, he earned the license of Christian practice as a medical doctor in 1892."

That made me think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara

"In 1948, Guevara entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. he completed his studies and received his medical degree in June 1953"

...of course like you imply, I also know, for example, radiologist-types with more of an entitlement attitude, like "I paid my dues into getting where I am today. Now I just want what's mine."

[cyu]

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/economics_frank/

We found evidence that differences in cooperativeness are caused in part by training in economics. we saw that the gap in defection rates between economics majors and nonmajors tends to widen as students move toward graduation.

economists were 42 percent more likely than noneconomists to predict that their partners would defect.

suppose that exposure to the self-interest model does, in fact, cause people to behave more selfishly. Several researchers have recently suggested, that the ultimate victims of noncooperative behavior may be the very people who practice it. experimental subjects are adept at predicting who will cooperate and who will defect in prisoner's dilemma games. If people are even better at predicting the behavior of people they know well, it seems that the direct pursuit of material self-interest may indeed often be self-defeating.

[theblitz6794]

I'm doing an engineering physics degree. (I can either work as an engineer or go to grad school for physics)

I'll get back to you on this in May of 2017 when I graduate.

Most engineers I know are jocks good at math. Few empathetic dreamy types. "Communism is great in theory but human nature man" runs rampant among engineers.

[Zhi]

I think this should be a criticism of the way the University faculty is ran, not the actual engineering course. I fear we're slowly drifting into the way the USSR ridiculed some sciences as being 'bourgeoisie' and others as being exclusively 'proletarian'.