New Evidence: There is No Science-Education Crisis
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
I'd say that this part of the article describes more or less exactly why the Science workforce is in such a bad shape (at least in the States):
Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit
There are very few who even bother to make it to "the top" where the actual salaries are because to get there involves getting stepped on, scooped (or outright left off papers), and generally used/abused. At a certain point most people burn out or just say screw it and move on to a different career.
What you end up getting are a lot of people who had good intentions, loved the idea of a STEM job, and/or idealistic beginnings, and then were destroyed by the reality of working in Science.
Call it a conflict of interest or call it the market. One way or the other, the conclusion is improve your skills, increase your value, and in the name of friendly competition, skin the company alive for as much as you can get for the skill the company demands. They are playing the same game with you.
I agree with what you're saying! I'm more pointing out that the problem isn't with educating more individuals (or doing it better) its with the way the system utilizes said individuals and their education/skills. You can't expect (or bemoan the lack of) breakthroughs if you are grinding the people you expect to make these advances into the dirt.
If it doesn't... Congrats 'Doctor' you make 50k a year after working in the field for 10 years (plus all the schooling you had to pay for)!
Additionally, the National Math and Science initiative is focused on the dual goals of improving the quality of education and quantity of students: https://nms.org/Education/OurStrategy.aspx
STEM grads go into finance and consulting because that's where the pay is better. Meanwhile philosophy majors struggle to get any jobs.
Net - either we need more STEM majors because STEM is the only rigorous career path out there, or we should steer more folks in that direction.
This should be a sign to more people that science and engineering programs are places where you can solve real problems.
I understand your response (there are so many law school graduates), but think about it - there's a huge number of unemployed or underemployed lawyers, legal costs remain sky-high, and most Americans can't afford a lawyer for very basic needs.
We force all lawyers to graduate from college without acquiring any particular background that is strictly necessary for the study of law, then force them to go through three years of very expensive graduate school, and in spite of that, many of them are almost completely incapable of practicing law or even finding reasonable employment when they graduate. It's a 7 year education path that results in an unemployable person while a substantial need for affordable services goes unmet.
1) Legal services is a product that's hard to mass produce because each job is idiosyncratic. Plumbers and mechanics, jobs which have similar characteristics, charge $80-100/hour. Nearly everyone fits in one of a dozen sizes of shoe that can be cheaply manufactured in China, but every landlord-tenant dispute is slightly different.
2) At nearly every level, there is a limited supply of experienced lawyers (this is true for plumbers and mechanics and also consultants and bankers). Compare with management consulting. The field has zero educational or certification requirements, as far as I know, but McKinsey doesn't charge less per hour than a high-end law firm. Corporate clients in particular don't want to hire professionals that don't have prior, real-world experience with corporate matters. There are a limited set of opportunities to work on a real litigation or real merger, and so there is a limited supply of professionals with the desired experience.
The educational system can't really remedy either problem. There are schools that put a huge emphasis on clinical, real world education, and yet firms and clients still focus most of their recruiting on schools that offer classes like Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology Language and Law: http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-for-....
Another big question is the effect this has on the lower end of the scale. We're talking about the daily grind of law, divorces, child custody cases, drunk driving charges, and so forth. My guess is that a lot of people dealing with these issues would benefit simply from having access to a highly literate person who can research things for them without getting threatened with charges of "practicing law without a license".
I don't think that these needs are well met by requiring someone to major in (I'll go with Obama here) "art history" for four years simply because they have to get a BA before they can go to law school, followed by three years of very expensive graduate education. A much shorter course in law, with perhaps some apprenticing, might yield lawyers who can afford to charge much less (then again, many of these folks have so little money that there really is no difference between $20 an hour and $700 an hour, they can't pay it).
I've heard cynics say that state bars are mainly concerned with preventing paralegals from hawking cheap wills in strip malls, providing assistance with immigration forms, that kind of thing. I'll admit I don't really know, I'm not involved in this sort of thing. I read about a case a while back (I really wish I could give you a link, it was an interesting article) where a judge did issue an injunction against a woman who had a law degree from another country who was providing immigration council in texas. The judge went out of his way to mention that her work was of high quality, but she clearly hadn't done her 4 years of art history + three years of JD, so she wasn't allowed to take the bar exam an was ordered to stop (like, you will be imprisoned if you keep offering these services).
At the high end, I do think you'd see a class of non-JD lawyers, probably MBA's. However, I don't think you'd have larger supply and thus lower prices. Supply is already quite elastic. The Chicago market used to hire about 1,000 new lawyers at large firms per year, and is probably down to 350 today. The elasticity of the supply comes from firms going more or less deeply into the class at the schools from which they hire. If you open the pool up to say MBAs at U Chicago and Northwestern, what happens? The job market becomes more competitive, but supply doesn't change. At the end of the day, there are only so many M&A deals happening in Chicago and only so many lawyers are needed to work on them. Indeed, the trend has been in the opposite direction. Over the last decade, technology and an intervening recession have reduced the need for entry level lawyers to perform say due diligence. However, rates have gone up over the decade and have held steady even after the recession, because the reduction in entry level positions has resulted in a reduced supply in the ranks of experienced lawyers.
So you've got the training challenges already highlighted, the complexity of cases (the legal profession is the epitome of a profession in which people are managing complexity, much as software is), and a limited number of playing fields. It's as if you had to apply to a limited number of government-run computing facilities months in advance to get a few minutes of processing time -- much as mainframe computing was through the late 1980s, for many people, in fact (there's a reason PCs and minis took off like they did).
Pumping up the idea of the "STEM Crisis" is just a way to inflate supply.
Perhaps, but this should be seen in the larger context of a general glut of supply of high-skilled AND low-skilled workers. The truth is, it isn't just STEM where oversupplied & underpaid workers exist. Humanity is becoming more efficient at everything, and there is less work to go around. White collar is the new Blue Collar, it's just that no one acts like it. Economists have acknowledged this[1], but of course haven't proposed real solutions. The real solutions are: (A) White collar Unionizes against an ever shrinking management, or (B) we come up with some kind of shared work program, where we finally start towards the goal of 100% unemployment for humanity. But no one of any power really wants to talk about that. A psychological phase change will be needed for that to happen.
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21586581-economi...
The problem comes when these individuals are more valuable not because equivalent talent wasn't available but because they're slave-like workhorses without flexibility or options.
H1B offers companies power of employees that they simply cannot wield over American employees, period. This is especially popular in some industries. Look at the IT work force here in midtown Manhattan for example.
It's complicated.
You have to include price. Otherwise, the statement doesn't really mean much.
I understand that employers must pay the prevailing wage, but a "shortage" probably indicates that the prevailing wage is too low. It's also easy to pay the "prevailing wage" for a job title that is actually lower than what you're hiring for (the oversight on this sort of thing is pretty weak).
There are also other compelling reasons. A key developer actually has a lot of power over an employer at a certain point in product development. If they walk, they can do a tremendous amount of damage. So employers may vastly prefer a situation where an employee is dependent on them for a visa or green card sponsorship. H1Bs can jump ship, but it's harder than it is for full citizens or permanent residents who can change jobs freely. While it isn't total control over the employee's freedom, it does give the employer considerable power, and they take some comfort in that.
So.. why would a company pay a small amount in legal fees to hire a worker who can be paid considerably less than a permanent resident would be paid, and who will have a harder time leaving the company for a different job? That's not hard to understand at all.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...
There is a lack of competent, available workers for low- and mid-level roles (if you've ever been on an interview loop, you've seen how uninspiring the general ability level is) but that's more an artifact of decades-long discouragement and organizational failure than an intrinsic problem of the people. Knowledge is spotty and hard to find. Formal education, on the other hand, is really easy to find in NYC or Silicon Valley or Boston. There are zillions of people with PhDs from prestigious schools (but many of those aren't any good).
All of this is dangerous in the long term, because after a decade of terrible leadership, competent people tend to leave for greener pastures, or burn out and lose motivation to do anything more than follow orders.
The fact that we fall short of where we should be in STEM is entirely an artifact of the (mostly terrible) organizations we build and the roles those define. It's not the teachers' fault at all, nor can it be fixed by throwing more resources at education without fixing the larger (and probably unfixable) society.
With so many specializations, isn't it partly a company's duty to train?
1) The reality that life is uncertain, and the company might be bankrupt a year from now. There's no sure thing in life, even huge companies disappear. If training a new employee would only pay off in several years, would you still do it?
2) At-will employment, where the employee could stick around for the training, then quit as soon as that's done. I think forcing the employee to stay for N months/years after that is a raw deal.
3) The fact that that employee isn't contributing as much to the company, but you're still paying him/her market wages. Would you offer them lower pay during the training period?
Ideally, yes. But most companies are short-sighted and tend to assume that if the talent isn't right there and ready, the task is too hard to be worth doing. Executives don't like taking risks, except for those that allow them to capture all upside while externalizing the downside.
There's a Gresham's Law of executives. Forward-thinking, progressive people are driven out by quick-flash politicking psychopaths. I don't know of an easy fix for that problem.