Here you have two for the price of one! And, speaking of bargains, how good is it that our amazing universities are willing to lower entrance scores to allow the most sacred of all minorities, namely women, to get into the boy’s club of STEM! Fantastic! Look, we will even report this quoting from Left wing source, which has put halos over our heads:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/29/university-makes-10-point-entry-score-adjustment-for-female-applicants
“The University of Technology Sydney is trying to encourage more young women to study engineering, computing and construction degrees by adjusting year 12 entry scores for female applicants. The university has received approval from the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board to make a 10-point adjustment to the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank of female students applying for those degrees for the 2020 academic year. The university hopes it will help address gender imbalances in those male-dominated industries. UTS Women in Engineering and IT director Arti Agarwal insisted the move would not lower standards. “We’re not taking in underperforming students or doing tokenism here,” she told Guardian Australia. “Nobody is getting a free pass … They all have to do all the degree requirements [and] internships.” Agarwal said the move was part of the university’s 30-year effort to improve gender equity in engineering, which includes primary school and high school outreach programs and mentoring for female engineers. “We looked at the performance of Atar and the performance of [grade point average] so a lower Atar did not mean they would get a lower GPA. A higher Atar did not mean they were best in the class,” Agarwal said. She noted a large number of engineering students gained entrance into the undergraduate degree through other pathways, which often were lower than the year 12 Atar minimum score. Agarwal said previously that, on average, females received 4-8% of UTS offers to study mechanical engineering/mechatronics. The university expects the score adjustment will increase female study offers to about 20%.
In civil engineering on average 16% of offers are to female students and this could rise to 20%. In computer science 10% of offers are to female students and this could lift to 19%. According to Engineers Australia, 84% of Australian engineering graduates are men. Female engineers make up 13% of the workforce. Australia faces a looming shortage of engineers. A 2017 Engineers Australia report found part of the problem was low levels of female high school students were studying the prerequisite subjects. Less than 6% of girls nationally studied physics in year 12, with advanced maths at 6.2%. Engineers Australia’s professional diversity manager Justine Romanis backed the UTS move. “We need to be disruptive – what we have been doing to date is just not working,” she said. She said to attract more females to engineering it was important to plant the seeds early with research backing career discussion with children as young as year 4. Virginia Singh, who studied a double degree in mechanical engineering and science at Deakin University and now works in the defence industry, does not think it is a good idea. There were two female students in her mechanical engineering course. Singh’s father and brothers are also qualified engineers. “I don’t necessarily think that it’s the score stopping females from joining engineering, there’s more so a stigma associated with it or Stem in general,” Singh told the Guardian. “There’s a perception that you need a strong Stem and technical background and although you need that, most of the day-to-day work is soft skills as opposed to … technical calculations every day.”
The move has attracted a fair share of flax on social media, with criticisms ranging from: (1) are you saying that women are not as smart as men at absolutely everything? (2) is being a woman now a disability? (3) isn’t this saying that female engineers are inferior to male engineers? You get the picture. No, No, No, little hobbits! What it means is that a whole lot more people are going to fail in later years, maybe first year, when they get hit with having to do first year mathematics, calculus and linear algebra, then second year engineering mathematics, differential equations, Laplace transformations, then vector calculus and statistics. Here, hum this one from vector calculus:
So, in the end, everything will come out in the wash! And, there will be a whole lot more unemployed, perhaps missing out on doing more appropriate courses.
Postlude
There is a great mythology about the sacred stem degree as a pathway to security, for fields like engineering, but, if the US experience is to go on, all the ruling elites will do is simply bring in foreign engineers to maximise profits:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/02/exclusive-rep-paul-gosar-get-a-stem-degree-watch-foreigners-take-your-job/
“For years it has been federal policy to encourage students to focus on science, technology, engineering and math (referred to as STEM). There are no fewer than 12 federal grant programs related to this, covering everything from minority science scholarships to magnet school assistance. There is even a STEM Education Advisory Panel. However, graduates currently outnumber jobs in all STEM fields except for computer science, which is about equal. As a New York Times graph noted in 2017, “So many degrees, so little demand.” These degrees cost money. The U.S. has over 44 million people who owe an average of $29,000 in student loans, exceeding $1.5 trillion in combined student loan debt. With this in mind, why would the federal government, through an executive order no less, implement the F-1 Optional Practical Training (OPT) Visa, which allows over 250,000 foreign students to remain in the U.S. and work in STEM jobs? Moreover, why would the federal government give financial incentives to hire these foreign students over American students with the degrees and skills? None of this makes sense, but it is in fact happening. I intend to change this, and I have introduced legislation to do so. In 2017, more than a quarter million foreign students in the U.S. on F-1 visas were given the option to remain in the U.S. and work under the OPT program. Thanks to an executive action initiated by President Obama’s administration, every F-1 OPT STEM graduate is allowed to remain in the U.S. for up to 3 years with each degree earned.”
It is much the same in Australia, where the international student marketing system is just part of the immigration program. We are constantly sold out by the elites, at all levels.
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2019/09/02/tech-entrepreneur-explains-how-wall-street-sells-us-out-china/