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Comment by russelluresti | Hacker News Reader

The argument that the person is missing here is whether or not there are a significant number of unfilled STEM jobs (either presently or expected in 15 - 20 years). If there are a lot of unfilled STEM jobs, then you should push people into STEM careers to fill those jobs.

The reason you don't push students into being lawyers is because there are more law students graduating than there are open jobs for them.

Any market, STEM or not, where there is a lack of unqualified workers and more job opportunities than graduates should have programs that encourage students to consider pursuing those careers.

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> The reason you don't push students into being lawyers is because there are more law students graduating than there are open jobs for them.

It's pretty funny that the article mentioned this as evidence that students respond accurately to supply and demand when deciding what to major in. Law is seen as a lucrative, high-demand field because it was -- decades ago. The reality has changed dramatically since then, but public perception has not. And that's why we continue to have more law students graduating than there are jobs for them, despite the blatant irrationality of this.

Actually, the article assumes that students don't always accurately respond to supply and demand. More specifically, it assumes that by marketing a degree effectively you can cause too many students to apply, causing an excessive supply of graduates and pushing down prices. This is exactly what happened with law; law schools markets themselves agressively based on the supposed earnings lawyers can achieve.

Right, so here's the problem in a nutshell: You can produce as many STEM graduates as you want, but those STEM jobs are going to continue to be unfilled because the job offers don't come with a a market-clearing salary.

STEM graduates (both undergrad and grad) wake up the day after graduation and start looking for a job. What do they find? Well, if they are smart (and, they probably are, because they just graduated with a STEM degree) and have one or two other skills outside the STEM degree, they find that there are people who are willing to pay them an incredible amount of money to do "not-science" and a middling amount of money to do "is-science." There are actually plenty of US-born STEM graduates created each year who leave their field to do something more lucrative.

Take a look as these statistics from the American Physical Society: http://www.aps.org/careers/statistics/index.cfm

Almost a third of people graduating with a Bachelor's in Physics work in some field that is unrelated to science, technology, math or engineering! In other words, by just paying market-clearing salaries, we could increase the number of physics graduates entering the workforce each year by a whopping 50%! That could happen tomorrow, not twenty years from now when today's kindergarteners finally get through the pipeline.

Pushing more students into a STEM track won't reduce the number of unfilled STEM positions: It will reduce the average salary of the STEM graduates who leave for other fields. With enough pushing, you might, maybe, one day push the salary low enough that graduates remain in STEM. Or, you could just increase the salary of those unfilled STEM positions.

> If there are a lot of unfilled STEM jobs, then you should push people into STEM careers to fill those jobs.

There aren't. That's the point.

If there were lots of STEM jobs (that pay reasonable wages), then wouldn't people move into them without government subsidies?

Well, frankly, STEM has a reputation of being hard because, well, it IS difficult. It requires certain kinds of critical thinking that the K-12 education system can fail to adequately teach.

I know plenty of people who started college in engineering or computer science knowing there's good paying job opportunities in those fields. But a big chunk of those people drop out once they start taking the more difficult courses.

Retention is just as important as getting people into STEM in the first place but it's hard to retain students who aren't adequately prepared for the challenge.

How many students, when deciding on their major, actually look up information on job availability and typical salaries? And then take this into account in their decision? Judging by the number of people majoring in completely un-marketable fields, I doubt the percentage is very high.

Seriously? Who goes to college without checking out job prospects before picking a major? I went to a liberal arts college that prided itself on not focusing on marketable, in-demand or especially practical skills, and I'm pretty sure everyone had a decent grasp of what the job market in their field looked like. (I'm not saying that it was the primary motivation for picking a major, but they at least knew the situation.)

Considering the number of "undeclareds", a lot.

To a very large amount of people, college is "just that place you go after highschool but before becoming an adult". I like to think that most of those people wise up or drop out pretty quick, but it seems pretty undeniable that a lot of people at least start the process without the appropriate amount of consideration.

If you want to do a quick ad-hoc study of a population with massive selection bias, just find the daily "I was told a college degree would get me a job. I was lied to." post on reddit, inquire if they researched the job market before picking their major, and watch the "I picked my major for person satisfaction! give me a job!" replies and downvotes roll in.

...actually don't do this. It is very frustrating.

I think something to note in your comment is that you chose to go to a school who didn't focus on marketable jobs... This seems to hint either at a) you didn't check job prospects before choosing a college or, b) your school was failing at what they prided themselves on by providing an education that got you a marketable career.

I think fewer students check actual job prospects less frequently than you might expect. Rather, they go with their gut or influence by people close to them (teachers, family members, etc...) who are probably just going from the gut anyway.

Sorry if that part wasn't clear, but people chose to go to this college for self-improvement or "life of the mind" or somesuch, and worrying about job skills was not a priority. My point is that even these idealists knew what they were getting into. Personally, I learned a lot before college and outside of class, and started work as a full-time software engineer two days after graduation.

How many students, when deciding on their major, actually look up information on job availability and typical salaries?

Not many, but most have a decent sense of how dropout graphs relate to ultimate income, and have a sense that engineers make a lot and comm majors less.

The other issue is one I've written about before, but universities have basically begun to practice market segmentation but with academic ability: people who want a really rigorous university experience can find one in hard science, engineering, philosophy, and some humanities departments, and people who just want a degree can find one in comm, sociology, many business schools, and a few other places.

When the graduating seniors start panicking because they can't find work, the underclassmen see the writing on the wall. Complaints about unemployment on reddit make the communication channel even stronger.

One issue is that, a lot of things can change during the 3-4 years of a typical university education.

Back then, I made the choice of not pursuing computer science because I entered university soon after the dot-com bust. I came from a third-world country, and the general theme then was that there wasn't much of a future in software engineering, that unemployment rates amongst programmers were horrendous. Which was true, back in 2005.

Wound up getting a different engineering degree. Things didn't turn out too bad, but in hindsight, I really wished I did go for that CS degree.

Back when I was at university I met lots of people working towards CS or engineering degrees either solely or primarily because that's where the jobs where. They had no real passion or interest in the field beyond that. Some of them had even made a conscious choice to not study what they where really passionate about because the they knew the job market was bad in those fields.

Also most people I know who majored in so called un-marketable fields did so knowing full well what the job market looked like and did take that into account. They just came to the conclusion that studying what they wanted to study, rather than what was economically expedient, was more important to them. A few of them have even, through hard work and dedication, beaten the odds and managed to end up in a well paid dream job in their chosen field.

You're assuming perfect information and low inertia, neither of which is true, unfortunately. It takes a loooong time to train someone up to the point where they can do many of the jobs, and by that point, they're very specialized, which makes it hard for them to hop to another opening.

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