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New Study Suggests No Shortage of American STEM Graduates
An anonymous reader writes "A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth. The EPI study found that the United States has 'more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations.' Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they've been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry. (IT jobs make up 59 percent of the STEM workforce, according to the study.)"
I consult as a programmer. I work for large corporations and mid-cap companies. When I stated a LONG time ago it was pretty common to see college hires and interns in programming departments. Interns are extremely rare, and I haven't seen a college hire in a programming team in 6 years. Companies would rather hire "experienced" off-shore programmers. So the only pressure there is on wages is off-shore.
Since the quality of off-shore work is a bit suspect I make a lot of money (almost certainly too much) as the lead/architect that's keeping things together. If companies want to stop paying people like me too much money they should be hiring young (cheap) workers to put downward pressure on wages. That doesn't happen because it's seen as easier to just go off-shore.
That's not to say all off-shore programmers are bad. There are several eastern European/ec-Russian block states that produce high quality code. They happen to cost about 2X the wages of India Off-shore and carry some IP Protection baggage.
This is a valid point. Perhaps the numbers are a bit overstated. But, the point in the article is still valid to an extent. Companies complain that they can't fill their run of the mill jobs with graduates. Secondly, at a time when underemployment/unemployment is higher than usual, and wages are flat, one should not have a problem finding "qualified" canidates.
Yes, but people will perceive that distinction as goalpost moving. Let's be honest about what's happening here: we are moving into a post-worker society. The set of jobs that a computer+automated machinery can achieve is rapidly approaching the point where it surpasses average human capacity in almost every field.
And I don't mean this as a neo-luddite "computers are taking our jobs" kind of way, just that the set of skills that are unique to humanity are shrinking. We're running, as fast as we can, at a point where ownership of capital is the only factor for success in a free-market economy.
Globalization only compounds this fact, by making historically disenfranchised workers able to compete for the same shrinking set of valuable labor skills. We're headed back towards a 2-class society, and I don't like it.
Allow an H1B visa holder to change jobs freely within the 6-year timeframe of their visa.
An employer would *have* to pay them a competitive salary to keep them from defecting to the competition. In that case, the employer would only willingly go through the hassle of justifying an H1B hire (we'd keep that requirement firmly in place, BTW) if there was a true need, not simply a desire to get an indentured serf on the cheap.
This would be good for everyone who's honest and upfront about their motives. It would only hurt sleazy employers who are falsely claiming a shortage of labor to underhandedly keep wages low.
Of course, the cynical part of me says it'll never happen.
And, for full disclosure: I started out as an H1B myself, and would have LOVED for the system to work like this...
There is indeed a profound shortage of STEM workers, in much the same sense that there is a profound shortage of 2014 Corvettes on sale for $10.
The past twenty years has been dominated by the MBA and the JD. The same people who demand outrageous salaries on the premise that they are indispensible, seemingly have a difficuly time understanding supply-and-demand when it applies to other people.
If you are capable of getting a degree in a STEM field, then you are likely more intelligent and rational than the average person. And an intelligent, rational person is less likely to commit to years of graduate work given the low salaries and job security that seem to be the norm. Why work and sweat so hard, when your CEO is just going to send your job to India so he can get his quarterly bonus.
When STEM grad students can expect $100k job offers out of the gate, and MBAâ(TM)s have to live with their parents to make ends meet, I bet our âoeshortageâ of STEM workers vanishes rather quickly.
(Have both a MBA and most of a Ph.D. in physics. Gave up the Ph.D. after I met brilliant people in my field who were in their 10th year as a postdoc and needing food stamps to make ends meet.)
This report does effectively see what is going on. Its the continuing effort to destroy high wage jobs in the US because corporate interests do not want to pay high wages.
Manufacturing jobs have faced this over the past few decades. Middle management has faced this. Now the skilled technical worker is the target for wage lowering.
However, our Captains of Industry have lost the wisdom that Henry Ford had about making sure their employees can afford the things they make.
There is really a neo-feudalism being formulated right now with the CEOs and corporate officers and boards taking a huge chunk of the company money, and with the money changers on the other side skimming off the top as well. They fail to see that enriching and advancing the middle class is the best way to actually make more money in the future. Their current method is going to empty the tank for the engine of the economy and set us on a continuous downward spiral.
The key thing to fix this problem will be to have businesses move away from "Increase Shareholder Value" and back to "give the customer what they want."
This is what is so dangerous about the Hedge fund managers' desires to increase Apple dividend payments. Apple has a clear focus on giving the customer good products. Turning them into a shareholder value type of company will only lead to disaster.
USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean that all, or even most, of the STEM people we "took" from those places are the best and the brightest. Nobody in the US opposes having the "best and the brightest" come here, but the vast majority are simply of average ability and recruited to reduce pay of people in the US.
I'm one of those meritocratic boogeymen that thinks our borders should be open with nothing more than a background check into your criminal record before you're granted entrance to the United States.
No problem. I think we should do that for STEM people as soon as we start doing it for doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc., eliminate sugar, ethanol, orange juice and other agricultural tariffs, and get rid of things like region coding and nabbing the elderly for buying their prescriptions in that third world hellhole of unsafe pharmaceuticals called "Canada".
The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries.
How do we "loose the STEM war"? Since the study makes clear (as have other studies, many done much earlier) that there is no shortage of STEM people in the US, the purpose of massive guest worker programs (e.g. H-1B) is to reduce the pay of people in the US. This has nothing to do with how "globally competitive" the US is, and everything to do with how the pie gets divided up here. The plutocracy doesn't like this whole "middle class" thing where many Americans make a decent living.
I totally agree that we should retrain, but having a PhD in Astronomy says almost nothing about that persons ability to become a competent software engineer. They are two completely different disciplines. Some would love it and be excellent at it, others would hate it and suck at it.
Generally speaking, someone with a PhD in Astronomy has done a fair amount of coding to implement their ideas. It's not far to go from scientific computing to Software Engineering, and in fact such a person would likely have a better math background than most of his fellow SEs.