Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs
tampabay.com
tampabay.com
Very misleading and a misunderstanding of what's actually going on.
Example: "The Census Bureau reported in 2021 that a paltry 28% of STEM grads are working in these supposedly in-demand, highly paid and important STEM jobs."
It's not 28% of all STEM grads, it's 28% of physical science STEM grads.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...
I'm going to do a better job than some shmuck journo.
"37% reported a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a STEM occupation" & "About half of workers who majored in engineering (52%) or computer, mathematics, and statistics majors (51%) worked in STEM."
This makes a lot of sense, about half of all STEM grads are going into STEM jobs. It's in tandem with the famous 50% of lawyers are not practicing law.
I'm certain that if you started doing breakdowns of demographics you would result in it making even more sense and easily explainable.
My last job was BA/QA work at an engineering software company, and it was by far the most "engineering" I'd done at any job. Even there, though, it was only about 1/3 of my responsibilities. I got good enough at the software stuff that I qualified for a 25% pay bump by moving industries. Year for year, my software experience pays more than my engineering experience.
> Extremely poor journalism... some shmuck journo...
How can you determine that a something something service analyst at a random non "tech" company in Illinois is or isn't a programmer? If you don't identify an extremely technical position as a STEM job when it's not named in a particular way, then what are you counting?
Suppose someone does have an IT-related title, but they majored in biology and are working for a paper company in Pennsylvania in the HR department as a programmer. Should they be counted as using their degree? Are they?
What if you are counting employees of a large government organization and for obscure reasons, they call everybody who touches a computer an "IT Specialist"? Then you might be vastly overcounting.
People who have exactly the same title and work in the same small department, even, can differ wildly in their actual roles, too.
As such, we are being told (mislead) by an HN commenter that the Census Bureau is incapable of summarising their own data.
From census.gov:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...
"Among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37% reported a bachelor's degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a STEM occupation, according to the Census Bureau's 2019 American Community Survey 1-year estimates.
This translates into less than a third (28%) of STEM-educated workers actually working in a STEM job.
The vast majority (62%) of college-educated workers who majored in a STEM field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling."
The graduates who did not major in science were more likely to end up in a STEM job. (The term "science" as used here, by me, excludes "computer science".)
"About half of workers who majored in engineering (52%) or computer, mathematics, and statistics majors (51%) worked in STEM."
Why don't more "S" grads work in "TEM" jobs.
Perhaps there are actually less "TEM" jobs than some folks believe.
I’ve long suspected that the whole “STEM” education movement is a way for big tech to attach prestige-by-association to computer nerdery that’s mostly employed to sell ads better, then use that to improve their hiring pipeline.
STEM promise: progress! Science! Engineering marvels! A new age of exploration and advancement on all fronts!
STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result 0.5% more often.
[EDIT] Since I seem not to have communicated it well, judging from the responses, I mean those two examples at the end as 1) What the "more STEM education!" movement was selling, by choosing to frame it that way, if not explicitly, (though, often, explicitly) and 2) What I suspect was the kind of work that the folks funding & lobbying for that movement actually had in mind.
I don't mean that everyone working in tech is working on ads, as some have taken it—rather, easier hiring for that kind of work was the point of the STEM push, to the organizations largely driving it. (I strongly suspect, to be extra-clear). I think it was sold as 1 because selling 2 would have been a whole lot harder, and more-closely associating programming with those other things isn't bad PR for the industry as a whole, besides ("STEM" as a buzzword has been incredibly successful in education—a whole generation now lumps all those things together, and they're working on a second, so, mission accomplished)
Source? (Not challenging you. Curious to see how wide the range is across majors.)
(Engineering is 49% (51%) while social sciences is 7% (11%).)
[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-23... Table 10
Then they convert to IT anyway. I wonder whether our acceptance for this system isn’t just that we blame the student for having chosen wrong, relieving us from feeling that we’re responsible for their debt and horrific life conditions.
The intersections of different disciplines are where a lot of innovation happens.
And there's no way the state will employ me to model and plan their dikes with my Cs degree.
It is very possible, with the post-covid changes, that platforms become paid-for and that there is much less of a focus on dark patterns in the future.
Other areas can be similar.
That couldn't be more false. The vast majority of STEM jobs do not pushing ads to people., only FAANGS and such which are a minority of the total STEM jobs.
The quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" is a fairly robust heuristic for determing what skillsets are valued today by Big Tech. I'm sure there are exceptions (there always are to every heuristic), but overall, probably a fair assumption.
The entire jobs market. Look it up.
STEM jobs doesn't mean BigTech. Mechanical engineering is also STEM. So is chemical engineering, architecture, etc.
A majority of STEM jobs fall under a category with "computer" or "software" in it [1]. Unless a majority of those are in adtech, you are correct.
[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-23... Table 7
But not all STEM jobs. And not all software or IT jobs involve ad targeting for +400k/year.
We might have more than enough "STEM" folks (but we actually mean programmers) to do everything except the stuff that we'd be better off not doing.
As it turned out, I ended up with a job doing high-level tech support at a company selling measurement equipment to engineers, so they wanted people with a science/engineering background. I think physics is great to study, but more like another poster said, like studying classics if you want to write literature.
I self-studied from my alma mater's computer science program (fortunately, many of the resources were all online) and was able to pivot into a career in software development, but it was a colossal amount of work and energy. I may as well have just done the computer science degree originally. A lot of my peers who had studied physics/math also took the same route, transitioning into data science or software development.
Miserable people love bitching about it.
It wasn't that bad when we ended up working for large banks, but a lot of we are asked to do these days is plain evil and a disservice to humanity.
We live in a society.
Walking in with that mindset made the whole thing really enjoyable, actually. Recommended!
Fast forward to today, I've ended up coming to the conclusion that the whole university system (much like the tech, banking & finance industry) subsidizes foreign nationals to the detriment of anyone who's native & pays taxes to support these institutions of "learning".
I didn't really see a straightforward way to do anything interesting with EE, which seems to entail going for a phd and navigating all the financial costs along with that.
Rocketry: We can now incinerate civilians 0.5 seconds faster than before.
Pharmaceutical: The stage-4 cancer patient will spend five more days in agony.
Electronics: Your new smartwatch can now render ads at 60 fps.
Chemistry: We added a dozen new forever chemicals to rainwater.
I don't mean that everyone working on computers works on ads, I mean that, for a lot of the people behind the STEM push in particular, my suspicion is that their main concern was in fact to be able to more-easily hire folks to sell ads slightly better. I think the form of the campaign was to make it look more noble.
It doesn't take a majority of the market—not even close—seeing such huge price- and demand-distortion to mess things up really bad for the whole thing.
There were 4.4 million computer programmers in 2022.
Taking some extremely rough numbers: Google employs ~190k people worldwide. Meta another 86k worldwide. Microsoft 120k (in the US). Amazon 950k (in the US).
Even if we were to treat every single one of the employees I listed above as if they were a programmer living in the US (which is clearly ridiculous), we'd still only account for 1/3 of US programmers. Once you factor in the number of those employees outside the US and the number who do things other than programming (and even more those who work on, say, AWS), the number would become even smaller.
The vast majority of programmers do not and never have worked in ad tech. Working in ad tech is a choice that some people make, and yeah, it can pay even more money than a regular software job, but choosing one of the millions of other jobs available isn't exactly choosing poverty.
What I mean is the STEM push sold one thing, but it was largely about another thing, which was more workers to help sell ads slightly better. It was about that to the people pushing it, that is.
2) The actual outcomes for STEM grads, as covered in this article. Looks like only one of the letters reaped large benefits from the push more more grads in those areas. Surely anyone could have looked at science, engineering, and (non-actually-CS) math and noticed that wages weren't acting like there was a major shortage, back in, say, the '00s and early '10s? But they were in programming. So now we've told a generation of kids there's a bright future in STEM (all four letters!) but it was kiiiinda a lie, and it kiiiinda wasn't hard to see it was a lie back when these kids were in grade school.
> Many able STEM grads bolt for better-paying careers, especially in business, finance, management and medicine (government programs focused on STEM exclude medical practitioners and are not designed to increase those numbers). Some do find high salaries in STEM jobs, many right out of college, especially in hot fields such as AI. But STEM grads even in the most dynamic sectors, including computer science and engineering, see their salary advantage fade over time, increasing the odds that they’ll leave for greener pastures.
> Employers also incentivize moves from technical work to management with higher salaries at their own firms, yet many bemoan a shortage of technical STEM workers, not managers.
This article is not so much anti-education as anti-management/investor-class-incentivization.
Equally, having many STEM professionals move to management doesn't mean that a STEM degree is oversold. There are a lot of STEM management positions where a STEM education and industrial experience are a mandatory job requirement.
Well... yeah if you have X engineers in the class of 1990, then in order to continue to be able to provide STEM services at the same rate a decade after that cohort retires in 2055, you'll need X graduates in 2000. Obviously, you can't just depend on aging workers, or you'll run into the retirement and death problem and be unable to continue the endeavor. This is not unique to STEM. All industries require new workers to be produced. Humans die, retire, and move on. Without a constant supply of new workers, industries fade, inventions never happen, progress ceases.
Also, a STEM manager is very much a technical worker. You have to be delusional to think you can substitute an MBA for an Engineering Manager.
But with all seriousness... I went to university out of high school in 2005 to get a mech engineering degree but never finished because I liked to party too hard and web dev was easy and paid better than most people I knew with entry-level engineering jobs.
Flash forward to now as a non-trad student and I'm in my 400-level coursework. It's all easier than it was, 100%. "We only need you to pass the FE" is what they say. I'm getting a 3.7 GPA by just showing up to class and doing the homework they assign. It wasn't like that ~20 years ago.
Makes me wonder about the quality of the graduates we're cranking out even at ABET-accredited schools.
What's the A?
EDIT: It's the arts [1]. It looks like a classical education.
[1] https://theconversation.com/explainer-whats-the-difference-b...
I think of a classical education as debate/rhetoric, philosophy, and Greek/Latin but I went to public school so I'm just going off of hearsay.
It should also include music and art, both creating and appreciating.
I realize many schools cut the arts classes first and I bemoan that as much as anyone now at my advanced age, but that's a different conversation.
Should be more like FTEAM.
Finance Tech Engineering Accounting Medicine
One of them is very sharp and definitely could have done the grind even 20 years ago.
The other three I have absolutely no idea how they passed those classes. They aren't engineers either, they are technicians doing low level work. All three also completely whiffed to a worrying degree when given a basic assignment to see how well they knew electronics (the one who is an engineer smashed his assignment no problem.)
I suspect that your partying made the coursework seem a lot more difficult that it really was.
The "STEAM" thing was invented by a guy at the Rhode Island School of Design.[1] It hasn't had much effect on education or hiring, but it transformed the maker movement into a branch of arts and crafts. Newer "maker spaces" tend to be heavy on construction paper and hot glue, light on milling machines and drill presses.
I've found that learning entirely new fields of study to be easier as I get older (although I'm "only" 33); I think going to college straight after high school is a disservice to those of us whose brains developed more slowly than others. Long-term thinking and impulse control are some of the last things to develop.
If at all. Guanfacine helps that though.
> But there is a problem with these massive investments: Most STEM graduates don’t work in STEM occupations. The Census Bureau reported in 2021 that a paltry 28% of STEM grads are working in these supposedly in-demand, highly paid and important STEM jobs.
Isn't that at least partly to be expected? When you have a shortage of workers in a field where it takes a fair bit of talent and years of training to do the job well and we don't have any good way to identify up front which people will be good at it the you are going to have to put more people through training that you actually need in order to get the number you need.
If we decided for example that the US does not produce enough chess grandmasters probably the most effective way to increase grandmaster production would be to make chess a competitive school sport starting in elementary school and continuing through college, much like we do with football, with funding for coaches, scholarships, and all that. 99.99% of the kids who go through that would not become grandmasters, but it would greatly increase the chances that kids with the talent to become grandmasters get discovered and get the resources they need to do so.
Maybe having 72% of STEM graduates (just using the article's numbers, but note that other comments have disputed those numbers) end up not going into STEM is just a reflection of how many you have to train to find the 28% that are suited for the available STEM jobs?
I graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics (non-sofware). I loved writing software as a hobby, but I wanted to "change the world" working at NASA or CERN or something.
In my 3rd year a FAANG offered an internship that paid better than what I would hope to make at NASA. I took it. Been in software ever since, bouncing between FAANGs and startups. I don't think I'll ever change the world. But hey, I have a family I can support.
Big tech steals you away with offers you can't refuse.
Basically my expected, actual diverged in this manner:
Path1: Not software
- Complete undergrad
- Join an engineering firm
- Definitely make <6-figures
- Wait years before you become a professional engineer
- Maybe make 6-figures
- Maybe complete undergrad
- Join a FAANG
- Make 6-figures as a new gradI do think that the STEM push has been a bit overdone at times, but we should still consider that people who majored in STEM may still have benefited from their degrees because it allowed them to stand out, and to learn things that are useful in some jobs that may not be considered 'STEM jobs'.
They will enroll as many people as they can convince to apply(rate limited by how quickly they can expand infrastructure and enrollment).
I remember 10 or so years ago when I was in school, if I wanted to get a real challenge when preparing for a test, I could just go back to look at exams from 10 years prior and things would be noticeably more difficult. I can't imagine things have improved significantly since then, and more likely they've gotten worse.
BDR == business development rep: outbound sales
Business development...representative? Role?
Anecdotally, I feel like some of my classmates had no interest in engineering. They seemed to stick around for the money or the benefits or the clout. But if landing a job in the industry became more trouble than it’s worth, I don’t see why they wouldn’t turn elsewhere.
Joking aside, every job that requires knowledge from a STEM field that goes beyond standard high school education.
As housing capital is squeezed so is the nation. The trend is not improving, many otherwise successfully people are or will be homeless and written off. The haves vs the have nots.
Of my physics undergrad, around 1/10th were independently wealthy - guess who is still working in physics. The rest either did it for a few years, or got the picture over the course of the undergrad.
A 40k/year job is great if you are getting an additional ~120k in cash from existing investments at 22.
I think lack of housing assistance is generally true of the sciences (biology, chemistry, etc) but less true for engineering. Computer science internships seem to be highly variable and not have any established industry-wide norms for internships.
Responsible and reasonable individuals are not interested in giving up 5 years of their life and accruing high interest debt for the chance at a job. This may explain why many higher education students stopped going to work.
The people you actually want to hire likely are working other jobs to afford to stay in school.
Humanities are now just a dumping ground for morons when they used to be the smartest people on the campus.
It's hard. An old friend of mine was a music major. Masters in music from Harvard, majoring in early music. Read and wrote Latin and Greek. Read and wrote early music notations. Could play a wide range early instruments. Never got a job that used those skills. Died recently, forgotten, in a Maryland suburb, her most visible lifetime accomplishment a book on needlework.
Another, younger friend also got a music degree from an Ivy League school. But she went to work for an app toolkit startup which was acquired by Microsoft. She's done very well.
My company has approximately 1,000 open positions for engineers. Not "build a website" or "use AI to sell ads" engineer but "build a TX tuner for spaceborne synthetic aperture radar from scratch" engineer.
We don't grant massive quantities of stock as part of a get rich quick lottery scheme, but I make over 3x the current US annual household income in an area where a 4 bedroom house on an acre and a half is $400k and that's enough. Anyone who thinks that isn't enough is crazy-- sociopathic, even.
Maybe there's not a shortage of biology and IT skills and coding bootcamp grads but there is a shortage of people who took, and paid attention in, a linear algebra class.
There is 100%, irrefutably, undoubtedly, unquestionably, a shortage of engineers. Actual engineers not "use AI to sell crypto ads" engineers.
Unfortunately, companies think they can skip investing in their people and expect people to spend $100k+ just for the privilege of applying to some company that doesn't respect their work/life balance and wants to pay them $50k/yr to start. Hard pass.
train them, WE DO I started over a decade ago as a technical writer and am now a senior principal engineer.
pay for their education, WE DO I had to get a degree and the company paid for almost all of it. They flexed my schedule and looked the other way when I slacked off due to fatigue because I was a single parent of three daughters at the time. Any cert I want, any conference I want, any class I want- gets paid for. Gratis (except owing them time).
and then they'll have a pipeline of engineers they so desire. WE DON'T
Highschool work study participants are paid $34.62/hr which is $72k full time, which is just below what techs earn. College engineering interns are paid more. New hires even more.
Also highschool work study participants are given full benefits. Have you ever tried to explain health insurance and 401k to a 17-year-old?
Like I said, I feel like I'm living in a parallel dimension.
I do not know where people work.
I do know that if you're a god damned receptionist at my company or any of our competi-mates and you say "hmmm.. can I take some classes to try to get more technical" they will throw wheelbarrows full of cash at you. They will give you WAAAAAY past the non-taxable benefit for education and then give you a raise or bonus to cover the taxes.