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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.'"
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.
'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.
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
An understanding of some of the basic principles of "advanced" areas such as derivatives and integrals, probability and statistics, symbolic logic, set theory, etc., can prove invaluable in all manner of endeavours.
You don't need to be able to perform the calculations with the proficiency of a professional mathematician to realise the benefits.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Pay your employees what they are worth and they won't get cherry picked by the competition. Or become a loyal employer and you can have loyal employees who won't leave at the drop of a hat.
The latter is a big one. Corporate employers have been extremely disloyal for a long time now and the employees have caught on. They have only themselves to blame.