The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013)
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
The most popular STEM degree by a large margin is psychology, many more than all engineering disciplines combined. That psychology majors can't find work implies little about the demand for engineers.
140,000 new jobs over the next 10 years, 1,700,000 current employment. Assuming the replacement cycle for an engineer is 20 years, that's about 100,000 jobs per year.
The ASEE ”Engineering by the Numbers" shows 124,000 engineering bachelor's degrees awarded in 2017.
Sure, you can slice it down to appear to be a deficit, but it'll look rediculous. "I need an opto-acoustic engineer with a pituitary gland the size of an avocado."
Median income for an RN in 2017 was $70k [2]
So, in the US it's fair to say that nurse is a moderately well paid job. Of course compared to west coast tech salaries that doesn't look so amazing, but compared to what many life sciences PhDs are earning while fighting for a tenure track job it doesn't look so bad
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26... [2] https://m.nurse.plus/how-much-nurses-make/
Programming is a paradox because it's an easy job, but with entry barriers that we don't fully understand. It seems to be prohibitively hard for most people, but easy for a few, and for those few, it doesn't seem to matter too much what their educational background is. I know people with music degrees who became programmers.
I was a math/physics major. Don't know about the talented part. ;-) Today, if you were to monitor what I spend time doing at work, it's mostly programming, followed by some electronics and optics design, and lab work. Lucrative, easy, what's not to like? Also, it was possible to get into programming without anybody's permission, because the tools are free.
It's also kind of a one way street. I've noticed that once people break away from quantitative engineering work, it's hard to go back, and they can't just start doing it on their own because the tools in those fields (e.g., mechanical and electrical CAD) are proprietary and expensive. This is like an imaginary thermodynamics experiment where you have two livestock pens separated by a one-way gate, and eventually all of the animals end up on one side if they are just walking at random.
By comparison my coworker with a Philosophy degree had gained what he described as zero useful skills. He was also making good money, but he described his degree as little more useful than a check box on the application.
These people often go back for a masters in CS, but that’s not required to work in the field.
The math and mathematical techniques for electronics, fluid mechanics, statics, and kinematics is all the same. For example, a mass/spring/damper system is the same as an inductor/capacitor/resister network.
My degree is in mechanical engineering, and I have had a nice career doing mundane compilers. A big motivator to switching to software is I could start a business with nearly zero investment.
Engineering is highly in demand. I imagine math too.
I know lots of people go pre-med and leave college in a saturated field
It's almost as if we want people to train themselves to work doing hard stuff and also don't want to pay them to do it. In other news, water is wet.
Scenario 1: People are starving. There is not enough food available, at any price, to meet the need, and there is a hard lower bound on how much is needed. We say that there's a shortage of food.
Scenario 2: There is a supply-and-demand situation for some limited good, and some who desire to use that good get priced out. This is the normal functioning of a market. Those who get priced out, though, complain about a "shortage" of that good. What they actually mean, though, is not an absolute shortage, but a shortage at the price they are willing or able to pay.
I think the STEM shortage is the second kind. Sure, your company could do all kinds of nifty things if engineers were abundant and free. That doesn't mean there's a "Scenario 1" shortage, though.
In the meantime, the engineers want jobs that pay twice as much as their current ones. There's a "shortage" of those, too.
It's clearly not a shortage in the economic sense, but it still makes sense to frame it as such, if you're buying labor.
Plenty of jobs.
There's plenty of jobs, but also plenty of applicants. Ask any one of these companies how many resumes they get, or how long it takes them to fill a position.
>"It will include subjects like history, social studies, and language arts, all of which are vital facets of a STEAM curriculum."
and now STEM has no meaning anymore (if it ever did).
These are all fine subjects, but they miss the point of the push for STEM that was based on the theory that Americans are falling behind in Math, Science, and Engineering and we need these to be competitive.
I agree that History, Art, Music, Literature, Philosophy...etc are important and can't imagine a world without them, but the whole point behind STEM was to put a focus on Math and Science because those help us keep our economic edge and solve the world's upcoming problems on the technical side.
Providing some after school programs to cover programming, computers (real computing principles and not just how to use Microsoft products and type), robotics, and additional math is good and gives our children a leg up. 1-hour of Math a day might not be enough.
What would your ideal curriculum be?
Bureaucrats make education policy.
STEM folks write the guidelines of how it should have been done, then the bureaucrats say "You know what this needs? The critical thinking skills that only liberal arts can provide!"
Then everything is just as fucked as before.
But the drawback to that system, it's easier to wipe out a small population and start to handicap that society. Thus, you do have a "type of army" of structural engineers that build and help maintain bridges. If they're gone, there are problems.
I do have one... discussion point(?) I'd like to bring up. I constantly see and hear that liberal arts and what not is supposed to teach critical thinking. How does it do so more than engineering? Engineering especially forces you not to just think of the immediate solution, but long term both in terms of wear/tear, environment factors, attack vectors and future proofing against obsolescence. Yet, I'm told, rather often by other people that a liberal arts major can do this better than an engineer. Look, I'm a sub-par engineer and programmer. I say this often and will never hide it. But I've yet to meet someone with a liberal arts or literary degree that can do analysis and solution strategies on complex, real world problems anywhere close to me. Sure, I get hung up on theoretical problems. Really badly too. But when it comes to the real world, I've never met a non-engineer who can step forward on a, again, real world problem.
I'd also argue, take a decent engineer in any field. Structural, mechanical, CS, electrical, whatever. Now tell them to teach themselves... oh, I don't know, philosophy? Maybe law. Well, I'd argue law is a more "scientific" version of philosophy because it does have "more hard rules". Me using those quotes are important to understanding what I mean. But, I think an engineer is well suited, after half a decade or a full decade of working, to teach themselves anything. Because that's part of the job. Learn, learn and learn because you're not done learning. Oh, and you need to try learning things that no one else has discovered too. Then learn more. I guess, I just have never seen an LA later learn engineering. But I see engineers learn LA.
So, how is morality, politics and philosophy closed off to engineers? You make it seem that an engineer is pure cold and calculating. That's just a terrible stereotype that, I thought died off quite a while ago. Then again, that stupid ass show The Big Bang Theory kind of brought that idea back.
Engineering teachings teach you to constantly learn. Essential, an engineer is never done learning until they die. This spills over to other topics just fine. The difference is, there's already a skillset of finding accurate and reliable sources, creating your own lesson plans (in a way) and diving into said subject.
This is not politics. I feel as though this discussion is stupid, since I think it's reasonable to say that the degree to which animals have "politics" is lesser than those animals which have tool use. You cannot forget that technology is always coupled to a certain stage of historical development, it does not happen in a vacuum. There is no such thing as production in general.
>Said hominid then lived for many more years. A sign they were taken care of.
A lot of animals take care of each other, it doesn't mean much in the way of how humans do it.
>So, how is morality, politics and philosophy closed off to engineers?
It is closed off in the same way that engineering is closed off to liberal arts majors, as the parent commenter claimed. That is to say, you must learn it, and learn how to argue about it. Of course I don't claim that you need to be a liberal arts major to be moral or even have cogent ideas about morality, but you still need to learn how to argue your point if you're talking about it, and you can only do that by learning about what's been argued before.
As a counterpoint to the above, I believe most highschool students can read the publications of many professors in the liberal arts and understand what they're saying (Ex: literary criticism) although it helps to have some background knowledge of the period in question. How many highschool students or even liberal arts professors can read and comprehend practically anything that someone in the engineering department published? My point is that it takes a lot more effort to get a working knowledge of something like physics. Although not everyone can and should be able to read a quantum mechanics textbook, I think the average adult should know about things like entropy. If you don't agree with STEM, at least change the course requirements so that the technically inclined can get more math and science courses under their belt. Your country may already do that, but it isn't super common in the US (public or private schools). My parents forced me to go to Catholic school growing up (public schools were terrible in my area) and this resulted in mandatory 1-hour of daily religion class for 13 years that I could have used for something else I would've preferred (math, science, engineering, programming, philosophy). Regardless of one's views, I question the sheer breadth of the US system over depth.
With regards to your point, the answer probably lies along the different types of reason. To put it crudely, if we were to ask whether a bomb made by a mad scientist is 'good', an engineer will first be directed to look at it in terms of destructive capacity, wear/tear, whether it can be used in the rain, and whether the production line is future-proof against enemies. The philosophy student, hopefully, will be directed to ask whether it was ethical for the mad scientist to create the bomb. The difference here turns on the meaning of the criterion (goodness), which is viewed from two different perspectives.
Plenty of "liberal arts" degree holders really do engage in analysis of complex, real world problems. For instance, the debate around, say, pornography (a very contentious topic which can and does inform legislation), distributive justice, or taxation (in the more abstract sense) is usually held by philosophers and sociologists. These are extremely important and complex problems that are informed by empirical data, not unlike in engineering. It seems as though you expect the philosopher to come forward with a ready-made solution, and indeed many do, but the field operates differently, it operates through dialogue, not only learning from past work. Next, it is worth considering whether working on the real world problems "close to you" is more important than more abstract ones. Philosophy and sociology work at a slower pace than the already slow engineering. It takes years or decades for new engineering works to make their way to pervade society (not merely to influence a few companies in tight competition with another) and it likewise takes a long time for attitudes to change.
I don't think anyone should be coerced into a field of study and I'm not sure if the "army" quote from the other poster should be taken literally. I read it as you should make sure society has enough in that basket to maximize welfare for all, but I could be interpreting them poorly.
When I hear arguments for STEM, what I and many others generally mean is that the pie-chart for things studied in school (Math, Language, Literature, History, Geography, PE, Sociology, Science, Art, Religion, Music...etc) should be tweaked a bit to where the Math, Science, and Technology subsections are bigger. If that means reducing the rest of the courses by some small percentage in order to do so, then so be it. Note that I'm not talking about eliminating anything entirely.
Regardless of chosen profession, I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be better off by being more scientifically and mathematically literate. At this point you might ask if the same couldn't be said for other subjects like music and I would disagree. Although all learning and knowledge should generally be considered a blessing, scientific reasoning is a force multiplier. Think of all the ignorance regarding vaccines, climate science...etc.
I think this might have been the early definition of STEM or I'm just an idiot. But I thought it was Sci, Tech, Engineering and Medical. Math just seems redundant to me in that. Because those 4 career fields are for the most part, all well paying and technical. So... yea, I guess... But also, I'm not for the end of art class or anything like that. I actually think music and art need to have a better focus of doing rather than just the history to students. Good for the soul, if you will. Something I've been working on myself recently.
Well, you know the saying that anything technologically advanced enough to someone just seems like it's magic? To me, that's exactly why people need to at least dip their feet into all STEM.
And I think you said it best. Things like philosophy, the humanities and so forth, are a force multiplier. However, no matter how large the number is multiplied against 0, you still get 0. I think STEM is your base score and the rest are force multipliers. My opinion.
But the reality of the situation is that economic "troops" are required to maintain our current standard of living. It seems to me even more grotesque to ignore the immediate needs of society because it feels wrong from some ivory tower philosophical perspective.
As a result, we now have "maker spaces" with people making collages and doing embroidery, but no metalworking tools.
Looking at salaries there is an over abundance of history and social studies graduates. It’s simply a supply vs demand imbalance, and one that has real consequences.
Many STEM fields are also over saturated, and some arts fields can make a good career path. But, nuances are not really the point of this discussion.
This happens because shareholder value is the only thing corporations are optimized for.
Why do you believe that?
Ask around, you'll find quite a few people like me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
So we end up with employers who don't want to pay top dollar in case they get a lemon, and competent developers who are either happy where they are or unwilling to work for lemon rates.
And have you interviewed candidates for development positions recently? It is depressing, and I say that as someone who catches flak about being too generous and letting too many "poor-quality" candidates through screens.
“We advertised this job for well below the going rate and didn’t get any applications, better outsource it!”
Entrepreneurship, business, personal finances and multiple servings of critical reasoning. And more...
Kids, after thirteen years of schooling, are handed to society with virtually no marketable skills whatsoever. Zero. The only two paths they have are:
-College
-Stacking boxes at Office Depot (or making coffee, etc)
Knowing how to code, I hate to say, is the last thing most people need in life. It is, without a doubt, a useless skill for the vast majority of HS graduates. What we should be teaching, we do not.
They need to learn all of the above as well as walk out of school with one or more marketable skills.
Love STEM. I even mentor a local HS robotics team. We need to do more. Education is broken.
Companies notice that they're getting less applicants with higher salary expectations.
When those companies are surveyed by the government, they cry wolf: "There's a shortage of workers!" they exclaim, when really it's just a "shortage" in the number of applicants with the same salary expectations as before - a trend that has to be nipped in the bud.
The goal then is to have policy bring labor supply back in favor of the companies, by dumping money into education and liberalizing immigration. Essentially, it's another bit of corporate welfare that can be marketed as philantropy.
The joke's on them though, because unlike most other professions, software developers have the ability to create more work than there would have been, had they never been hired in the first place.
Same thing happened when the telephone got popular and the demand for switchboard operators exploded. "At this rate, everyone's going to have to be a switchboard operator." Then they added dialers to phones. We just need better spreadsheets.
If such people exist, it won't be long before someone realizes they can hire these people cheaply because they are less in demand. Undercutting your labor costs gives a massive competitive advantage bringing products to market. There are thousands of startups every year started by a very wide variety of people from widely different backgrounds.
Ageism is a particularly good canary in the coalmine. If someone has decades of relevant experience and you can't find anyone, why wouldn't you hire them and if they've worked for your company for years and know all the subsystems well, why would you ever think of firing them and hiring someone else?
This frivolous misuse of human capital shows that overall, there must certainly be a surplus of talent rather than a deficit.
A great counterpoint to prove this is/was the web boom. Web talent used to be priced at $50-60K because such people were everywhere. Once Javascript became fast and highly-interactive websites and web apps became hugely in demand, a localized deficit started.
The reason for the localized deficit is obvious, but worth reiterating. The development tools and language were considered frustrating to learn and use by other programmers. There was a "not a real dev" stigma. IE and other cross-platform issues were hard to deal with. Powered by the new, fast JS engines, a glut of new APIs surfaced which led to another glut of CSS features -- all taking almost super-human effort to keep up with. Complicating this, most frontend developers up to that point didn't have strong programming skills, so you had either experienced programmers or knowledgeable frontend developers with a very small overlap.
The result has been to hire everyone. In 2010-2015 especially, if you had 50 people apply, probably only one person qualified (and if you found two, it was worth considering hiring them both). With real choices being that limited, companies simply cannot afford to waste time to market trying to find a candidate that "is the right fit" or whatever the BS "ism" label is in that area. Even people with no programming experience outside of a couple months of "boot camp" have a chance at getting hired.
As time has gone by, that drought has become at least mostly slaked. Companies can be a little pickier about whom they hire and wages have mostly stabilized at a bit over average programmer rates (which seems to account for the extra troubles of frontend development over most other types of programming).
I'm betting that once the current tech bubble bursts and wages plummet, we'll still keep hearing about the shortage of programmers who will work for $40K per year.
And if not, what's missing - useful ideas ? capital ? management ? Something else ?
Can you get more of them?
Yes if many smart people currently avoid STEM because it is low status, hard, and not really paid well compared to things really smart people can achieve.
No if people who have the ability to do the hard work are inevitably drawn into it anyway.
Until every job is automated?
https://medium.com/launch-school/why-do-programming-bootcamp... (By someone selling a bootcamp, of course.)
"“Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry,” said Maggie Johnson, Google’s director of education and university relations, in a statement. “We generally don’t hire from coding schools,” said Robyn Blum, a spokeswoman for Cisco. “Coding schools haven’t been much of a focus for Autodesk,” said Raymond Deplazes, a spokesman."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-jo...
Bootcampers tend to have roughly the same level of programming skill as someone fresh out of a CS degree course who has brushed up on the tech we use. Additionally, many have backgrounds in other fields (everything from working in a small business to line cook to psychology to sales).
If your company isn't prepared for the mentoring and training needed to deal with junior developers, hiring someone fresh out of a boot camp is a bad idea, especially for someone like Google or Cisco that does a ton of programming at much lower levels than web development and doesn't treat it as a primary focus (where more resources are likely to be spent in mentoring).
Take a moment to read through the article. First it tries to show that STEM graduates are such a small proportion of the total labor force, only 3-4%, the implication being that such a small proportion shouldn’t deserve the attention the get. OK, fine you’re arguing that it’s hype.
Next, cherry pick data to show that not all STEM graduates from this tiny sector can all find jobs. Yes, this is not a factory, you can’t just train someone and expect them to be productive in STEM. It’s not the same as pushing buttons or lifting things, it requires much more from the person which is why you can’t mass manufacture STEM graduates. Just because not all STEM graduates can find jobs means that it’s a hype? Okay.
Next, sprinkle some grievances about STEM being used to justify increasing the number of H1Bs, and now you’ve got the racists, the “H1B workers are why I don’t have a great job” crowd. Nice.
Oh, don’t forget the quotations of authority figures sounding alarm about the lack of engineers. The same alarm, that helped US education systems include more technical training to keep up with schools everywhere else who were in the same race. This is not some secret, all countries know the importance of high skilled labor force.
The wealth and prosperity we see in most nations today is precisely due to the work of millions of STEM graduates, creating innovations and technologies that constantly drive down costs of manufacturing and transportation, increased labor productivity, gave us fucking smartphones and internet everywhere devices and are currently bringing down the costs of renewables so rapidly that even Texas is going all in on wind energy.
I’m very upset that this appears in ieee though. I imagined that to be a respectable academic institution and not one that would allow such a poorly researched and hyperbolic article to be published.