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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.
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.
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That's the problem with grouping science and engineering together. A shortage of engineering jobs means the market is saturated. A shortage of science jobs means that Congress and the President cut the science budget again. The two are not nessisarily related.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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~
Math is a set of problem solving tools, and like any tool, can be invaluable when properly applied. Like gaining insight into a logistical dilemma in a company's finances.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
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.
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...
The original quote included the word "productive".
Don't do it. You'll earn more having others do math for you.
On the other hand, if you don't understand at least some math you may find other people making a great deal of money by doing math against you, e.g. casinos & the lottery.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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.
So is an understanding of English, various foreign languages, history, psychology, geography, etc. What's your point? Most of the math you mention can be taught at an advanced high school level, or maybe a college freshman or sophomore level. There's no need to get a math degree for it (a math degree being the obvious inference since you only mention math subjects). Even sillier would be getting a bachelor's degree (or higher) in a hard science or engineering just to learn the math you mention. If you get a BSEE or MSEE, but don't work in EE (or some related field) then a knowledge of the practical applications of electromagnetics, semiconductor physics, etc. is no more useful than a knowledge of art history or English literature.
If the math you mention is so useful, why not major in one of the other subjects I mentioned, and get a minor in math? Or perhaps an associate's degree, which would easily cover the subjects you mention.
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...
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The point is to create an oversupply, and there is a two-pronged method to acheiving this: First, to create more STEM workers locally through the "STEM crisis" myth, and second, to import more foreign labor. This also gives cheaper local labor if the government ever makes it harder to use foreign labor.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
That's actually the sentiment amongst many young students. Why work hard at a STEM major when a business or law degree is likely to result in higher pay and higher social standing?
Scratch law degree. Unless you are able to grind, network, and kiss ass much harder than you would in almost any STEM masters degree program (as well as harder than 95% of your fellow tier I or tier II law school students) you won't be getting one of those fabled six figure associate positions. What? you didn't attend a top tier or top regional tier law school or you didn't rank near the top of your class ? 50% chance you won't get a job in the legal profession at all, at least not for a year or more after graduation. Law schools are now being regularly sued by their graduates for lying about employment prospects
If you're strictly looking for high pay/high social standing: finance/math
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.
-Pharma management was taken over by Wall Street, and an obsession with quarterly reports does not work in a high risk field where it takes 9 years of exponentially increasing costs to determine if a product can be brought to market. They chase the newest shiny thing (management fad, drug target, whatever) since they can glue their name to that accomplishment THIS YEAR, and honestly that is what will get them their annual bonus/promotion.
-For a bunch of reasons (low hanging fruit are gone, increased safety and efficacy regs at the FDA, increasing cost of clinical trials) it is much much more expensive to invent and bring a drug to market than it was 15 years ago. About $4B on average in R&D spending.
For those of you more involved in IT than in Pharma: Pharma laid off more scientists during the 'aughts than were employed in Pharma at anyone time. Unlike IT, the jobs are not coming back. Think big steel in the '70s.
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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?"
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It's true you need to know English, history, etc.
But the only prerequisite for those subjects is reading. And whatever you get up to, you are not going to lose the ability to read text, because text is all around us. Even if you don't go to college, you'll be reading newspapers and magazines. Don't know anything about Wittgenstein? You can pick up a book and start reading. At any age. And the other thing about the humanities subjects is they are all related. There's a common context that will allow you place at least the holes in your knowledge. For instance, everything that appears in the news has a historical backstory. This whole thing in Syria for instance has a backstory which ties in with loads of other subjects that you'll have heard of in your readings.
Math based stuff is easy to forget the prereqs for. If you forgot the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, it's unlikely you'll be reminded of it in your everyday life. Come across a quantum physics course, and you'll need to brush up again. A lot of mathematical stuff gets its power from being quite specific. Sure, there's also a context, but often it's not enough to know that there's some equation out there describing your phenomenon. The conclusions we can draw from equations are also not very obvious. For instance, you have Newton's laws along with some elementary calculus of circular motion. How does that lead one to conclude that the mass of the Earth, Mars, and the outer planets can be estimated, but not Venus and Mercury until recently?
So, generally I think you benefit more from the regularity and discipline of a university when doing math type courses than "reading" type courses.
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
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"?
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.