IEEE Spectrum: 'The STEM Crisis Is a Myth'

[Newsjock]

Source: IEEE Spectrum

You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can’t find enough workers in those fields, and the country’s competitive edge is threatened.

... And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.

... The takeaway? At least in the United States, you don’t need a STEM degree to get a STEM job, and if you do get a degree, you won’t necessarily work in that field after you graduate. If there is in fact a STEM worker shortage, wouldn’t you expect more people with STEM degrees to be filling those jobs? And if many STEM jobs can be filled by people who don’t have STEM degrees, then why the big push to get more students to pursue STEM?

... Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. 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. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.

Read more: http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth

[FreakinDJ]

1. OMG - they actually admitted "Importing workers is all about suppressing wages"

[Igel]

17. There is no "they."

There are a bunch of theys, most of which are actually hes or shes.

I've known a lot of STEM graduates--that great mass that he says could step in and take up the slack if there were any.

1. Many graduated with bachelors in science. Not much to do with that--to really use that science you need an MS or PhD, otherwise you're a high-skilled technician. I'm working with a microbiologist who after a few years of that decided to teach 9th grade biology. My mentor teacher worked for the military in their biological weapons dept. as a civilian. With a PhD, he's teaching community college--in his retirement. A Rice University nuclear physicist, finishing her PhD, decided that she could be a great researcher or a great teacher and in academia you had to be both so she'd wind up neither. So now she's a great teacher, working with kids at a KIPP Academy.

Other STEM grads got MBAs. Some went into sales. Some went to law school.

2. I've known grads with PhDs in high demand fields who, after looking over the pay scales and job duties and stress levels decided to bail. One went off to work as an FBI agent. Not in forensics. An astronomer decided that he wanted to be a graphic designer. Another got married and wanted to stay at home with her kids--and 20 years later found her PhD in to be outdated.

3. Many graduated with bachelors in engineering. They got engineering jobs. And moved over into management. That's my best friend from high school. EE from Drexel, he eventually set up his own consultancy and now has a team of engineers that he wrangles. He's management.

I worked with a lot of non-STEM STEM people. We translated over 10,000 pages of technical Russian into technical English. We had to understand the machining, physics and materials science behind the Russian documents and how to present it for American engineers. But we weren't officially STEM.

Of course, this also discounts all the grads from lesser-tier schools with STEM degrees that aren't really worth much. An ex-colleague's husband said they hired a new engineer and he knew nothing. They hired him cheap from tier 2 or tier 3 school because that's all the small company could afford. They were scraping together a better compensation package so they could have a more attractive job posting for the day they fired the dolt. Not everybody who graduates with a STEM degree should get a STEM job. Think of it as intellectual darwinism--we don't want to "weed out" students in public universities, so a lot of incompetents get degreed. We don't want the incompetent operating on us or building our bridges. So we "mercifully" let them graduate and then deny them jobs.

It also ignores the semantics of grammar. I went to work for a non-profit in 1981 because there was a recesssion. Note that in the early '80s there was a huge surplus of STEM-qualified workers. Of course, when the recession ended there was again a shortage of them. So it's not only specious to say that we don't need as many because there a lot of STEM grads not working in STEM; it's also specious to say that we don't need to train any more because right this moment there is a surplus. It's like what happened with teachers in the '90s: There was a surplus, schools were despondent over their grads getting jobs, schools were debating disposing of education certification programs. Then demand increased (smaller class size) so they scraped the bottom of the barrel for them and hired a lot of unqualified teachers.

I'm a firm believer in requiring STEM classes in high school. Not just biology and another class. Last year a physics student took physics when he was forced to like it. He hated being in class. By the middle of the year he realized he liked it. He's off studying engineering now. If he hadn't taken physics he wouldn't have found something he liked. It's the same in reverse with my nephew's friend--he went to school for chemistry, because he thought he liked it. He took a film elective and love it: he'll graduate this year from film school. (Will he get a job? Dunno. There are a lot of unemployed film makers or film makers who have pursued other fields so maybe we really should close a lot of film schools and reduce the # of film school grads.)

[PasadenaTrudy]

2. I never bought into

this crisis story. Bollocks.

[antigop]

3. K&R. nt

[n2doc]

4. What we really need are more doctors

And degrees that don't cost a king's ransom to obtain. No one ever seems to bring this shortage up. If more people could be trained and end up as good GP's who could live on 50-100K a year (impossible now with huge med school loans to pay) we could make a dent in medical care costs and provide more access to care.

[reformist2]

5. The med schools deliberately keep their programs small - they act like a cartel.

[n2doc]

6. Yep.

I was taling to a friend the other day, one of his son's friends eventually became an MD. He had a 3.5 GPA as an undergrad, was told 'it wasn't enough" so we got a masters, straight A's, still "wasn't enough", so he went overseas to get his degree. He is now a successful practitioner here in the US.

Gotta heep the competition down. Meanwhile my Doc friends complain about ho hard it is to keep good docs here in Savannah, they go elsewhere for more pay.

[reformist2]

7. Here is a nice chart showing the almost non-existent growth in medical schools

The number of "matriculants" - actual new students enrolled in med school each year - has gone up over the past 11 years from 16,000 to 19,000. But that translates to only an increase of about 1.3% per year, hardly enough to keep up with the growing demand, never mind dealing with the shortage.

[cascadiance]

9. Though at least doctors are harder to outsource than other tech workers...

Though I've heard of a lot of problems for radiologists who've had their jobs shipped overseas since it is easier to have CT Scan and other imaging data sent overseas to be analyzed.

And in nursing homes, there's a big effort to bring in foreign workers in to work for lower wages. Don't know the details of that, but hoping they aren't being brought in under "indentured servant" guest worker programs like H-1B that don't allow them to compete for other jobs here and keep wages from falling too much.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

14. Degrees good, STEM good, inflated university fees are outrageous.

A university education is about much more than a specific skill or knowledge set, if it is any good. In that sense, a university degree is good.

However, ..., for many people, especially in science and technology, a degree is not strictly necessary.

Double however, ..., regardless of how difficult it is still to obtain work even with a science or tech degree, ..., many people are simply not capable of teaching themselves or disciplined enough to acquire a full complement of skills in a specialty (not just "can program in a language or two&quot . So degree programs are still a good way for many people to go.

Many university fees are ridiculous and the more outrageous universities need to be boycotted by just about everybody except scholarship students and the 1%.

The bottom line: If you want to be a great success in life, it is not necessary to go into soul-crushing debt to get an undergraduate degree at a top-ten university. For certain disciplines, like academic research, doing graduate degrees at a top-one-hundred (of the world) is still a good bet.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

15. More than doctors, we need more nurses, nutritionists, home health-care, physios, etc. nt.

[caraher]

8. I wonder whether this is also intended to shape education

For instance, here in Indiana one of our state's flagship public universities now has Mitch Daniels as president, and he has (in)famously been busted trying to keep people from reading Howard Zinn. Almost all the pious rhetoric about the importance of "education" spewing from the lips of his education wrecking crew lionizes STEM education as the pinnacle, with nary a word about arts, humanities and social science. Could it be that keeping students' noses to the grindstone of problem sets and "practical" skills prevents them from taking the time to become informed citizens, question the status quo, and imagine better futures?

[NuclearDem]

16. Well, at least he took over Purdue and not the IU system

No offense to Purdue, but the IU system has the better humanities and social sciences of the two. PU still has the better STEM schools though.

[cascadiance]

10. It would be good to see ACM follow IEEE's lead here in publishing this article...

It's good that IEEE is publishing articles on this. I for a long time have felt that there should be efforts within ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) to have a SIG and be more active in providing protection for STEM workers wages, rights, etc. Maybe IEEE making a move this direction will help push that to happen to help those of us more in the software ranks...

Arguably, engineers have done as much or more to help provide companies the seeds of automation that have allowed them to lower the labor costs. It seems like THEY (and collectively all of the workers that work at higher productivity levels as a result o this) are the ones that should get more of the profits from the cutting of these costs than those financiers at the top of companies who arguably are greater cost to companies now that should be cut than those costs of average workers that do most of the work in far more productive capacities to generate their bigger profits. Just more wealth redistribution towards the top as they steal our wages.

[secondvariety]

11. Just what I figured.

[MNBrewer]

12. This variously un/underemployed PhD biologist agrees.

I know, I know... the world is flat

[on point]

13. Answer is simple. Put a heavy tax on each H1b worker say 100K and use it to fudn training Americans

Now that it would be more expensive to hire H1B workers than USA workers, I'll bet the shortage disappears overnight.

And if there is a real shortage, since we put the money to training (and re-training older workers in new skills as if needed), the shortage would disappear in a few years fixing itself.

The whole shortage of STEM workers is a corporate fraud to get cheap labor.