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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (215096)	1/26/2007 5:57:05 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The AMA has however done things and continues to lobby with the Docs interest more at heart than the patients. No surprise, that is what it was founded to do. I follow with some amusement a longstanding debate within the IEEE (electrical engineers organization) regarding engineering education, certification, pay & prestige. Engineers have long looked with some envy at Law & Medicine, since the IQ required to become a good engineer, and indeed the class work in college is on par if not superior to either of those professions, yet engineering is much less regarded in society, and the pay is less. So there are some who want to emulate law and medicine, require a post graduate or terminal degree, followed by board certification for engineers. They would then get states to make practicing engineering without a license a crime, just as it is for medicine or law. The logic being that prestige and money when then follow. The flaw in this argument is that engineering tasks are much more easily offshored, so unemployment is the more likely outcome. In engineering, the paper on your wall is not what counts, it is your technical abilities. The two are in theory related, but not necessarily. It should be noted that certain aspects of engineering do in fact have this sort of protection, Professional Engineer or PE is a licensed engineer. They typically exist where safety is an issue, such as in civil engineering for building structures. They do indeed make a bit more money as a result, but there jobs also don't tend to be available for offshoring. Both law and medicine most likely could tell similar stories. I recall a very moving film, forget the name, about a young black man in the south, who became the assistant to a surgeon who developed the techniques for saving "blue" babies with heart defects. The uneducated, or rather self-educated black developed the techniques on dogs, and was actually the more skilled surgeon. The white doctor finally had the black guy bail him out from some tight spots when working on human babies, much to the shock of his university colleagues. After years of discrimination and poverty, the university finally conferred a degree on the black guy and recognized his contributions to science. Well worth watching.