Well, that’s a factor of supply and demand, isn’t it?
If I really desperately need a programmer, I’d be satisfied with one of fair to middling skills. If, however, there is much more supply than demand, I can be picky, and only hire the cream of the crop.
But not everyone with a biology degree ends up a biologist, or even haf the slightest intention of being a biologist. Some become teachers, or sales people for technical firms, or technical writers or business consultants or go to grad school or law school or medical or vet school or business school or they pursue whatever career path they started on as an intern.
Isn’t that just circling the argument back to the original premise though? If a lot of people with biology degrees are not pursuing a career in biology how does the cost of tuition as well as the opportunity cost of spending the time pursuing the degree factor into the evaluation of that education in as an economic investment? Some of the fields you mention require a bio degree, some do not. But the question is also one of pay; if one gets a STEM degree and then becomes a teacher, would they have needed a STEM degree to obtain similar compensation?
I don’t think anyone can really answer these questions, but without any numerical analysis of the salaries involved and the expenses incurred all it ends up being is navel gazing in my opinion. It all sounds very good though before you get into the nitty gritty.
We’re talking ‘bad’ here, not ‘fair’ or ‘middling’. There is scope to choose between less experienced and more experienced, generalist and specialist, but generally you never want a ‘bad’ professional in any situation. You’d never say “I’ve only got a hundred bucks, I’ll just get the bad attorney.” The reason is that the risks are obvious and salient, whereas for a bad programmer, most people don’t even understand the harm they can cause.
So we don’t need more bad programmers. Steer kids toward math, language, and problem-solving, and they’ll be ready to code. If coding isn’t their thing, cool, they still have 3 valuable and transferrable skills.
Sure. Though define “bad”. There are plenty of people who do their jobs at ‘fair to middling level,’ and yet manage to complete tasks in such a way that their employer finds value in their work. I’m sure on an objective scale many of those people are “bad” at their area of expertise. But, they’re expert enough to hold a job at whatever their salary is. I am not suggesting that I’d hire someone with the title of “attorney” but who didn’t actually accomplish attorney-skill-based tasks just because of their title and cheap rate. That’s not an attorney, but a scam artist.
Slight digression aside, my rhetorical point was only that, if the jobs are truly there waiting, then maybe a bad programmer/scientist/etc (bad, but still possessing a baseline skill set, see above paragraph) will do.
A lot of people wanting to go into STEM (vaguely defined) only want to get a bachelor’s. Thirty-odd years ago, I knew someone who got a BS in biochemistry and was not at all happy with the biology-related jobs that she could get. Apparently you need (needed - the information is old) at least a masters to be more than a lab flunky. She was able to shift to programming because at the time it was relatively easy to get programming jobs without certification.
It’s good to know from the beginning what kind of jobs you can get with just the BS. Some STEM areas are more BS friendly than others.
I didn’t mean it to sound like a downgrade. Getting to be a scientist in industry is often an even more challenging path than academia. And the science I do is often considerably more curiosity driven than academics. I don’t waste time writing grants, and because I’m fully funded, and there is no one checking how I’m spending every dime, I have the bandwidth and the budget to do pretty much whatever I want as long as I produce for the company as well. And I take full advantage of that! I’ve driven a drug into the clinic based on a “Well, that’s funny” experimental result from about ten years ago.
I’m a STEM success story, but the vast majority of my classmates weren’t nearly so lucky.
You don’t have to write grants? Most scientists spend about 1/3 of their time on grant writing and reporting. Being out from under that is definitely a success.
I’m a scientist at a company. I’ve never written a grant in my life, and I never intend to.
This certainly sounds like purely anecdotal evidence. You don’t have kids in the school system, so I’m curious where you heard this. Mommy message boards or Facebook groups where moms complain that their daughters have to learn science/coding don’t count. And you never state whether the SONS are just as actively guided into STEM.
People often forget that governments (local, state, federal) hire scientists. My agency seems to be hiring more and more folks with advanced degrees, including Ph.D’s, to do work that technically only requires a Bachelor’s degree. I did a post-doc since I was too timid to stray from the beaten path. But I knew academia wasn’t the life for me. A coworker of mine who also has a Ph.D was in academia for several years, but decided to jump ship because he couldn’t deal with the politics and the lack of work-life balance. I anticipate we’ll be see more “ship jumpers” in the years to come.
I don’t feel like I’m the kind of scientist who’d make my graduate and post-doc advisors proud, since I don’t do research (at least in the conventional sense), I only publish grey literature, and my jargon is equal parts wonky and sciency. I also don’t attend the same conferences or travel in the same circles as my former mentors and fellow labmates. So I feel like I’m not in the club anymore.
Meh. I went into biology because as a 18-year-old I liked it okay and I knew I had the chops to get a job in it. Emphasis on “a” job. I didn’t have my heart set on “the” job because I didn’t have one in mind. Even when I left my post-doc, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I fell into my current job. Thankfully, I have grown to dig it.
If someone came to me wondering if there was any value to a biology degree, I’d tell them yes, but with some caveats. Biology is a fantastic vehicle for acquiring marketable skills. But you will not acquire most of those skills in the classroom, but rather by “nerding out” in your spare time–something we tend to associate only when computer science/programming geeks. I was able to get my foot in the door of my current workplace by showcasing skills I was never formally taught, but that I knew would be valuable one day. The current job market favors autodidacts who love to tinker with stuff. So if you’re a self-learner and confident enough, the world will be your oyster (provided a decent amount of luck is on your side). Unfortunately, earning a biology BS or BA will not automatically equip you with these traits.
So, I’m going to get hammered for this, but here goes.
I think in a world with over 10,000,000 people graduating with STEM degrees every year (almost 9 million just between China, India, Russia, Iran and the US), in a world where we are trying to replace brain power with computing power (and looking back at our successes in replacing muscle power with machine power), economically speaking, if you are a child it doesn’t make long-term sense to go into STEM as you will be facing competitive pressures not only from 9,000,000 * X-years of graduates (and note the above statistic excludes entire continents like Europe, South America, and Africa), but all the machines the CS STEM graduates are programming to do STEM work.
I can hear the naysayers now: “Technology always increases the # of jobs”. Well, actually, population increases generally account for the need for new jobs, but let’s ignore that for a second. This argument, assuming it is true, looks back at a historical period where people stopped being machines (laborers) and started being tenders of machines. Now we are asking the large segment of the population that once used to be machines, but now tends machines, that their future job is to, what… create machines? Discover scientific principles? Solve for X?
“STEM jobs are hot and in-demand NOW” Yes, but what good does that do my 16yo daughter? What happens if, at the age of 45, her career as a geneticist is destroyed because a group of computer programmers used their STEM education to automate the process she was so adroit in? And since STEM jobs are so highly paid, where is the disincentive for a capitalist to spend $500,000,000 to get rid of 1,000 jobs @ $90k/apiece via an automation process (and then sell that process to other companies with similar rolls (roles?) of $90k jobs)?
“Computers don’t have the creativity to be good at science/math!” Wonderful, if this remains true until the end of time. But the people programming the computers do have the creativity needed. And this assumes that computing theory and technology remain unchanged, that computers will always remain a very valuable machine that can only do what people tell them to do, working on the same principles we have understood since von Neumann. However, the entire basis of the “technology changes, so you’d better learn STEM to keep ahead" argument is the first two words: “technology changes.” An AI capable of learning might be decades away… but for a 10yo, “decades away” means that they could very well be fubared when they are 40, married with 2 kids and a mortgage, wondering what they are going to do with their engineering background now that 70% of all engineering is done via computers.
As someone who has seen his career… and family fortune… destroyed by changing technology, as one who now literally works with corporations on future technologies and their applications*, the people who argue the long-term value of a STEM education are, (again, in my opinion), not looking at a long-enough horizon*. We have machines which are literally “dumb experts” in science, technology, engineering, and math (and getting better), we have 9million+ people graduating with STEM degrees every year in just five countries alone, and we have an economic system which is based upon the idea of creative destruction. The idea that STEM jobs are somehow safe from all this is so naïve as to be… well, sweet, like when my grandfather used to say “the world will always need ditch-diggers.” Uh, sorry, Grampy, but apparently it did not. Nor will it always need hundreds of thousands of geneticists. Or physicists.
To me, if (the royal) you want a position where you won’t get killed by technological change (and I’m not too sure if that is even possible over three-score-and-ten), one would be farW, far better off in fields where human interaction is key: teaching, the arts, sales, therapists, marketing, governing.
*One of my clients is developing a toothbrush that communicates with a dental artificial intelligence. Their goal is that the toothbrush will be able to (1), give advice on how to better brush your teeth (it will map out your mouth, then tell you where you missed), (2), have biometric sensors on the brush to test for bacteria/viral clusters which indicates tooth decay, gum disease, etc, (3) communicate this information to your dentist or a dental Artificial Intelligence (which they are designing as well).
Part of what they (the client) hope sells the product to the consumer (and to health providers and health insurance companies) is reduced visits to the dentist, possibly getting rid of the annual checkups altogether (you would go in for cleanings and treatments, of course). Reduced visits to the dentist means reduced revenues to the dentist which means weaker-capitalized dentists go out of business which means that the field of dentistry will shrink. They expect to go to market with this in 2028.
So… if you know someone going into dentistry, tell them they are going to have to compete with toothbrushes for annual checkup revenues in about 15 years. 10 years beyond that? Who knows.
I agree with this, and it’s not limited to students. I was a software engineer for 20 years when I needed to do another employer change. I’d been working in “legacy technology” so I knew I needed to update myself a bit. Looked around… do I learn C++, Java, Javascript, PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. etc etc.? Too many to choose from, all used in the industry and in my local job market, but no way for me to predict which ones would still be in use “tomorrow”. I ended up saying fuck it, I’ll just become a business analyst!
I’m sure many students who majored in “Vacuum Tube Engineering” were surprised when they found out the market had totally dried up while they were in school. There is no language that will be used forever. There is no technology which will be used forever. Any STEM graduate will need to be proactive about keeping pace with the industry in order to stay employed.
Back in the 80s, a programmer could work in one language for one application for years and years. That’s not the case anymore. Projects are much more short term and will use different languages and tools from each other. It’s common to be writing apps in many languages/environments at the same time. One single project may be using all those languages you mention and more. Developers are expected to teach themselves the languages, tools and environments necessary to complete the task. Gone are the days where your employer sends you to an 8 week class in C++. Professor Google is supposed to teach you everything now.
A STEM degree really just gets you started in the STEM field. Many of the tools and languages you learned in college will be obsolete in a few years. “It’s great you learned Perl/Python and Virtual Machines in school, but we’re now using GoLang and containers for everything now.” This is one reason someone should only go into STEM if they truly enjoy the field. The re-education never ends.
Ok, I hear your argument. But…why not pick a job that the one that is the “last to go to the ovens”? Obviously in the immediate short term, developing automated systems that can replace other people’s jobs can’t be automated. (there are some ways to automate some of the steps of designing and optimizing a neural network [MIT Technology Review] but for right now and the next decade or 5, that last step can’t be automated.
Because if it was…if AIs were smart enough to design AIs to solve any other jobs, then there would be zero remaining jobs on earth for humans to do. This is basically a tautology. In a world where a group of AI designers are designing AIs to replace other jobs, the moment they make an AI smart enough to self-design, it can be run on the problem set of all other jobs, solve them all, and now there’s 0 human jobs left. It might take 50 years to reach this point or 500 or never, but that’s the endpoint.
So my argument is a “by definition” one. The safest job on the planet is a job designing AI. That obviously requires grad school education, I’ve heard one of the hot degrees for it is actually physics undergrad and grad school covering machine learning, that’s where your daughter should go.
The reason we say “FUSS” (fuck you social studies) is what value adding does a social studies degree prepare you to do? What unique thing can you now do that has value?
I mean you could teach social studies, but obviously if 1 social studies teacher is needed for every 20 students who only take it 1 year in their life, this is obviously a very small market. Yes, there’s social worker type “soft skill jobs”, but it’s hard to say how a degree is even needed for those, that’s more of a talent kind of thing…
I always wondered about this. If it just gets you started, and then after that you need to keep yourself updated, on your own time, network on your own time, add more certs on your own dime, and then factor in unpaid time between jobs, then that should be considered in actually evaluating the value of a STEM degree it seems.
In a way, if people in STEM fields are like musicians then it should be evaluated that way and not as a good career choice for someone who has a good work ethic, is reasonably intelligent and wants a stable career but is not in love with something STEM related. I’m learning programming now just because it is something to do in my free time, but I can’t imagine someone who doesn’t like programming being satisfied with the average compensation, given the amount of time they would be spending to stay current.
Same thing with accounting - the pay for accounting is really shitty if you factor everything in. Accounting is a little different though if you start young and have some other skills - you don’t necessarily have to do any accounting and can make a nice living; but you’re really not working as an accountant.
I never quite thought of accounting as STEM until someone mentioned it earlier.
Yes, absolutely.
Also filmore missed my point completely. I wasn’t complaining about having to keep current. My complaint was that I was unable to predict which tool/skillset employers would be demanding over the next 5 - 10 years. I’m great at learning new things. I’m not as willing to fork over money for certifications every 5 years to keep up with the technology fad of the day. Last time I looked, each programming class was around $2,500 for a week. You’d need 3 - 5 of those to get certified and the better certifications also cost something to take the test.
It’s a judgement call that all programmers have to make: how many years can I use that certification before it “expires” (need a different one due to tech transformations) to make it a worthy investment?
Just for an example, I’ve only been a BA for six years and the programmers today are using frameworks (no longer programming languages, they now use frameworks!) that hadn’t even been invented when I was a programmer. That makes me think that a good programmer needs to learn a new language/framework every single year to keep up!
I don’t want to derail this thread into a science fiction discussion, but I will counter that once your Singularity is built and the AI guys laid off, there will still be a need for human actors, therapists, child psychologists, and other disciplines which require personality. And while I don’t discount the possibility of creating an Artificial Personality, it isn’t anywhere near as a priority as Artificial Intelligence among today’s investors and inventors, so jobs requiring a basic human touch should be safer longer than jobs requiring a basic human brain.
You’re right that it’s cost prohibitive to pay for classes with the hope that it pays off. To succeed in STEM, you have to have the wherewithal to teach yourself what is needed. There’s no one class you could have taken 5 years ago which would have prepared you for today. Today there’s not a single language or toolset which is sufficient. In the past you could have gotten any job by being proficient in C programming. There’s nothing like that today. Python was hot for a bit. Now GoLang is getting some momentum. In a few years it will be something which doesn’t currently exist (GoLang++ ?) and then something else after that. But even with that core skill, you are expected to figure out all the support languages and tools which are necessary to complete the task.
Going into STEM is not like learning a skill like welding, where once you learn it you can do basically the same thing forever and just gain proficiency. A STEM degree should prepare you for the requirements of the field at the time you graduate, but expect those requirements to greatly change over time.
But I’d like to add, you don’t have to be an engineer to be successful in STEM. Just like any industry, all types of skills are needed. In addition to the actual scientists and engineers, there will also be writers, project managers, people managers, sales, marketing, testers, and so on. A STEM degree will get you in the door, but you don’t have to stay technical. You may find success in providing some type of support role for the product or service even if you don’t have any clue how to create it.