America Does Not Need More STEM Education

There are a few problems with my opponent's rebuttals: First off, Con mischaracterizes what's said about supply, demand, and price by purely focusing on the product market. He doesn't consider the labor market side of the equation which requires sustainability. There's no reason to believe that just because prices go down in one sector of the economy that wages will necessarily sustain in that same sector. This is especially in a society with free trade and free labor where not only can wages become skewed between sectors, but wages can also become skewed from domestic, towards foreign, labor supply. This is even more so in a debt, service, consumer economy where the international balance of payments has more expenses than revenues. A debt, service, consumer economy also discourages the long-term thinking required to appreciate what engineers do. Instead, people literally borrow money in order to live in the moment, and take engineering for granted. A classic example I give about this is how engineers don't make as much as Hollywood celebrities, especially despite how engineers design the very information, transportation, and energy technology used to catalyze consumption of film, music, television, and other forms of media. They also don't make as much as professional athletes whether in basketball, baseball, football, or elsewhere (and I'm assuming this is so blatantly obvious that it doesn't need citation). On the other hand, there's also what I call the "nerd paradox" in how the unmitigated exercise of engineering today inhibits the cultivation of engineering tomorrow. For example, let us say engineers design mp3 players. These mp3 players get purchased by students in school who engage in a popularity contest by consuming pop culture. In turn, serious proto-engineering personalities who lack effective language arts skills become socially alienated. One, the exhibition of pop culture via mp3 players is distracting in itself. Two, by being immersed in incompatible culture, proto-engineering personalities lack the rejuvenation required to "sharpen the saw" in their studies to avoid burnout. This can also take place in public and private schools alike; I'm not sure where Con came away with the impression that I said education is based on a free market. In fact, I agree with him about the student loan crisis, but he hasn't explained how that connects to the topic at hand. While it is possible for engineering careers to be lucrative, engineering graduates still need to network into the workforce. In fact, Russell Kirk and Harold Innis had much to say about the information technology revolution not being all that it's cracked up to be in terms of being self-destructive. That is because IT consumption discourages long-term thinking, the production of IT becomes unsustainable. Furthermore, the increasingly frustrated attitudes of engineers from society being filled with idiots leads to an alienating communication style that inhibits instruction to potential future generations of engineers: http://www.kirkcenter.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... Lastly, in building off what I said about networking into the workforce and Con's rebuttal of my "nerd theory", Con's position (on Democrats) is just flat out wrong: http://www.salon.com... While I do agree that American cultivation of engineering is lacking, this is because of unmitigated consuming patterns as previously described. Without language arts, engineering will be used to indulge in hedonist, libertine, unsustainable pop culture instead. Interest in engineering will remain a will-o'-the-wisp. In fact, Korean Cheabol and Japanese Keiretsu (which we outsource to) are two examples of success from organically cultured conglomerates. On the other hand, China and India are notorious for reverse engineering.