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The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
theodp writes "Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians, advises IEEE Spectrum contributing editor Robert Charette — the STEM crisis is a myth. In investigating the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, Charette was surprised by 'the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor's degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them — 11.4 million — work outside of STEM.' So, why would universities, government, and tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft cry STEM-worker-shortage-wolf? 'Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle,' Charette writes. 'One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit...Governments also push the STEM myth because an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense. And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as 'taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities' by allowing them to expand their enrollments. An oversupply of STEM workers may also have a beneficial effect on the economy, says Georgetown's Nicole Smith, one of the coauthors of the 2011 STEM study. If STEM graduates can't find traditional STEM jobs, she says, 'they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive.'"
Don't do it. You'll earn more having others do math for you.
Articles like this a) assume all STEM degrees are interchangeable and b) assume that possessing a STEM degree means that they are qualified to work in a STEM field. Anyone who's had to interview candidates before knows that's not the case.
This is all about four letters, but they're not 'STEM'. These ridiculously large and enormously profitable companies want to import workers at much lower wages and hold them hostage by controlling their immigration status in the US.
"Woe is me, woe is us, we can't get the workers we need." I call bull shit. Stop trying to fuck over the people you want to sell your products to, or sell as your products to your advertisers. If no one earns enough to buy your shit, who the fuck are you then?
don't bother doing anything hard kids, take a 'media studies' degree, 'cos you'll end up sweeping streets anyway. In fact, forget the degree - go straight to an industry apply to be an apprentice or intern and then work your way through its hierarchy by diligence, and/or brown-nosing.
Then, in 20 years time, you can turn around to anyone who asks "what became of America, why is it such a useless 3rd world country now when it was so great back in the 50s", you can give them the answer before telling them to get off your lawn.
'they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive."
That may be true (STEM grads probably have functioning brains), but is a STEM education an efficient way to train greeters at Walmart or burger flippers? A STEM education IS good at creating a new crop of student loan slaves every year...
Wow. I do believe a dose of Hanlon's Razor is in order here.
You can easily have an abundance of STEM people overall, and yet have a shortage of people in specific fields. The shortage is of course most likely in new and in growing fields, while surpluses are most likely in old and settled, or declining areas.
So, mismatch can easily explain the discrepancy without ascribing malicious intent to anybody (which is not to say there is none). Instead the problem really is the tension between learning a field and training for a specific job.
Seems US and European corporations are more and more insistent on finding workers that fit right into a specific job with little to no training*. Which seems good in the short term, but people with mostly job-specific training will have a much harder time retraining for a different kind of job when the winds inevitably change. They'll act as anchors for their employers, and collectively reduce the pool of qualified replacements if or when their employers decide to kick them to the curb.
I suspect that this practice is in fact bad in the short term as well; but since the effects across the life cycle of an employee are felt in very different parts of an organization it's not a waste that any one person will normally notice.
* Japanese corporations, on the other hand, go overboard in the other direction. They hire mostly or only new graduates for any career jobs, and you - and the company - generally don't even know what you will actually be doing once you start. They want to hire blank slates they can train and mold as they see fit.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
We don't have an overabundance of STEM workers.
We have an overabundance of H1B visas...
There is also the not insignificant fact that STEM graduates can get better [pay and more respect by working in other fields.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
while nobody sees this as yet another failure of capitalism to magically optimize everything for everyone like some kind of wonder fairy. Look, it's a system with winners and losers. Like the lottery, there are a lot more losers than winners.
Oh, and newsflash. The winners would like workers who are as close to slavery as they can get without an overt revolution which might get expensive. Twas ever thus.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
A strong focus in the push for improved STEM education (at least in some corners) is the recruitment of more women and minorities into STEM fields. De-emphasizing STEM education as this article suggests would only exacerbate this problem.
When companies stop blowing me off because they think "Well he's an expert in C++ really well but has only done C# for a year or two so obviously he's useless in that." (From what I'm seeing most of what they do isn't that hard and what I do know about C++ does transfer over rapidly to C#. Hey, have I ever mentioned the grammar of C# (and Java for that matter) was done that way so us C++ guys could rapidly switch over to it?) You know, at time the vibe I get from companies is that they want what I call a desert island developer. That's a developer that's so good you could literally put him on a desert island. You'd air drop coding specs, food, beer, and women to him every day. Then he'd code it up by writing it up in the sand on the beach(Which the next airdrop plane would photograph) and that code in the sand would work perfectly once it was scanned in.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I have been interviewing IT candidates for years. We don't have a shortage of applicants. We do have a shortage of good applicants. I am increasingly dismayed by the number of individuals who profess ten or even twenty years of IT experience on their resumes, yet who cannot solve the most basic design problem or answer questions about the fundamentals of the language they use daily.
This goes for both native-born U.S. workers and those from outside, by the way.
I suspect that many people become software developers because they believe it to be a lucrative -- or, at least, employable -- field. But being a developer is like being a novelist or an athlete or a professional chess player: it requires a certain amount of discipline, above and beyond just showing up and doing the work assigned to you. Where I work we can't afford to have bad coders, so it's very hard to make the cut.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
We had a research project, funded by a major, national science research agency, focused on STEM education. Early on, we needed to formally define STEM disciplines. It turns out there are as many definitions of STEM as there are organizations studying STEM issues. The two main perspectives are education and occupation. Both use their own codes (SOC for occupations and CIP for education). There are crosswalks, but they are not 100%. In the end, we needed CIP codes and collected many CIP code classifications on STEM.
What was confusing is that many researchers exclude major, technical fields, like medicine or agriculture. Best we could determine is that STEM definitions depended on who was funding the research. Some researchers add social sciences. One classification included Gender Studies as STEM! What is needed is a much finer classification, within STEM disciplines. Then, industry numbers from BLS can be mapped to CIP codes in education. And while many workers move out of their base CIP discipline, a matching of supply and demand can be done without as much aggregate noise.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Of all the years, never seen a STEM "crisis". Good to see some counter argument. It's seemed like an unquestioned pile of BS too long.
We have a few problems with just crunching the numbers in this case.
First of all - Not everyone who manages to 2.0 their way through a STEM degree will do well at it, or even like doing it for that matter.
Second - A STEM degree (even with a 2.0) carries the prestige of "this guy knows something". For all the require-a-degree-but-not-really jobs out there, having a "real" major rather than Wymins' Studies will go a loooong way toward getting you in the top half of the pile of applicants.
Finally, jobs that really do require a STEM background tend to favor younger people, both in terms of sharpness of mind and lack of experience to say "no" to regularly putting in 60+ hours a week, on salary. The core STEM workforce of the 90s and even the 00's has largely moved on to manage today's engineers - If they haven't gotten so sick of busting their ass that they dropped out and went on to a sleepy AP Entry Clerk position somewhere.
So yes, we very much do have both a surplus and a shortage. We have a surplus because not all STEM grads can or want to work in STEM; we have a shortage because we don't have enough people good enough or naive enough to put up with actually doing a STEM job.
If you are able to set the definitions, you can (and should) win any argument.
The classification they are using for STEM is very, very broad. Sorry, your technical support job is NOT STEM. Sorry, your forestry job is (probably not) STEM. Lab technician... not STEM. Your BA in geology, (probably not) STEM (note, BA, not BS, meaning you couldn't cut it in the MATH and SCIENCE courses).
So, yes, if by STEM, you mean not physical labor, then, yes, there is no shortage; indeed, there is a surplus.
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so it prefers to bring in foreigners if they can. And they can, because the buy politicians and write the laws (ALEC) for the politicians to pass.
Money. Someone with a STEM degree can often make more money, in the short and long term, by working in a field that is not a "traditional" STEM field. The STEM "crisis" is the result of companies unwilling to compete on salary and benefits; in some cases they think their name alone should be enough to get job applicants lining up. I saw that as an MBA candidate; with major corporations crying they can't fill their interview slots. Well, guess what Sparky, if you offer 50%(or more) less than Wall Street and consulting firms you aren't very attractive. My class had a lot of recovering engineers such as myself; and none went to traditional STEM employers post grad school. Anecdotal information suggests a number didn't out of undergrad as well.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
if you manage a project properly, then you do this thing called 'delegation' and 'breaking up a complex task into smaller pieces'. then you have teams of people work on those tasks while also being able to, i dont know, shit and eat. its a fucking amazing concept, first pioneered in, i dont know, ancient fucking babylon.
I have to say that STEM education in US is not good enough. For instance, kids start to use calculators too early. Using calculator is a great way to simplify many computation tasks. However, it deprives kids the opportunities to THINK and ESTIMATE. Both are crucial for STEM jobs.
In universities, I have encountered engineering students who did not know what they should really know. Well, they eventually got their degrees. In my opinion, it is much better off for them to pursue jobs in areas other than STEM.
^(oo)^pig~
There are also capital letters, which were invented before lowercase letters.
And the reason that STEM jobs require 60 hours is the same reason that any other jobs does... there aren't enough qualified people around to do it.
I think in order to really appreciate STEM, the summery should have written STEM in more places. So as to signify the importance of STEM and how it relates to STEM people and their STEM dealings.
Great students graduate with STEM degrees but find they can work in other fields for way more money. Fields that don't suppress wages with H-1B visas. It's what happens when companies figure out its simply cheaper to buy off politicians than pay engineers what they are really worth.
Direct result of declaring corporations "people", hiding campaign contributors and not requiring public campaign financing so every voter really is equivalent!
Actually what always amazes me is that software projects are viewed as failures if they are over budget or completed late.
Funny, the construction industry, measured under the same standards, would have absolutely no successful projects either.
Far too many PHBs think that software development is really easy and don't get how clueless they are.
I don't have any problems with managers making a lot of money. I have problems with managers that are dumber than shit making a lot of money.
Would you like parallelepiped potatoes with that?
I have a engineering degree from a mid-tier University and did the bare minimum to pass. I learned a lot and was exposed to a lot of technologies, theorems and approaches I wouldn't have been otherwise. That served me well.
Instead of living in the library, I learned how to socialize with people, drinking beer - and learned everything I could about practical programming - back then, MFC, Core Windows API, Linux 1.0-series kernels, bringing up green hardware to a bootloader.
I never had to provide a transcript to get any job. When pushed, I just flatly refused. That included positions are large leaders with "HR" departments. You impress a manager enough, you won't have a problem with HR. They may have a problem with you, but they're overhead. Whining otherwise means you don't know how to network.
I let my solid record stand for itself. I never had an issue with "FizzBuzz" style tests or technical interrogations. Ultimately, despite my "2.0'ing it through", I knew my shit, very, very well. Now I am more of a manager, and I run very large projects. I've learned to spot those who are solid technical performers. It's not that difficult to do.
If you are having a problem finding work, or are stuck in a dead end position, one of two things (or both) is likely true:
#1. You are not as good as you think you are, and/or are lacking the experience, talent, or some combination thereto. If you can't build an IT product, program, service - whatever - in your own time that you can use as a reference to show "hey I know my shit", then you're going to have a rough go.
#2. You are an under-socialized technical person. The world runs on relationships, not tech. That's not fair, but my friend, that is the way that it is. Fake it until you make it. There are lots of books you can read on how to interact and learn social cues. Some people just know, I had to learn, and I learned from those books. Use those skills to identify and create opportunities and new positions you can use to jump up the ladder. On the upside, you'll also enjoy a lot more success with your sexual partners of choice.
If you're unwilling or unable to do those things - and you don't have a trust fund - the world will be one hell of a harsh place and a rough ride.
Companies that cannot hire H1-B's (defense contractors) are paying outsize salaries and lavish benefits to their engineers. At the moment, they can't seem to stop laying them off...
Several of my former students have earned engineering degrees and found gainful employment - in the banking sector. What do you think is happening to Wall Street? High speed, low latency trades programmed in assembly on Linux. Flash crashes. Goldman Sachs halting the NASDAQ. Complicated derivatives that screw everyone except for the investment banker.
There's your STEM graduates hard at work!
I worked in a "STEM" job in the US for more than 10 years. I noticed quickly that the engineering field is not really considered respectable in American culture. To put it bluntly, engineering is not a white man's job in the US. Dirty work is left for foreigners, while money and women are in business, law and medicine. The only decent way to earn a dollar appears to be through socializing, networking, smalltalk and such.
In ROW, engineers are up there with doctors as favorite son-in-law candidates for the daughters of respectable folks.
to much push for degrees over other types of learning?
In some areas like Tech / IT there is to much push for an degree over more hands on learning and the tech / trades schools out there are roped into the degree system. Also in some areas some 2 year tech / trades schools are very good but they get pushed back as they are not 4 year ones even when you can learn a lot more at one.
For lots of IT / tech / coding jobs some of university are over loaded with theory and they trun out people who can't do the job.
It will be interesting to see if a surplus in STEM grads will lead to an increase in small innovative start ups. STEM education provides a problem solving mentality. It may be that the surplus of STEM grads will translate into a strong entrepreneurial class.
I'm totally ok with raising my taxes. I would prefer income taxes... especially raising capital gains taxes to AT LEAST be equal to normal income taxes since that is not really legitimate income... I don't do anything to get or really contribute to the economy with it.... if anything, I should dump it completely (most of it I have already) since it goes towards evil bastards who ruin the legitimate economy.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
the article doesn't even touch on your point. It just says that gov't and business are touting statistics that say there aren't enough people with STEM degrees and that those stats are lies used to lower the standard of living and quality of life for those same degree holders.
Now, to your point, I love the sentiment you just expressed: "Americans are too dumb and lazy. We need more H1-Bs". I'm not even sure you know you're expressing it. That's the beauty of it. That thought is being drilled into our heads by corporations. That and the notion that you, yes you, are too lazy and stupid and if you don't have a good life it's all your fault for not working harder (and has nothing to do with the fact that you're poor).
It's the opposite of an "Entitlement Complex". A Disenfranchisement Complex maybe? I don't know. But I know this. American spent the last 30 years being told their worthless garbage that are not worth the salaries they make. and they've started to believe it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
...like food service. Welcome to my generation.
Which is exactly backwards, at least above the primary school level. Want to teach math? You ought to have a degree in math. Physics? Degree in physics. The pedagogical stuff can be picked up on the side and checked with a specialist exam.
At 6th grade and above, teachers who have not actually studied in the area of teaching will be outpaced and embarrassed by the more gifted students in their class. I had a teacher like that - I was so f***ing bored in her class (as was a friend of mine) that (in order to avoid falling asleep) we sat quietly in the back and wrote notes to each other. The fact that we could always answer the questions she randomly threw at us during class infuriated her, so she seated us on opposite sides of a tall cabinet. We responded as maturely as our ages (12 or so) by throwing notes over the cabinet.
Had the teacher actually known and cared about math, she would have given us some sort of challenge - we'd have dug in and been quiet. Since she quite clearly did not even particularly like math, well...
Three years later, I was in the "slow" math class because I had phased out. However, my parents had moved me to a private school, and that teacher was a mathematician. I saw some stupid typo he made on the blackboard, corrected it probably as snarkily as you would expect. He immediately realized what was going on, and sent me to the advanced class down the hall. Man, the teachers all knew their stuff, and really enjoyed teaching it. What a revelation!
Above primary school, education degrees are irrelevant. A couple of classes in child psychology and teaching techniques will do. Training in, and a love of the subject you are teaching is all that should matter. Which is one of the biggest reasons that most American public schools suck.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
All of these "STEM shortage/STEM non-shortage" concepts are inherently ignorant of economics.
No central planner is going to have enough information to effectively determine whether people should have STEM degrees or not.
Individuals are the best people to determine for themselves that given their inherent capabilities and the market situation whether they should invest in acquiring educational capital. They might not always get it right, but they are more likely to get it right than a central planner.
Government subsidies to favor STEM education over other types of education are likely to lead to misallocation of educational capital.
Companies will seek STEM employees on the open market, where a market-clearing rate will be found.
Furthermore, there is no set number of jobs in any sector. A single entrepreneur can create hundreds or thousands of jobs. To succeed, entrepreneurs may have to hire key employees without which the company will never grow - these employees need key skill sets. But the entrepreneur will find a market clearing price to hire them. And so on...
No-one's really mentioned the plight of scientists (vs engineers) here yet, which has even worse over-supply problems.
Under the way that science funding is usually structures -- via short term projects with jobs tied to projects -- the only proper career job for a scientist is "professor" but we train around 6-10 postdoc researchers for each proper job, via those short term projects. The rest of them end up in the scrap heap. The system has already driven wages for project scientists down to minimum wage in many fields, and coupled with visas for immigrants seems to have reduced the incentive for any westerner to work in science to practically zero. We're now in this bizarre situation of throwing taxpayers money into these science "projects" that exist to train up Indians and Chinese as they work 12 hours days for similar salaries to binmen, one in six of them will become a prof and the other go back to India or China to use the science we paid for to aid their own countries -- either though low-budget startups that the west can't compete with on wages, or often military applications.
In theory I understand that free immigration is a good thing and makes the whole country efficient -- it would be nice if was applied across the board fairly though, for example so that we scientists and engineers could afford to hire immigrant painters and plumbers at reduced rates to match the reduced rates that we now get in our own jobs. But if we only open visas to some professions, then we basically crap on the westerners in those professions, and encourage them to move out to a more protected profession (such as medicine or defence -- which is probably where I'll be off to pretty soon for that reason.)
o the government lies
o corporations lie
o hiring practices favor imported, low-cost labor
o older, sicker technical people are treated as unemployable and fireable if already in place
o arbitrary degree requirements place artificial barriers between employment and many technical people
o HR departments operate by rote and bean-counting, not "find a great employee"
o congress sets the immigration rules for imported tech labor
o congress is wholly corrupt and beholden to corporate direction via funding pressures
If you want to be truly successful, you'd better cultivate some creativity and start your own thing. The employment situation is horrible and constantly getting worse, with no end in sight. And if anyone thinks an artificially inflated number of STEM grads is going to do anything to alleviate any of this, they're out of their minds. The slope is only getting steeper.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you have a political target for the amount of research and engineering that should be done, then it is not necessarily inconsistent that there are too few people taking education in these fields while few of them can get any jobs. That situation would be consistent with there being too few STEM jobs *and* too few STEM workers. This is not unrealistic - countries like to compare themselves with others based on how much research they do, so it is only natural to set political goals for research.
When India claims it needs 800 new universities, that could be based not on how many STEM jobs are available in India at the moment, but on how much research India wants to do. I haven't checked if that is the case here, but if it is, I would accept the statement to be accompanied by something like "and we will also need 200000 new STEM jobs to reach our research goals".
Guess what? Most History majors don't get jobs as historians, most Econ majors don't get jobs as economists. There has always been limited correlation between formal education and chosen profession. Only a subset of STEM jobs really require the formal STEM education, and a lot of those really need advanced degrees.
I know, I have an econ degree and have not worked a day in my life in that field. I work in an environment where 90% of my co-workers are engineering majors. I don't hide my background, but I don't paste it to my forehead. It is not common for people to go a couple years before it comes up, and they are usually surprised I'm not an "engineer".
Of course if I am a business who really needs to hire STEM majors, I want to hire the best 30%, not 100%.
The best part of that article was the conclusion, which I strongly agree with:
A broader view, I and many others would argue, is that everyone needs a solid grounding in science, engineering, and math. In that sense, there is indeed a shortage—a STEM knowledge shortage. To fill that shortage, you don’t necessarily need a college or university degree in a STEM discipline, but you do need to learn those subjects, and learn them well, from childhood until you head off to college or get a job. Improving everyone’s STEM skills would clearly be good for the workforce and for people’s employment prospects, for public policy debates, and for everyday tasks like balancing checkbooks and calculating risks. And, of course, when science, math, and engineering are taught well, they engage students’ intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works.
Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.
And this was a traditional view, during the time when this country supported education more than we do now (college was free or low cost with no loans, high school teachers had good jobs and respect).
That's a liberal arts education. Everybody should learn science and math, as much as they're capable of. Some people will be surprised to find out that they're good. Everybody should learn history, art, literature, philosophy, languages. When I went to school, even the engineering majors had to take freshman humanities and argue about Socrates, Dostoyevsky, beat poetry and whether there is a God.
If you read the biographies of Nobel laureate scientists, you'll see that some of them (like Eric Kandel) started out in literature and moved into science when they were driven there by curiosity.
Why should you be forced into an irrevocable career choice at 16? The rational strategy would be to learn as much as possible about as many diverse fields as you can, and move in to the one that matches your talents, the job market, and the opportunities that come to you by chance or social connections.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This reminds me of the 1980s, when the editorials were dire complaints about the shortage of physicists in the US, while all the physicists I knew who were earning Ph.D.s were asking "where are all these purported jobs?"
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Russia or South America or Africa or Iran.
This has been known for about a decade from studies by the Rand Institute and others. It gets ignored and will continue to get ignored.
There are two reasons corporations complain about an alleged "shortage". First, a flooded field reduces the wages they have to pay. Second, they don't want to spend time and money on org-specific training, and the bigger the pool of STEM workers, the more likely there is be something close to an instant fit.
They don't care if many STEMers have to fall by the wayside in their pursuit to flood the market, they just want what they want when they want it and don't want to pay much for it. Corporations are supposed to be selfish, no?
Table-ized A.I.
The problem is that everything is important when it comes to school subjects. Law is great to know. Business is great to know. Psychology is great to know. Art is great to know. History is great to know.
Everything is great to know: makes you more flexible and well-rounded. After all, often one will likely be working for illogical dolts. Thus, knowing about The Great Dolts of History is useful knowledge. The problem is that you can only fit in so many topics in a degree.
Table-ized A.I.
is a great example if you want to see age discrimination, yet there are where most of the STEM jobs are.
Quite frankly, agism exist because the managers/owners/business leaders have no idea (or just being lazy) on how to utilize the exceptional experience of the 40+ years old. It takes a special type of manager to manage a team full of superstars. Your local MBA PHB is not going to cut it.
It used to be that, companies avoid employing older aged people due to potential high health-care cost, but Obamacare pretty much fixed this (by either turning them into contract workers, or just report them as 29-hour workers.... you don't need to pay for their healthcare.)
New Economic Perspectives
I remember about 15 years ago that there was a time when multiple people worked on a project. Now, it seems that one person works on multiple projects. I, for one, have at least 10 different projects that I am supposed to be working on simultaneously and am supposed to be able to give detailed information on at any given point in time.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
A lot of people finish their degrees and decide it isn't for them. I have a physics degree of the few people I kept in touch with I'm the only one who ever used physics outside of university. One taught english for a while overseas and is now a handy man/artist, another is in the insurance business. I'm now in software development so I didn't even stay in the field. When graduation was a approaching people just took what jobs they could find and lots of employers like the fact you can solve hard problems but not a lot (relatively speaking) have physics problems they need solving. Add to that similar to people that study the humanities people often get degrees because they are generally interested not because they want to commit to a particular area of work.
Lastly, and more importantly: a lot of people that graduate with the degrees you wouldn't want working for you. By definition half the people are below median. Better a passionate quick learner with say a psych degree than someone with a BSc but didn't give a crap by second year.
Given that STEM workers can't get enough jobs, it doesn't mean those skills aren't needed, it means the allocation mechanism is wrong.
Restatement:
Technological utopianists, such as myself, say we need all STEM knowledge workers we can get. The fact that our society can't support them just means we live in a sick society.
Our society is offering greatest rewards to business, especially business/banking manipulations; does nothing to add to society. Sorry, all wrong. (Captialism, or whatever it is)
Posit that the solutions to our problems are technological. Any creativity will come from that. The seed corn of the future.
Also, STEM is a great culture. I don't use all my STEM college degree for work/money/commerce, but I'm glad I know it. Likewise I'm glad I read the novels and poetry and sociology/anthropology/philosophy I've had. Underemployed STEM graduates are better, even to themselves, than underemployed nongraduates. I advocate open eyes: go to college , know you may not get job, and do it anyway. (Actually, free online courses currently available may be the way to go. College overpriced)
TFA presents some interesting data, but is a bit weak on the interpretation front. It's easy to say, "there are multiple times the workers available as there are positions, hence the shortage is a myth". It's much more difficult to answer the question: "then why is everyone making such a big deal out of it". TFA does attempt to give a number of answers (for the lazy readers, scroll down about 2/3 of the article to the paragraph starting with "Clearly, powerful forces"), but leaves me somewhat unconvinced. There must be more to it than that. Could it for instance be that a lot of these STEM graduates have assimilated the knowledge from their textbooks but lack the deep insight and creative talent to use it to excel in a real work situation? I know this is certainly a problem in my field, just like there are so many people who call themselves programmers but can't really program. (Just read Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky and co if you don't want to take my word for it.) Could it be that "the graduates get snatched by better-paying jobs in other sectors and the STEM industry doesn't want to raise wages" is also partially "the graduates were found to dull by the STEM industry and got employed in a different sector"?
If STEM graduates can't find traditional STEM jobs, she says, 'they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive
In other words, STEM workers are more productive than average on non STEM positions? That would be a good point for subsiding STEM education
I graduated from an engineering-heavy university (back when STEM was a part of a flower) so most of the people I knew were BEng types. 5 years after leaving almost all the engineers were in finance, with a few in IT, one was an actuary. Why? Higher pay.
Same old same old.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Count me among the STEM degress not working in a STEM field. I actually dropped out of a STEM Ph.D. program after I realized that no one around me was able to get a decent job after they graduated. No one could get an academic position because for every 2-3 year postdoc contract that opened up, there were over 400 applicants competing for it. No one could get a non-academic job because every time an HR drone saw "Ph.D." on the resume, that person would get passed over for being "overqualified". Yet when people took the Ph.D. off their resume, they had to find some way to explain a 5-6 year employment gap, and no one I knew managed to do so well enough to get past a first interview.
So I took a Masters, dropped out, and spent a few months living frugally off of what I'd been able to save from my Ph.D. stipend while studying a business field like a madman. Then I lucked into finding employment with a corporation that was impressed by my skills and willing to train me the rest of the way on the business side. Now I'm making plenty of money to support myself.
I am the only person of my incoming graduate class that didn't earn a Ph.D. I'm also nearly the only person of my graduate class that currently isn't either on food stamps, stuck living with their parents at 30+ years of age, or working one or more low-paying retail or fast food jobs just to make ends meet. The only exceptions are a few foreign students who went back to their home country immediately after graduating. (It's kinda sad to think that someone I know who worked on a Large Hadron Collider project is now making french fries for a living)
Don't go into STEM, people. Go get a business/finance/accounting degree if you want to get paid. If you really have the drive and skills and desire for a STEM degree, then double major in something like Math or Computer Science. It might make a good supplement to your primary business degree to help you stand out a little more.
Over 50% of jobs are got through networking.
So what should one do in order to start getting better at networking? I gather that a Cisco certificate won't help with this particular kind of networking.
Capitalism's not just about financial capital: it's about intellectual (you might have this) and social (many geeks don't have this, although the stereotype's changed).
Many geeks became geeks because they don't have this. I, for one, have a diagnosed disability affecting social interaction. I want to overcome it, but I don't know how what I should do as the first step.
You keep in touch with them after you graduate.
Unfortunately, I ended up failing to keep in touch with my classmates and professors in a systematic way. Do I now have to go back for a master's for a second chance at getting a set of social acquaintances? Or is there an easier way?
The following claim is honest while satisfying the keyword scanner: "10 years of HTML and CSS experience including HTML5 and CSS3".
Funny enough, when they build something here in Japan, they *can* build it on time and within budget. There's a lot wrong with the Japanese, but they do know how to plan and budget construction. It seems like we are under a mass delusion in Europe (place of origin) that it is impossible to build things on time or within budget.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
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I've known excellent software product developers who had PhDs and excellent software product developers who were still in high school.
I've known excellent software product developers (and sys admins, and data-base analysts, and system performance specialists) who had degrees in music, in classical (Greek, Latin) literature, psychology, or no degree at all.
And I've known bad programmers who had degrees in computer science.
And who hasn't run across an incompetent dentist or doctor or professor?
OTOH, "qualification" and "qualified", being arbitrary terms, one can honestly claim that someone who does not have a certificate, or degree, or who is of a race or sex or age of which you do not approve is "unqualified". But someone able to do a good job is able to do a good job, regardless of his or her "qualifications".