ComPhys @comphys@qoto.org

What do you think of this article on the education of physics?

https://physicsworld.com/a/building-a-physics-degree-for-the-future-five-key-questions-we-need-to-answer/

Something which often concerns me about opinion pieces like this, is that employability, which was until recently a side effect of having a physics degree, seems to have become the primary goal. The first example in the article says
"[...] during which they apply their learning to solve research or technical problems based on global challenges, possibly posed by businesses." However notably, physics challenges aren't mentioned.

Encouraging children to learn from online resources, rather than textbooks is also (currently) a mistake; as they are in my experience very often inferior. Whilst a mix of resources is probably the best, I have encountered students who genuinely believed that watching a 3blue1brown video was in some way equivalent to doing exercises themselves. Students starting university need to be told what the best resources are, we shouldn't be simply accept their potentially inferior preferences. Find me a single online resource better suited to teaching Fourier Transforms than Robert Bracewell's textbook, and I'll reevaluate my opinions.

I actually agree that exam grades can be misleading and maybe there is a better way to assess. Everybody I know who got good grades, myself included, crammed before exams, and I'm not convinced if that really represents a mastery of the subject; although it does demonstrate work ethic, dedication, ability to learn etc.

The suggestion to reduce time in the lab is just downright wrong. We need to be improving our students practical abilities by expanding lab work and making it far more integral to the learning process and maybe even the assessment process. I've seen high-grade, covid generation students confused why their circuits didn't work with only one end of a battery connected. In my opinion, that was brought about by a lack of opportunity to turn their theoretical knowledge into real world knowledge. Students like that are leaving university without the skills to contribute to making technology for physics or addressing global challenges.

In my opinion, physics degrees should adapt to meet physics needs, and we should accept employability for whatever it is after that. If physics graduates become less employable then so be it; it's natural that desirable skills change with time (although physics skills are definitely important at the moment). Fundamentally, physics degrees should never be allowed to become generic workplace training courses.

@freemo I don't think it's controversial to say that you've appealed at an extreme by suggesting workers might expect infinite money. If anything close to that were true then companies would regularly fail after negotiating with unions. Anecdotally, that doesn't seem to happen very often, and this article in time[1] quotes a study[2] of nearly 30,000 US companies that “**Unions likely do not affect businesses by making them more susceptible to failure or re-location, despite the fears of many employers and employees.**” In reality, it seems unions negotiate with the knowledge that demanding too much would not be in anybody's interest.

I think where we will differ is your suggestion that a workers pay is directly correlated to their value, or perhaps what that really means. If a workers value is how much money they generate and this were true, then we would see pay rise with profits. I suppose that vested interests on both sides will make finding reliable evidence difficult, but this paper[3] suggests that large companies with high profits do not necessarily pay workers more. This also seems to agree with my own experiences; especially for low-pay jobs (although there will always be exceptions.) It could then be argued, that some employers are paying their employees less than they are really worth.

I found this point in that time article very interesting: "The only time that the bottom tenth of the population and the top tenth of the population have come closer together has been during those years, when unions were operating in the largest corporations in this country,” If unionisation reduces income inequality on average, then it seems reasonable to conclude that it will also drive improvement in the metrics I mentioned earlier. Certainly, the effects of extreme income inequality are well documented [4].

[1] https://time.com/6168898/why-companies-fight-unions/
[2] https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/unionbf.pdf
[3] http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2008.33660403
[4] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Staff-Discussion-Notes/Issues/2016/12/31/Causes-and-Consequences-of-Income-Inequality-A-Global-Perspective-42986