Whoops! This is a huge piece missing from the conversation. I'm in EdTech and I had no idea. Can we get a source?
Note that some of the assumptions are a bit comical, like an economics major who works in finance or a biology major who becomes a physician are considered STEM majors who work in non-STEM fields.
Still, the overall picture isn't great even if you look past those weird classifications.
How many mathematicians and physicists are going into finance to produce marginal improvements in liquidity, instead of contributing to the advancement of human knowledge?
How many brilliant software engineers are working on mindless CRUD and API-piping tasks at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al.?
How many great doctors go into high-paying, no-research, largely menial positions instead of working on medical breakthroughs?
Capitalism probably does a better job at allocating talent than any other economic system we know of, but the results are still depressing.
Weird things always happen when you try to classify occupations, but I suspect a there are a lot of high school teachers who needed their STEM degree for their jobs.
It is certainly true in Australia:
https://grattan.edu.au/the-number-of-science-graduates-are-g...
Australia includes Psychology in science. Which is fair enough really.
Note also, about 1/4 of University Graduates say they didn't need their degree or are not really using it for their job:
The fact is that Universities world wide try hard to get as many people enrolled as possible and are often supported by governments in this but we already over educate the population.
Getting people to get good skills to get good jobs is much harder than raising the number of people who get not great degrees in subjects where is no employment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/20/only-...
(Heaps of other sources, search for one quarter of graduates don't need their jobs or whatever)