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.
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.
I exited a traditional mechanical engineering role because 90% of my job was not engineering. I loved what I covered in undergrad, but most "engineering" jobs were 80% project management / paper shuffling / oversight, with a bit of engineering tacked on.
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.
I was a mechanical design engineer for a decade before switching to a software based role. The biggest thing to keep in mind is MechE is the paintbrush with the broadest stroke in engineering. You can work in a lot of different roles or industries. But I experience a lot of what you said but not to that extreme. I would say I did 50/50 fun stuff (engineering) vs boring stuff (project management and documentation).
I'm sure that the census and other researchers make a valiant attempt at distinguishing technical and scientific roles, but I don't think it's possible.
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.
> Extremely poor journalism... some shmuck journo...
This is a guest opinion column by a book author to promote a book. All of these facts are very visibly stated on the page, including the word OPINION (in all caps at the top of the page), the author's professional bio, and the title of the book being promoted.
"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 looked at the census site and they're also including psychology majors, which is the most popular college major in America. Unsurprisingly, most of these folks don't go on to apply that major in scientific research. I think it's a pretty normal degree to get for social work, therapy, etc.
> 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. These include diverse sectors such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and energy, but about half of STEM jobs are in computers, and tech firms typically complain the loudest of STEM shortages.
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)
Big surprise, the jobs that pay more attract more people than the jobs that pay less. My partner has a bio undergrad degree, she works in a field having nothing to do with it because she didn’t want to pursue masters/phd.
Here in European country my understanding is even if physics is hard Science job. There really isn't much demand for it. So either you got to teaching or computers. If not later, yeah you are doing something else...
That's my point, and why I quoted that part. The only bit of this that needed some kind of big training push was computer nerdery, and that, mostly for selling ads better. Putting that under the "STEM" umbrella gave that crap an association with, you know, things that actually matter, which made selling it easier and generally raised CS' prestige (in a PR-campaign sort of way).
Google and Facebook pay well and employ a good number of software developers, but there are more types of software out there by the many other companies out there that don't involve selling ads. Sure, if you want to be depressing and toxic to the people around you, be reductive about it and oversimplify things, and disqualify the positives - software has done good things for the world, I'm sure you can think of some.
The top-comp tier skews toward harmful things, though, and if not for those bad things... would there be a shortage?
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.
I must be really lucky. I work at a smaller engineering company, working for engineering clients, making software that analyses engineering data, and I get to use the languages and tools I want. I must be a unicorn at this point given how miserable most programmers seem to be.
A lot of (younger?) people in web development seem to forget that other software continues to be developed, much of it unglamorous and not consumer-oriented, but still interesting to work on.
I have a mechanical engineering degree and work as a software developer. I tried for a long time to find a company like this but they all seem to only want people who very narrowly fit a senior engineer role in either specialization, never someone who can do both.
>STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result 0.5% more often.
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.
And how bad would the "STEM shortage" (... but mostly just computer folks) be if, say, we outlawed dragnet-spying in the name of advertising, and the air went out of that market?
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.
Most of them are driving and sustaining user engagement in online services of some kind. It's mostly a zero-sum game between many services competing for user time and attention.
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 thing is even though I went to school for EE, I found it weird that EE jobs demanded an incredibly wide and difficult to obtain skillset, including rudimentary CS knowledge, yet paid less than what I could sell said CS knowledge for.
I saw getting my bachelor's in electrical engineering as similar to when an aspiring writer gets a degree in classics instead of English lit. I always knew I'd end up a software engineer, I just also knew I really wanted to know how things worked on the physical level and wouldn't be able to muster up the energy to touch enough differential equations and vector calculus to actually grok it for myself ever again after college.
Walking in with that mindset made the whole thing really enjoyable, actually. Recommended!
This is why I switched out of firmware after years of twiddling bits and routing circuits. Imagine working on difficult threading issues one minute then needing to deeply understand a circuit layout the other and getting paid less than entry level bootcamp python programmers. Oh yes, with constant threat of being sent to country_of_manufacture to work out manufacturing issues on a moments notice. It’s capitalisms way of saying “we don’t really want or need this right now.” I heard you loud and clear, American tech companies.
I had this experience. Got a degree in physics and heard throughout my time about how awful this STEM shortage was. Went to graduate and couldn't get a job in my field at all (granted, I don't think I knew how to market myself nor was I well educated on how to do so). Ended up working towards a CS degree instead and getting a job in that field. All of my friend group in high school ended up with a diverse range of STEM degrees, but every one of us ended up in some sort of software work in the end.
I had a similar experience when I was doing physics in undergraduate as well. I read online and was often told that a physics degree opened a lot of doors - academia, government/industry research, engineering, high school teacher, software development. But during my senior year when applying for jobs, I was hard-pressed finding any place that was interested in me. I was fortunate enough to find a job as a laser engineer immediately after graduating, but the specific role was leading to a deadend career.
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.
I read "STEM shortage" as "shortage of excellent software developers". The STEM shortage was after my time in uni, but what jobs actually need physics? I studied physics, too, and as far as I could tell my options were get a Ph.D. and then postdoc until a professor died, become a quant (might require a Ph.D., since it was the math that was attractive), teach high school physics, or do software.
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 hate this stereotype on HN that we're all working in or adjacent to adtech. It's simply not accurate.
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.
Huge market distortions can come from a small absolute proportion of the market. Say, those with spying-advertising money-spigots. Nothing I wrote contradicts what you've written—rather, and the phenomenon paying incredible wages to capture the top talent—so, those with both a lot to gain from improving labor supply—and the coincidence of having a whole lot of money to fund PR and lobbying pushes to get more grads in the pipeline for computer-stuff hiring, is concentrated largely among ad companies.
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.
My suspicion, and what I'm getting at, is that the people selling "STEM education is vital!" were likely on the payroll of places that mostly just wanted to have more workers to sell ads better. They had the money to make the push for that, and the incentive to try to fatten their hiring pipeline, and dragging the other three letters along was just a sales tactic.
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.
Some of the way this is being presented makes it seem like "bad for the workers" findings, "don't study STEM after all" but this is more about "is this the best way to employ people with STEM degrees", with a central complaint being something along the lines of "innovative IC STEM work is underpaid compared to neighboring business/management-ish fields that capture a lot of graduates"
> 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.
I fail to see how being a software developer in a financial sector or in healthcare is not a STEM career?
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.
Also "Why is the best path to a lot of non-STEM jobs to get an unrelated STEM degree, why don't jobs the primary duties of which are well covered by liberal arts (reading, writing, interpersonal communication) hire for liberal arts degrees?"
> 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.
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.
I say this with 90% sincerity: I thought this was STEAM now?
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.
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.
So you think the classes are much easier? Might it be related to your life experience and focus you have now? Or are there things that simply aren't are rigorous as it used to be?
Obv this is anecdotal, but I graduated in 2023 from a T10 CS school and it was not very challenging. Most of my friends in college agreed that besides 1 or 2 classes, we never had to work late nights or seriously stress about passing a class. I wasn't a 4.0 student, but I got a 3.7 with very little studying. University is getting a lot easier, and I genuinely think that as long as you are trying to ask the professor questions and for help, you cannot fail a class.
It's hard to say, it may be both! But we get a page of notes for every exam in all of my classes pretty much without exception. I don't recall that ever being a thing.
Man, I did not think you were serious. I love how the liberal arts grads are trying to sneak in through the back door! That's hilarious. STEM is a hard nosed group of disciplines that build things. You'd have an easier time convincing me that CS doesn't belong in STEM than convincing me liberal arts does.
My old school electronics company has gone through some recent EE grads.
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'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.
You may have changed more than you give yourself credit for, my experience at a highly-regarded place 20 years ago was that homework and showing up and passing the final went a similarly LONG way. But it was easy to not do those things.
I started university in 2004, and I did not party. My university coursework was no harder than my high school coursework, outside of a couple of weed-out classes (like organic chemistry) -- but those were graded on a curve, so they FELT difficult, but in practice weren't hard to pass at all because we were being graded against the students who were there to party and missed the fundamentals that everything else was built on.
I suspect that your partying made the coursework seem a lot more difficult that it really was.
> Their goals include reducing perceived shortages of STEM workers, boosting American innovation and competitiveness and diversifying this highly paid workforce. The message of lucrative STEM careers appears to have reached students and tuition-paying parents — the number of STEM majors has surged in recent years.
> 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 don't know how accurate/inaccurate the overall argument here is, but they're saying "STEM" a whole lot when their criticisms are pretty specifically about tech, and mostly software companies.
There is a huge difference between software and non-software STEM jobs. The required education/qualifications are different. The job market is different.
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
Path2: Software
- Maybe complete undergrad
- Join a FAANG
- Make 6-figures as a new grad
It's kinda weird that your 1%er flex of owning a home would've been absolutely unremarkable for your typical working class Joe a couple of decades ago - sign of the times I guess.
Readit News
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.)
Other areas can be similar.
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.
Miserable people love bitching about it.
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.
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
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.
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.
We live in a society.
Walking in with that mindset made the whole thing really enjoyable, actually. Recommended!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Dead Comment
> 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.
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.
[1] https://www.risd.edu/steam
https://gradeinflation.com/
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.
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'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.
I suspect that your partying made the coursework seem a lot more difficult that it really was.
> 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
Path2: Software