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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

If more kids get into STEM, then eventually STEM salaries will regress to the norm. It's a non solution.

Systematically, the average American will and must confront quite the bleak future.

thinking about, building, and running a business is pretty much the only real future. This may look like becoming an expert and contracting oneself out, or it may look like finding a niche and exploiting it for all the market value it's worth.

Working for someone else has been the "easy" route (mentally) for a long time, and easy things never pay well.

I agree this is viable for some people. But it's structurally impossible for a sizeable portion of the population to do it. Our economy needs employees to run. It's not a question of easy/hard.

> thinking about, building, and running a business is pretty much the only real future

Much like the GP comment, if more people start their own businesses then expected returns from running your own business will regress to the norm.

I'm fine with the norm. The norm is better than losing all hopes or a bleak future. The norm is a job that pays ordinary salary but gives me hope that I sharpen my skills and get rewarded accordingly (no guarantee, of course, but there's hope).

I'm grateful that STEM pays so well nowadays, but I don't mind if my pay goes back to norm in exchange for many people having a better future. I don't see the current K12 system will help, though.

The norm is falling through time. Right now, the norm is fine, but in a few decades, the norm will be to barely be able to afford rent.

The way things are going, the norm is trending towards pretty bleak, yeah.

I guess STEM here really means the fields that pay decently and require hard skills. I hope we will always have such fields, be they STEM or not.

Of course. But they will pay decently so long as relatively few people go into them.

Increase in STEM degrees does not have a causal effect on number of good jobs. Any hope that it does is about as speculative as "investing" in bitcoin or the next Gamestop pattern.

So much this.

I live in Austria now and the market is flooded with STEM grads due to very good schools and free education to the point where, in my college town, I can't throw a rock out the window without hitting someone doing a PhD in ML, but that doesn't translate to an abundance of jobs due to the lack of VC funding in this area.

This leads to massive academic title inflation where, unless you already have job experience, most companies can afford to throw your resume in the bin if you don't have a MSc and stil have enough candidates to fulfill their demand, so your only choice if to pursue at least a MSc if you want to be employed.

Friends in Denmark have told me the same, you can easily find an Architect but good luck finding a plumber.

The truly sad part is it leads to broad financialization of Science. People up here making education into a personal problem (haves/havenots) are apparently "too smart" to see the social costs of heavy public investment in STEM education

Surely there must be some value in a more educated and capable population in and of itself?

Salaries are not determined by the value employees create on the downside. They are determined on the minimum by the minimum your employer can get away with paying you, which is a function of scarcity.

On the maximum, they are determined by value, in that your employer will never pay you more than the value you create (otherwise, why hire you?)

It's not far off for graduate jobs already.

Unionization will fix this. A glut of STEM candidates will not.

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