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"For example, Mining Engineering has experienced a decline in enrollment, yet this area is critical to the state and the region, and there is unmet occupational
by sgustard 3y ago
"For example, Mining Engineering has experienced a decline in enrollment, yet this area is critical to the state and the region, and there is unmet occupational demand. Also experiencing similar challenges is the Petroleum and Natural Gas program"
Very interesting. The politicians of West Virginia want to prop up the oil and mining industries. Young people do not want careers that destroy the planet. So the solution is: eliminate World Languages?
- failrate 3y agoYes, learning other languages will increase empathy. Reduced empathy makes it easier to work in the fossil fuel industry.
- ecshafer 3y agoHow does learning other language increase empathy? Can you give a specific mechanism or metric for that? This sounds like a feel good idea, but I’ve taken foreign languages in a formal setting with 3 different languages; I never felt more empathetic afterwards.
- failrate 3y agoBeing unable to communicate with another human being can be very alienating. In my experience, learning another language opens up even more the fact that different groups are fundamentally similar. It could be that I started from a relatively low empathic capacity, but I also do not learn languages in a formal setting. I prefer to learn them immersively, e.g. working in a kitchen, traveling abroad.
- CSMastermind 3y agoNo that's a dishonest framing. What actually happened was: 1. WVU is running out of money 2. They hired a team to devise a way to fairly eliminate programs. 3. That team decided that student enrollment should be the key metric to drive program elimination, but recognized three exceptions. 4. Both World Language and Extractive Resource Engineering programs have declining enrollment, thus would be slated to be eliminated. 5. The extractive resource engineering programs qualify for one of three exceptions which was significance to the local region and economy. 6. Thus those majors will be combined/restructured and downsized rather than being outright eliminated. It's also worth noting that while you can merge the Mining Engineering major with the P&NG Engineering major in a clean way since there is significant overlap in coursework it's unclear to me how you would merge the Chinese and the Russian programs into a single major. So even if they did qualify for an exception, I don't think you could use the same solution.
- jtriangle 3y agoNo, mining is actually critical to the state and region, specifically coal, specifically bituminous coal, which isn't used for power generation, but instead in applications that need to be much hotter than what other fuel sources can easily obtain, like steel manufacturing, ~70% of which uses coal blast furnaces. And while you might want to replace those furnaces with something else, there really isn't a great way to do that. Most of them are already running and are going to need to run another 10-25 years before they're replaced in order to pay for themselves. You can't just shut them off, because then you won't have steel and you do need steel for civilization to keep running smoothly. So what you're left with is trying to make hydrogen cheap enough to replace the coal furnaces and make it worth the extra R&D time required to get your foundry producing in-spec material with a different fuel source, which means their processes need to be better with the new fuel as well. If that sounds like it'll take decades to happen, well yeah, you're right, probably decades to even start happening, so we need to keep mining coal, and, it'd be a very good idea to get young, bright minds involved, because the mining process is, by my estimation, ripe for automation, and if you want to directly reduce the human cost of mining in general, robots is how you do it, and that's also a goal worth pursuing given the number of people die every year digging in the dirt, not just in the United States, but worldwide.
- 7speter 3y agoWouldn’t it make more sense to put he young bright minds to work at trying to make hydrogen cheap enough to replace coal for the steel production? Keeping people working isn’t really the problem.