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Science and Engineering Workforce Has Stalled In the US
dcblogs writes "The science and engineering workforce in the U.S. has flatlined, according to the Population Reference Bureau. As a percentage of the total labor force, S&E workers accounted for 4.9% of the workforce in 2010, a slight decline from the three previous years when these workers accounted for 5% of the workforce. That percentage has been essentially flat for the past decade. In 2000, it stood at 5.3%. The reasons for this trend aren't clear, but one factor may be retirements. S&E workers who are 55 and older accounted for 13% of this workforce in 2005; they accounted for 18% in 2010. 'This might imply that there aren't enough young people entering the S&E labor force,' said one research analyst."
Arrr, a shit storms a brewin!
The more that business sends that kind of work offshore, the less interested people will be in having the rug pulled out from under them in the Holy and Unquestionable name of Global Competitiveness.
You want to get people interested in science & engineering? Kill all the guest worker programs, prioritize citizens over internationals for university slots, and start working with business to guarantee long-term work to attract people back.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So, after a lifetime of watching older members of the science and engineering community get outsourced, downsized, run ragged, and generally mistreated by their employers, young people don't want to sign up for the same thing?
Good for them. Maybe the kids today are smarter than we thought.
--saint
Why would young people enter science and engineering when they can go into management and finance? Then they can take the credit and pay that would have been taken from them if they had gone into STEM.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What they should say is that there aren't enough people willing to work very hard for a an ever shrinking piece of the pie. What do they expect researchers to do when they keep cutting basic science funding? The numbers are terrible right now. Something like 10% of those with new Phd's that apply for a grant actually get it. Who in their right mind would get a Phd for a 10% chance of getting funding? They apparently expect Phd's to be happy to work indefinitely as a post-doc for 30K a year. This trend is very similar for recent engineering graduates.
Maybe if donations to universities went to beefing up outdated science & engineering departments instead of athletes, it might "trickle up" to the real world. But that's just crazy.
The data might not mean there is an outright shortage of S&E workers; it could indicate a combination of factors related to such things as the recession and offshoring.
This suprises anyone?
The other thing that happened since 2000 was 9/11 and all our immigration hysteria. I'd wager that fewer foreign tech students stick around after graduation. I know at my company work visas and green cards are harder to come by than they were in the 90s.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
As a young engineer myself, the good part of the story is that there will be more promotion possibilities because the older workers are retiring. The bad part is that the reason for the decline is the loss of job security and pay that barely pays the school loans and isn't matching inflation most times makes S&E a somewhat risky career path.
It's funny reading all the responses saying "It's obvious"... and then each response gives a different cause.
If I knew then what I know now, I would probably not have gone into electrical engineering out of fear of offshoring. Thus far it hasn't completed killed engineering in the USA, but it has certainly made a big dent. But I don't know that the majority of young engineers know to even fear that...
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
Isn't this inherently what happens with higher technology? As technology increases, you can get more done with fewer man-hours of labor (e.g., concentrating IT in cloud-like service centers and so forth). It's not like we're socialists who use this to give everyone a dividend in more pay, or less hours per week. Instead, we hire fewer people, and the business world considers that to be a good thing.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I typically get the feeling the young are stuck between a rock and a hard place for STEM careers. On the one hand we are told over and over that these are important jobs. But then when you go to apply for them, you are told you are too young and need more experience and can't hire you. "Well, can you train me?" "No, you just have to get experience, or go back to school." So you go back to school, and they tell you "Well we don't do job training, our focus is how to *think* and learn the principles needed. Go get a job if you want experience." And so you end up in a bizarre catch-22 where everyone expects you to know everything at a young age, but no one is willing to provide the training you need to get there. It's as if they think scientists grow on trees and you just wait for them to ripen and apply for a job, with their analytical skills and knowledge fully formed. Maybe that was possible in some sense during the baby boom, when it was also more patriotic to go into a STEM field to fight the commies, but today you have to work for it and provide incentives. There are less people for each job, not more.
Either these are important jobs employers need to support more (with leniency on the expectations of youth, pair them up with an older mentor, on-job training, etc), or they aren't. Suck it up and pay for it instead of whining. But I am tired of the limbo these fields leave many younger people floating in.
That is the most bizarre set of stats i've ever read....
I cant understand why they would think the PERCENTAGE of the workforce for s&e would be on the increase? That just baffles me.
Its like, checkout people, the number you have is dependent on the number of retail places around, which is dependant on the population, and hence its probably always going to be relatively fixed (as a percentage). At the moment, that might be on the decrease cause of automated human-less checkouts, but the driving force behind checkout people is the size of your population.
I cant think of anything in the last decade that would propel more ppl (as a percentage) to enter either science or engineering. Any factor that might cause it is probably going to be offset by something else, ultimately if everyone started getting into science and engineering, who's gunna be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, etc etc.
How that even begins to relate to "less innovation" baffles me even more because 5% of the population is a considerable number of people and innovation itself tends to be sporadic and driven by individuals (and then implemented by large armies of kill robots). Ultimately even 5% is an ever increasing number of people (given population growth).
I keep looking at the clock wondering if its april 1st, cause I really cant understand how they think "Ideally, the S&E workforce -- it numbers more than 7.6 million workers -- would be expanding as a percentage of the labor force. That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers." is a remotely valid assumption. Again, given population growth, "That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers" that is actually happening if your holding at 5%.
Truly bizarre, its like someone misunderstood the different between what a percentage is and an absolute figure.
It has nothing to do with the number of people entering these fields. It's the number of jobs that companies are removing from these fields. They cut staff and tell those remaining that they have to work another 20hrs/wk to cover the workload.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
My town is home to the base facilities for eight of the Mauna Kea Observatories, and we're looking at the Thirty Meter Telescope in the near future as well. Needless to say, there are pretty much always job openings for engineers, technicians, and PhDs. The catch? We're on an island, and some people get tired of that.
So Science Education/Public Outreach (SE/PO) is a part of life here. Pushing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) as good ways to make a better-than-average living is a part of life here. The scientists take over the local mall one day every spring. In late January, we take over the University for a "science day" in honor of Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Ellison Onizuka, for kids in grades 3-8, and NASA sends an astronaut each year. And around late February or early March, there's Journey Through The Universe.
I'm actually about to head to a nearby school to spend an hour talking about science careers to a classroom of 7th-graders, so I'm getting a real kick out of this article showing up right now. The other 9 classes I'm visiting over next Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are a bit younger - grades 1-3. The idea, though, is that from Kindergarten on, kids here are meeting real live people who work in science at observatories or other "famous science places" every year and are being encouraged to stay in school, take classes about STEM, look at college majors in STEM, and become qualified for those good jobs, so that we can hire people who are from here and would love to stay here.
Last year, I was told about one of the first success stories - a guy who was in 7th grade when they started visiting classes, and as a result of what he heard over the years, had picked a STEM major at the local university, and was now going to accompany a scientist to classes as a "community ambassador" sort of person.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
We are educating kids to be users of technology, but not developers or inventors. Every time I've taken a computer or a disk drive or other electronics apart for a demonstration to the Scouts or just kids, they are always amazed. They are never taught beyond a mouse click. A lot of kids coming out of college are no better these days. Another problem is that in our zeal to bring girls into higher education, we are losing boys - those who would be most interested in engineering ( see Carpe Diem website archives for all the graphs and tables on subject preferences, Prof J does a great job of laying that argument out from high school on ).
This is an excuse to open the doors to more immigration to bring in cheap technical labour.
There is no technical shortage. Just a shortage of highly-skilled qualified people willing to work for minimal wages.
I saw recently an article in one of the local newspapers that indicated that 4,000 engineering graduates were being produced per year in Canada, 10,000 engineers per year were being brought in via immigration and only 1,000 new engineering jobs created per year, thus 13,000 engineers per year are unhappy and either unemployed or employed/under-employed in jobs outside of the field.
Add in government grants that pay 50% of the salary for non-citizen visible minority engineers, why would anybody hire a Canadian educated engineer except for when they come straight out of school?
The constant mantra of the sky is falling because we have no engineers is an old story and is used to bring in more engineers via immigration and thus deflate the average income for engineers. The problem is that governments keep on falling for this ruse.
The basic issue is a disrespect for the skills of engineers and desire to turn them into a disposable cog in a company to maximize short-term profits.
I know dozens of highly qualified engineers with 20+ years of experience that are underemployed, or unemployed or working in other fields because they cannot even get an interview nevermind a job.
The media & governments fall for this ruse over and over.
My two-cents
The kids today are experiencing an uphill battle. I remember 20 years ago having a discussion with the guys I worked for about the total lack of young workers in our workplace. I was doing communications install and maintenance for a large electrical utility company. The problem for the young workers, as we saw it, was the requirement for a very diverse experience background. Microwave radio, UHF, VHF radio, fiber optic, RTUs, computers, phone switches, DACs, mux, and much more. The employer wants to hire work ready people and are afraid that if they expend money to train a young worker the young worker will bail as soon as he finds a better offer. It's a trap. No experience, no job. No job, no experience.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
Really? You think guys?
Then why is it that despite me having tons of technical work experience, a CS degree, and an extensive background in Graphic Design, I can't even land a simple UI designer job that pays enough to repay my student loans and pay rent at the same time? In a big-10 college town with a pretty big tech industry?
Perhaps it's because instead of R&D and progress, we're focused on blowing up brown people and stealing their oil? Perhaps the same reasons why NASA is woefully underfunded, and yet the DOD has a few billion to throw at missile research?
FUCK this country. It used to be great, now it's just a slowly-fermenting pile of excrement.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I think it's a little more complex than that. The immigration hysteria has mostly been about illegal immigrants, i.e. people from south of the border with no skills at all besides picking fruit and who don't speak English, not people from Asia with college degrees and tech skills who speak good English.
Instead, more important factors are that a lot of industry is going to Asia (China and India specifically, plus other countries like Thailand) where these foreign students come from. Where industry goes, so do the engineers, and since these kids come from there anyway, it makes perfect sense they'd want to go back there.
Put yourself in their shoes: suppose we're in an alternate universe and the USA (presuming that's where you're from) was a 3rd-world country all along, but you were smart and you went to China (a giant world power and leader in technology) to get an education as an engineer. When you're done, perhaps you even work there for a few years to get experience. But China's moving all their manufacturing to the USA because the labor there is so cheap, and the US economy is rising dramatically as a result, while China's is stagnating badly. So do you want to stay in China, where you don't speak the language that well, you're an outsider, and you're living in an alien culture, making very good money but the cost of living is high? Or would you rather move back home, get a job paying half as much, but because of the low cost-of-living this much money lets you live like a king, with a servant or two, and you're in your own culture around your own countrymen you grew up with? I think the answer is obvious. The only reason these people were coming here was because of jobs and money. As the job opportunities got much better back home, they just went back there.
The article says the reasons aren't certain, but my experience doing technical interviews for my employer seems to point to a possible cause -- perceived lack of stable career prospects.
My background: I work for a medium to large IT company doing systems integration -- code for "troubleshooter, lab rat, make-stuff-work-in-the-face-of-no-documentation person." For a person with the right temperament and skills, it's a very fun job. However, whenever we go out looking for new team members, we get back lots of less-than-qualified people. I'm not talking about qualities like "experts in 4 different operating platforms, genius-level coding skills, etc." -- I'm talking more along the lines of "communicates well, writes clear documentation, and has logical thinking skills." Everything else is trainable in my mind, but if you don't have the engineer/tinkerer/figure-it-out-without-help mindset, you can't do this job well. And oh yes, the pay is decent, and the job is stable if you're good at it and contributing excellent work.
The only problem is that we're in the NYC area, and so is the finance industry. Anecdotal evidence from my colleagues in finance states that any new college grad who is remotely good at science, math and engineering is going into finance or business. Unfortunately for us, that's probably a rational choice given the current employment climate. When you turn 21 or so and are faced with constant talk of outsourcing/offshoring, companies living with a skeleton crew because they don't want to hire and add to costs on one side, and see in finance/business an easy and very lucrative job market, what would you pick? Go back a couple of years before that...and compare the STEM students working in the lab/studying all the time with the business/psychology/communications majors partying 24/7 and coming out ahead of the game in terms of compensation and ease of work. Then, you really start to see what's wrong.
One other problem is the outsourcing/offshoring of routine IT work. Some of the jobs that us IT veterans got our start in are way less accessible than before. I started in tech support/help desk, and it was the best training for dealing with angry users and calmly troubleshooting a problem without changing 100 things. Now, those help desk jobs are overseas or at one of three or four huge IT service providers. So, strike two -- uncertain future employment/compensation prospects, lack of entry-level positions to learn the business...what else is stacked against us?
Personally, I still see a need for *good, competent* engineering talent. Even though most companies and products now are just marketing, flash and repackaging of old technology, someone has to come up with the next neat thing. (Or in my case, someone has to make the 45 neat new things that all got mashed into our software/systems work together.) The problem is that business hs to either start signaling that they really do want and pay for talent, or we won't have replacements for all the people who are slated to retire soon.
...of the fall of Rome. You better watch out though because the dying body of this beast is still going to kick and flail for another 20-50 years. You don't want to be in the way.
Silence is a state of mime.
First it was manufacturing, next IT, next Software Development, now science and engineering. The government wonders why the economy is in the shitter. It's called globalization. Outsourcing sucks. Corporations are cutting the domestic workforce, and they wonder why their products are not selling. We gotta take industry back and reward US companies that design, and build their products here. Screw this globalization shit.
One issue is the large "winnowing out" of STEM majors in college:
Among students who majored in liberal arts, business or other fields, 73% of white students and about 63% of black and Latino students finished their degrees in five years.
Forty-one percent of American students who start off majoring in science, math, engineering or technology fields graduate from those programs within six years.
The question is whether this "winnowing" is due to lack of preparation of the students before college, or simply a non-educational strategy of signaling that the students who "survive" are of high quality, in which case the institution should consider not calling itself a "higher learning" institution but a "better signaling" institution.
Students in general are choosing non-STEM majors. Top US graduating majors are 1) Business 2) Social sciences and history 3) Health professions and related clinical sciences 4) Education 5) Psychology 6) Visual and performing arts.
I feel pretty bad for anyone who took out loans for majors #2 or #6 and think they can pay them back...#5 will have a rough time as well. Education doesn't pay well on day 1, but if you can stick it out for 10 years and sneak a graduate degree you can do OK, depending on your union contract.
One other issue is that while more women than men are now attending college (57% women/43% men), women are even more likely to choose non-STEM majors. In Business, the female/male ratio is nearly 50/50, but in the #2 top major group of Social Sciences, it is 64/36 in favor of women. In #3 Health, it is 76/24. In #4 Education, it is 77/23.
In CS the female/male ratio is 30/70, in Engineering it is 17/83.
Physical sciences are closer to even (47/53) while Math is slightly more female (58/48).
"Oh golly, Yes!" They must be thinking. "Let me work for an engineering degree so I can compete with someone making $8/hr. in the Philippines and be laid off by the time I'm 50 because I'm "too expensive" and my skills are "obsolete" according to a bean counter and an upper management ignoramus who knows nothing about my industry or what I do."
Sure! Why, I bet the kids are just lining up for that "opportunity." That bed has been made by American corporations. Unfortunately, we must all lie in it.
The USA and its wealth are being harvested by an international elite who don't give a rat's ass about the USA or any other nation state. Nobody with power/money has any interest in having a strong, stable middle class in the USA. The best skill set for a young person with a passion for engineering is the ability to speak Chinese or Hindi and the skill set to acquire permanent working status in China or India, where at least the cost of living is more in line with salaries.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
We've really created a hostile environment for anyone wanting to study science as a kid.
Can't give your kid a chemistry set, those don't exist. Can't buy chemicals, you might be making a bomb.
For several years (after 9/11) you couldn't buy a model rocket engine, 'cause of course you could use it for terrorism somehow.
Until recently you couldn't build a UAV. Well, you could build it, but flying it was illegal.
Students are arrested if they bring electronics projects to school (Can't find the link, remember reading about this).
Having canning jars and a bag of fertilizer in your car can get you arrested for having bomb-making materials.
Taking apart a smoke detector (and using it to demonstrate alpha radiation) is a "grievous offense" (actual NRC term) and can get you raided and have *all* your lab equipment taken away.
Your hackerspace will be shut down instead of "given 30 days for compliance" as would be the case for a company.
Really... what's left? Mathematics? I'm surprised that we have *any* young people interested in science ATM. We make it nigh impossible and come down hard on them when they do.
I was recently in a room with 10 Chinese students, 3 Americans, and 1 Japanese Professor.
He asked the Chinese students if they were going to stay in America or go back to China. After they all said they were going to go back to China he goes on to talk about how 15 years ago everyone would have stayed in America but times are changing. He spoke along the lines of exactly what is in this post.
The EE department at my school is about 95% foreign and ~60% are from China.
I see this is as one of the biggest problems our country faces going forward. Our best schools are teaching people who go work in other countries...
Even if someone decides to enter S&E career fields, there are very few real jobs offered by real employers -- it is much easier to use "this gun is for hire" contractors that you can REALLY abuse and dump with few consequences.
Contractors are used with great success appropriately. My father contracted out to a number of contractors the company could never justify having full-time, to do specialist work, which is the whole point. For example - a guy who knew CCDs inside and out. Another specialized in PCB layout, generating boards my father (an EE for decades, no stranger to PCB layout) described as "art."
All these guys were well compensated for their work and in some cases had more work than they could handle. So, if you're a programmer - find something that you think has a market which interests you and you're highly qualified in, hone your skills, and market yourself. You will never be able to be a contractor as a Java programmer - you're a total commodity.
If you want to talk about inappropriate use of contractors...well, the IRS has been cracking down on companies that use contractor status to avoid payroll taxes and benefits. My state has been, too.
Please help metamoderate.
I think it's a little more complex than that. The immigration hysteria has mostly been about illegal immigrants, i.e. people from south of the border with no skills at all besides picking fruit and who don't speak English, not people from Asia with college degrees and tech skills who speak good English.
Wrong!
I was one of the last few people who managed to come from GERMANY to Sillicon Valley on a H1B visa back in the 90es.
I would say that i speak the language here pretty fluently, and have several graduate degrees. I admit, i DO pick fruit in my backyard, but only recreationally.
Still, my Greencard process took a total of 7 years (filed right before 9/11, YAY!)
Since then, I have worked with several high tech, talented people, and - my colleagues from Germany largely don't want to move to the US of A anymore, and are even annoyed by many of the things they undergo to come here for business trips.
I have also worked with a team from Brazil, and wanted to hire their top engineer (MS/CS, fluent english, on track to senior management).
I tried to convince him to move to the Valley, and work for a billion dollar company.
Even with the resources of a huge company, it was impossible to get a timely visa for him, and after "pending" in the queue for 10 months, his wife pulled the plug and decided she doesnt want to come and live here anyways, since she (who is a MD in Brazil) couldnt practice here, and she also didnt want to subject her children to american school system.
YAY, way to go. each one of my friends who has been strung along and finally gave up would have held down a top paying job here in the high tech industry, and payed taxes and created jobs.
YES, foreigners CREATE jobs in the USA, they don't take them away.
Dont believe me - well, look at some russian immigrant who founded a small company called Google.
Or this Vinod guy, who is the #1 VC, Khosla Ventures who co-founded SUN (together with Bill Joy a German, and
So, yes - i DO believe that the US immigration policy has thrown out the baby WITH the bath water.
Overall, there USED to come more highly talented people INTO the US.
Those were the ones who actually FOLLOWED the laws, which were now tightened up unreasonably.
The others, who come here illegally - well, do you REALLY think the immigration laws affect them? seriously?
There's a reason they are called ILLEGAL.
It's now almost impossible to transfer good workers from abroad into the US. The criteria have changed so much that our company has basically stopped doing that except for higher level managers. It used to cost about $70k-$100k to get an Engineer into the US on a work visa but the cost and time involved has ballooned so much that it's no longer considered cost efficient by my employer. I saw a memo to that extent a few years ago.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
That, combined with the college/student loan bubble. S&E students tend to be, well, intelligent. The combination of outsourcing concerns, college costs vastly exceeding inflation (which any intelligent middle/high schooler witnessed during those years), college costs more or less exceeding what one could realistically pull in with employment, and the fact that there's no way out of student loans that didn't produce return on investment would scare away plenty of people with the natural talent needed for S&E. These people may seek out other fields that can be entered through different means, finding other means to make it.
Those who simply equate college=more money and don't THINK, often go into unprofitable majors, don't work part of it off and leave their four year with five figures of debt, or worse. Incidentally, their burden on the demand is responsible for scaring away those who would otherwise get into profitable S&E fields.
At the risk of getting too political, we have deep inlaid problems that will take years if not decades for the masses to finally pick up on...
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Wages are low, work is hard, college for these degrees is hard, and job security in general is all but a punchline but especially painful when you are uber specialized. You are smarter to get a more mobile degree like business, as it is also easier and anecdotally it has a much higher wage ceiling than science and engineering.
Not that I'm jaded or anything...
Also think about education, India and China have been pumping money into engineering and science degrees for the past 20 years and general push people to go abroad to study and work. Its not a surprise that they have more volume but that doesn't always equate to better works just as in the US that hasn't been pushing as much money into higher degrees. We probably have the same percentage of really good workers compared to overall graduates of higher levels but when you have more graduates, you have more physical people that can do a better job. Dealing with physical people nominal data in forms of percentages doesn't work as well to compare number of people that can fill the 2+ million jobs that are needed in the Tech industry. Also take a look at the rankings for the OEDC countries on education standards and see where we are. I have not had a problem getting a job in US over the past 5 years and my salary has over doubled in the past three years with a computer science degree. You just have to be good at what you do.
Nothing says the US can use its top-of-the-world position to bring it back to a more manageable US/UK/Western EU/Australia alliance.
Why should globalization mean that the developed world guts itself, sending the bits that made the country developed to some hellhole?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Our best schools are teaching people who go work in other countries...
That's because most of the work is in other countries.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
When I was in Engineering school, 20 years ago, the freshman class was bigger then the rest of the school.
There were more freshman then sophomores, juniors, seniors, grad students, faculty and staff combined.
It typically cleared out in the first month. Lots of new CS and business majors.
I don't expect this has changed much.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That is such a shame. We should be doing everything we can to make it simple for the rest of the world's best and brightest to live here. If you have a certain resume and pass some simple financial tests, your work visa should be nearly automatic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think there's much more to it than that. I think STEM is a canary for the US economy at large. You can't maintain a first-world industrialized economy by just shuffling pieces of worthless paper around.
Since 90% aren't smart enough to be scientists or engineers and we also need smart people for a few other things, I don't see this as likely to change.
H1B are not the "best and brightest" - far from it. According to the US GAO, 54% of H1Bs are entry level, only 7% work at the advanced level.
H1Bs are cheap labor used to replace American workers. H1Bs are also used to help with the offshoring of US jobs.