Is There a STEM Crisis?
Interesting research with disturbing implications
A recent piece of journalism with a lot of research on STEM jobs can be found here. I find some of it interesting, but many items casually mentioned are disturbing. The basic premise of the article is that while corporations are lamenting about the lack of STEM graduates, the data does not seem to support their case. In fact, there should be a surplus of STEM employees waiting to fill the jobs (obviously anyone in hiring for engineers knows this is not true). Additionally, it is actually normal to hear governments around the world worrying about not having enough STEM workers. Here is a quote from the article.
Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.” In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57 000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India.
You’ll hear similar arguments made elsewhere. In India, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Vijay Kumar Saraswat, recently noted that in his country, “a meagre four persons out of every 1000 are choosing S&T or research, as compared to 110 in Japan, 76 in Germany and Israel, 55 in USA, 46 in Korea and 8 in China.” Leaders in South Africa and Brazil cite similar statistics to show how they are likewise falling behind in the STEM race.
I also legitimately love the final sentence of the article. I completely agree with it.
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.
The article even goes on to acknowledge something most technology workers already know and fear. Amen! Let’s stop this from happening!
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.
However, the article then shifts into idiocy by casually discussing the fact that it might be good that college kids cannot find a job in their major. Think about that for a second. You are asking an 18 year old kid to take 4 years of their life pushing themselves harder than many of their classmates and taking out huge loans. Their reward: low wages and maybe no job. While maybe you could argue this is good for the economy, this is NOT good for the individual. While their may be short term benefits, the long term implication is it would keep people out of the STEM altogether. The author though seems to think it is okay that people cannot find a traditional job.
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.”
It gets even more scary is when you consider this paragraph as well.
The nature of STEM work has also changed dramatically in the past several decades. In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past, employers seldom offer generous education and training benefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete.
I don’t think this is really true for the STEM economy at large (yet), but the author seems again to think this is okay. In short this article acknowledges 3 disturbing trends within engineering professions:
- Engineering salaries are low, and kept low by bringing in foreign workers.
- This is okay because it is good for employers (forget the individuals it hurts).
- The nature of STEM work is becoming less stable with poor benefits.
The problem I see with this is that items 1, 2, and 3 create a destructive cycle. In my one post, I argue that low wages keep our best and brightest out of engineering. However, in my more positive post on engineering, I argue that job stability is one major benefit for engineers. Without both, the profession completely loses its luster.
I am somewhat surprised by how the article brazenly lays out these facts, and yet goes on to argue how they may be good. To me, this will further escalate the ongoing cycle of losing our best and brightest out of STEM.
People have to acknowledge the simple fact that the world is different today than it was 30 or 40 years ago when our parents were choosing a profession. There are many more easily accessible information sources available for college kids to make informed decisions on what to major in. Articles like this that argue that there is no shortage in engineering, salaries are kept low, and jobs are not stable will create even bigger problems, particularly for overachieving kids Googling what they should major in. Again, per my past post, the problem is not a lack of people with technology degrees, but the lack of our best and brightest with technology degrees.
While this article tries to make the case that there is not a large cause for concern with STEM, I think that the article does not see the forest through the trees. Yes, if you take a step back and look at the numbers, things within STEM look good. However, if you think about the long term implications indicated in this article, our overachievers will not chose a career in STEM. Other professions simply offer better work environments with better salaries. What I really want to imply from this article is:
- I agree with the article’s conclusion that the government should just focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying, rather than just getting more graduates.
- However, the article argues the exact opposite is happening now and that is still okay.
- The trends of low salaries and low employment security may have serious long term effects on the quality of individuals that go into STEM.
The United States needs to have some of its best and brightest go into STEM. We need to make those jobs more attractive.
At least IEEE Spectrum magazine has provided some good counterpoints to the article:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/is-a-career-in-stem-really-for-me
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/the-changing-pattern-of-stem-worker-employment
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/an-engineering-career-only-a-young-persons-game
