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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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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.
I've been programming for a long time as a hobby. I've been at my current job for 10 years now. I write webapps (mostly as a cowboy coder), do some administration work on enterprise systems and basically I'm the guy in my division they call when any project gets stuck on a technical issue.
I see interview questions for SQL and Java which I've used a lot of in the past 10 years, some of them I can solve, some I cant. I really wonder what kind of hell I'd have to go through to get another job. Half the time I think "I'd just google that if I had to do it and figure out the best methodology from there". I've really come to the conclusion that my best skill set is that I read documentation, I can find answers quickly on google, I can come up with creative solutions to business process issues, and I've been doing IT for so long that I can deduce what an issue is fairly quickly just from experience. I really don't know how you figure those things out in an interview, or how you communicate them to a potential employer. Furthermore, employers seem more interested in you knowing some nuance of a programming language, or something that just doesn't apply to day to day programming.
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.