Jobs and math

I found the comment on this CNN article here interesting:

For my experience as a professor in engineering, I have observed the following..

Every class that I teach, there will be 1 or 2 (at most) native born American kids who will be brilliant. It will be hard for me to find a foreign student who can match these by a long shot.

The rest, I am afraid, are far below your run of the mill foreign student. At the senior level, they cannot handle math that a high school student is expected to know in India, China (pick your favorite former 3rd world country) by default.

There is a reason for this. The best students are self motivated. Do not need prodding. The rest need to be guided and cajoled. Unfortunately, standard of high school education has sunk so low, that majority of student have little or no math when they graduate. There is no challenge. Their absolute reliance on calculators etc to do the most basic math is scary. Most of these kids can do one thing very well. Given a formula, they are perfectly capable of using their calculators to "plug and chug" and get an answer without understanding the fundamentals. This coupled with a sense of entitlement ("I think I deserve a B in this class") is a recipe for disaster. There is no way these kids are going to compete with foreign talent. I am afraid that this is clearly showing. American companies will recruit foreigners (to work in the US) in spite of all the immigration hoops that they have to jump through not because they are cheap, but because they beat the local competition hands down!.

I agree completely with this gentleman. Although I am not a professor in anything, that's my observation with my experience as a student. And I am not a foreign student. I attended American high school. But my first 10 years in Hong Kong definitely make me different.

So whose fault is this that American students are so much lacking behind? The teachers? The teachers union? Culture? What is it? What can be done?

Instead of blaming can anyone do something.

I'd like to see excellent produced math related TV shows with excellent graphics (and perhaps hire the most handsome and pretty teenagers to talk about the Pythagorean Theorem I guess may help). Look, math is not just for geeks.

I'd like someone tells me what kinda phone apps can help your math (and I'll write one for you)

But the article is about job loss. One guy lost 6-figure manufacturing job to China. See, that's precisely the reason why we lost job. American workers cost too much. But when the company fire him, do they ask, "hey, how would you like keep your job for $30,000". Chances are: they don't even give you he option. They fire you first, with or without math skills.