Educational crisis looms when the 'Space Cowboys' retire
Who will go to space, do engineering, do math without a calculator, major in science and IT?
May 25, 2005
While the popularity of high tech careers means that there is no shortage of programmers for Java or Microsoft tools, there is another crisis looming among older computer technologies such as Cobol, Fortran, mainframe and non-relational database technologies. The guys who enthusiastically trained on this new technology in the fifties and sixties are nearing the end of the line. And no one is in training in America to replace them.
Things are different overseas, though. Take the case of Russia: 50 percent of its graduates major in science; 55 out of every 10,000 people are engineers, one of the highest ratios in the world; 4 percent of programmers working in the world today are Russian. Microsoft Research figures that Russia graduated 180,000 people a year with the necessary skills to make it in IT.
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Things are different overseas, though. Take the case of Russia: 50 percent of its graduates major in science; 55 out of every 10,000 people are engineers, one of the highest ratios in the world; 4 percent of programmers working in the world today are Russian. Microsoft Research figures that Russia graduated 180,000 people a year with the necessary skills to make it in IT.
The full text of the article