One supposed advantage of a STEM education is that it confers an ability analyze the question at hand and the available data, from which one can draw a reasonable conclusion. This is lacking in the quoted post.
The quote references a link that was omitted. This may be it: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm
“Most new jobs: 20 occupations with the highest projected numeric change in employment.”
The thread is about STEM degrees. Of the 20 occupations with the greatest projected growth (by number), the top five paying are:
[ol]
[li]Software developers, applications ($100k)[/li][li]General and operations managers ($99k)[/li][li]Registered nurses ($68k)[/li][li]Accountants and auditors ($68k)[/li][li]Market research analysts and marketing specialists ($64k)[/li][/ol]
Just about everything after that has a median pay <$40k.
As for these top five, software development is certainly a STEM field but doesn’t require a STEM degree. General and operations managers obviously don’t need one. Nursing might be considered STEM, although apparently people argue about this (I just searched for ‘is nursing STEM’). Accountants use high school math. Market research analysts run the gamut, so let’s count it.
After that it’s things like home aids and truck drivers.
Not exactly strong evidence for high value or a shortage. There may be specific subfields with shortages and the corresponding pay one would expect for high demand and low supply. But that tells us nothing about STEM in general, or how well you can expect to do with an undergrad-only degree in, say, chemistry.
Although I generally support more education and better science literacy purely to improve my own quality of life.
Ruken, the OP specifically questioned the shortage of STEM graduates. There is, it’s reflected in the projections for positions available, particularly in the software industry, but also in STEM-oriented health care professions. For software, there’s also the relatively low unemployment rate and relatively high number of people with a software-related degree working within their major. Given a large number of positions projected to be available in software development, its high salary, and its high growth rate, it’s easy to see the tremendous value in the field especially considering the cost of entry is a bachelor’s degree. The trajectory of software development, by itself, is enough to exhibit concern over the lack of STEM graduates.
I always considered my friends with PhDs in chemistry or biology who worked in industry every bit as much a scientist as those who worked in academia. It is easier to give up on doing anything innovative in industry, true, since you get paid and don’t have to publish or do grant proposals, but it is not necessary.
You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.
I guess you forgot about Disney (among others) who fire whole groups of IT workers in favor of H1B holders. And force the IT workers to train the new people. The problem is not primarily hiring one or two H1B holders - it is hiring scads of them through Indian owned outsourcing companies who grab most of the visas.
During the bubble lots of students did the “right thing” by switching to CS majors to meet the shortage. And lots of them got screwed when the bottom fell out. So not only are they expected to track technical trends, they should also forecast the economy. Pretty tall order.
Big companies used to have education centers to bring new hires up to speed on new technology while also letting experienced workers learn new technology. That’s mostly gone. The building next to the one where I used to work used to a an education center - now it is a customer visitor center. If you want to learn new things, go to conferences (oops, strongly discouraged) or learn it in your copious free time.
I’m not talking about college or even high school aged girls. I’m talking about grade-schoolers.
That’s what seems to be going on in my area, anyway. They’re basically telling those girls that something is wrong with them if they don’t want a STEM career.
I find it disturbing the way everybody is being forced toward STEM. Or as I like to call it, FUSS (screw you, Social Studies). It contributes to the idea that school is about driving people toward high-paying careers, that equality is about driving girls toward high-paying careers, the idea that STEM itself is about high-paying careers, the idea that STEM is the only high-paying career, that the end goal of everything is a high paying career.
20 years from now we’ll end up with a bunch of people hating themselves for going into software development, and there won’t be enough child-care professionals to watch their kids, marriage counselors to save their imploding marriage, elder-care professionals to help with aging parents, or psychologists to work out any of that stuff.
Maybe the focus should instead be on making math and science classes part of the general education requirements in colleges. Yes, yes, I know that they already are… but at the school I went to, non-science majors could get their science requirement out of the way with a course that was literally at the third-grade level (and yes, I know what “literally” means). And maybe then some kid who originally intended to study history ends up changing their mind and going into physics… but even if they don’t, they’ll still be a historian with some basic physics under their belt. Certainly nobody questions when it goes the other way, like a friend of mine who got his bachelor’s in CS, and is good at it, and has mostly made his livelihood in computer-related work… but who now considers history to be his vocation.
Not really, we’re allowing ourselves to be lied to. We like being lied to. The truth is boring. The vast majority of us are workaday peasants, nothing more, nothing less. Try as we might, our lot is more or less the same, work ourselves to the bone striving to be something better than the common riff raff. Today’s soup du jour is STEM education, yesterday’s was the gold rush - “Go West young man!!” “Plastics!!!” Tomorrow it’ll probably be something even more rediculous like everyone will save up for some sort of cranial implant that employers are raving about, there will be debates about what kind of implant to get, people will be judged upon what kind of implant they have. Their morals will be questioned, a movement to have them all sterilized will take hold, but the bill will die in committee. People won’t even associate with people who don’t have the right implant - very gauche.
Perhaps some of the pro-STEM stuff is in reaction to the way it used to be, where not knowing literature made you a savage (true enough) but not being able to add two numbers or know the difference between a light year and a leap year was considered cute.
Really? What type? In Silicon Valley bioengineering is a growing field. I know engineering professors who are moving to bioengineering because that is where the grants are these days.
I suppose if you are in the wrong specialty or not very good at it the job market would look bad. But that is always true.
Perhaps we should worry about not only enjoying STEM but being competent at it. Whether or not we need new programmers, we don’t need new bad programmers.
But a person with a BS in Biology can easily transition into bioengineering in grad school. Probably more easily than an engineer can go the other way. Biology related fields are booming, so I find it odd for someone to say it is hard to get a job with the right kind of degree.