The STEM Crisis Is a Myth 284
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.'"
Re:degree != qualification (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not all one field (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A few flaws here.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
It's really simple (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:There's both a glut AND a shortage (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:degree != qualification (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone has something the US wants to buy ( like oil ) then they'll just be bombed till they do. Soon enough the powers that be will realize this ( they already have ) and just take the dollars and accept living like the kings they are *within the system*. If you have power, do you ally with the winning side, or do you attempt to find a coalition of those being shat upon? If you have power, you personally aren't being shat upon, because you rationally sell out. It's those with no power who are being shat upon - the poor. So who exactly is there to oppose power?
Macheavellii would say that it's always better to ally with the weaker side because it increases your leverage and prevents you from becoming someone's bitch, but do you really CARE if you are someone's bitch? I mean who wouldn't rather be a billionaire than a king? You get all the perks without the stress/risk/culpability
And the fact is, most humans are redundant. The world is going through a sea change as big as the one that caused an end to serfdom and brought forth the enlightenment and the rights of man. Instead of people being valuable b/c of megadeath caused by the black plague, and new untapped worlds opening up around the world begging for humans to take advantage the world is filling up. Stuff is more valuable than people. Now that humans are not valuable, they will be treated worse than before. I wouldn't be surprise to see a rolling back of the gains made since the middle ages. Only megadeath would seem to have a chance of making humans more valuable relative to things.
UC Davis' Gregory Clark has some iteresting insights about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvZlXaGEzwg&list=PLmq9H75aU8iNWq2oXfH2y82yH1HzaITpa [youtube.com]
Also, technology during the industrial revolution pushed human labor into pursuits that could not be mechanized. With thought itself more and more mechanizable, what is left for humans? http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-articles-about-robots-2012-12 [businessinsider.com] ?
Paris Hilton is very productive. ( in the economic sense where work done with a backhoe is more productive than work done with a hand shovel ) Her labors are mixed with a very high level of capital. And what do those labors consist of? Merely not losing her money. Does she need to be superior in any way to perform her duties? is there any meritocracy going on? Well...
She can and likely does hire a finanacial planner. Brains are a dime a dozen.
She buys $40,000.00 purses. So at first glance it would seem she does a poor job at not losing her money. But she can afford $40,000.00 purses. That doesn't realy represent substantial consumption. Giving away half her money to someone who's never had money would involve *massive* consumption. If she gave me half her wealth, I would probably give half of it away to people I know who would also spread the wealth themselves etc. This would cause *millions* of dollars in consumption. A $40,000.00 purse is nothing.
So it seems Paris Hilton is far better qualified than I to be wealthy.
But isn't it weird that she doesn't have to do anything but not consume?
All she needs to do to not give away her wealth is insulate herself from need and the temptation to give it all away. That is, she need only stay amongst the her own kind and not mingle with the peasants.
Societies that support this tendency win out militarily because those societies with the most capital will be able to field the most fearsome militariy might including robotic military might. There is no reason to suppose that without valuable labor to parlay into means to consume, tha
Re:And thus the obvious is explained in detail... (Score:4, Interesting)
Horseshit. Capitalism is a tool, not a religion. Socialism too. Idiots make religions of economic systems, which is sort of like worshiping your computer (No offense to long time Mac users). Both systems have strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who works in IT and has had their rational decisions overridden by ignorant high-level managers knows that capitalism fails at certain scales. Central planning works no better when done by someone who sits on the board of GE and viacom than it did when it was done by someone at the Politboro.
Heterogeneous small scale capitalism, where corporate size was controlled through taxation worked well in the 50s, 60s and 70s before the congress was sufficiently purchased in order to change the laws (Anti-trust, glass-steagal) that prevented our currentl slide into the logical end of unfettered capitalism (e.g. Mexico, Kazakhstan, Russia).
Uh, that's sorta the point of the 'crisis' (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org]).
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...
Re:And thus the obvious is explained in detail... (Score:5, Interesting)
You can have two principled choices: You can say that (1) borders should be open, and any worker can apply for any job that he wants (2) a country has to defend its own borders, and we can't open it up to unfettered competition from overseas workers, products, pharmaceuticals, etc.
I tend to prefer open borders.
An Irish radiologist wrote about how the EU has anti-discrimination laws, and a French hospital couldn't discriminate against him in hiring him -- even though his French wasn't quite that good. He said that an x-ray has a lot of ambiguity, and when a radiologist gives a report, the report has to reflect that ambiguity. His French wasn't quite good enough to do that. He would give a report, he wouldn't have time to explain it properly, and then the meeting would be over. It took him 6 months for his French to improve enough to give a good radiology report. The hospital couldn't even discriminate against him because his French needed improvement.
If we want to bring in foreign workers, we should bring them in on a free-market, open-borders non-discriminatory basis. And I should be able to go to those same countries and work under the same terms.
But right now I'm tethered to the U.S., other workers can come in and compete with me, and I can't go to their countries to get the opportunities of their employment. (And free universities; I'd like to get that.)
Under the present system of bad compromises, I'd rather have fewer H1-Bs. If the corporations need STEM workers, let them pay taxes to improve the school system (from kindergarden to grad school) and grow their own STEM workers. Let them give good salaries, education benefits and in-house training, and job security.
Same story for several decades (Score:5, Interesting)
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?"