There are other types of engineering besides “computer”.
IT / computers suffers from a number of industry specific issues:
The pace of change is so quick that often only the past 5 years of your 30 years of experience is relevant.
Since the 90s, it has become significantly more “youth-centric”.
The compartmentalized nature of the work lends itself to offshoring and outsourcing.
Other engineering disciplines like civil or mechanical place a higher premium on longevity and education because there is more of an accumulation of knowledge. Same with management or project management. Years of experience leading people doesn’t just “evaporate” like those hours I spent learning PowerBuilder in the 90s.
Has it occurred to you that you may be very talented and/or lucky, and that your experiences are not representative? If you wanted to answer the question “which majors do the best”, you would need to consider the *entire *population with a given degree. Otherwise you might conclude that dropping out of harvard is best…
Y’know, it’s been what, 60 years since Sputnik and American schools going into an *“OMG We’re falling behind!!” *episode, and ISTM the scenario just keeps repeating under different names and styles.
In reality, the USA has a LOT of very succesful STEM activity going on in both academia and private industry. But at the same time we simply cannot summon up of a population of homegrown Top Scientists and/or Technology Wizzes on-demand, just because “we need them”. Either you are cut out for it or you are not. And we need as many as we do need – cranking out three times more STEM grads is not going by itself to make American science/tech become 3 times more productive or 3 times faster advancing – and we don’t really know how many we need beyond a very short term.
Kids who are “cut out for it” are not going to develop into STEM majors without educational opportunities to do so. If you are a relatively affluent person moving in relatively affluent circles, STEM opportunities are plentiful. But nationally,half of high schools don’t offer calculus; a third have no physics. A quarter of those schools with high black/Latino populations don’t offer Algebra 2; a third offer no Chemistry. How is a kid with a strong aptitude for STEM going to find her way when her high school offers Alg 1/Geometry/“Applied Math” as the rigorous sequence? How can you get into college without chemistry or Alg 2? How would you ever even find out you are good at these things?
I teach in one of the best STEM-focused public high schools in the country (and we date to the 70s, so we’ve been doing this a while). We still have to hire fresh-faced brand-new math and science teachers and train them up ourselves because we can’t find qualified STEM teachers. We’ve had two STEM vacancies–CS and Engineering–for a semester because we can’t fill them because we’ve had so few applicants. STEM education in this country is not adequate to develop whatever talent we have, especially among poor urban and rural populations. There’s tons of talent and interest languishing for lack of opportunity.
I took some of these classes online in the wee early days of the internet. But that requires some cooperation from the school (which I received) and reasonable internet and computer access.
In this very thread we’ve seen part of what leads to this problem: more people going into STEM *teaching *is not considered to be one of the goals being sought.
It is, in the sense that if more people had degrees in CS or Engineering, I think we’d have a better shot at filling those positions. The fact that it’s so hard to fill CS and Engineering positions suggests that people with those degrees have better options.
Do you require teaching credentials and a STEM background?
Your experience shows that there is no real shortage of STEM graduates - unless the people wishing to hire them can’t pay enough or have nonstandard expectations. In your case the expectations are better justified than for most.
Who’s going to, having spent as much as six to seven years getting a PhD and possibly more as a postdoc, going to then spend even more years getting the required education degree for a pay cut and worse working conditions? Such a person can probably still find a job in a private school or at worst take a crappy job in a temporary or non-tenure track position. While that’s the worst-case scenario, I don’t think you’ll get a lot of takers with an MS or BS degree either, not with the cost of needing yet another degree. The only person I knew in college who actually wanted to be a science teacher double-majored in chemistry and education and didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of her education classes.
If so many STEM grads get churned out, there will be more supply than demand OR those forced or coerced into getting a STEM degree will not have interest in it and therefore churn out less than desirable results. Just my opinion.
If you have a degree of any kind (which shows you can follow through with something) and are willing to learn a skill on your own and demonstrate it effectively, you can have an equal or better shot. It seems employers rely heavily on skills and experience over degrees lately on job boards. Also my opinion.
I don’t follow. If there were tons of people with STEM backgrounds that couldn’t find work, it would be easier for us to find people STEM degrees willing to make $50k/yr teaching STEM courses. The fact that we can’t–and there is a national shortage in these ares–suggests that there is no glut of unemployed STEM graduates. It certainly doesn’t show that no shortage exists. Are you saying that if there were a shortage, we’d have more applicants?
Who said anything about a Ph.d? We need people with a B.S. in math or CS or Engineering or physics willing to go through a concurrent alt-cert program and work for $50K a year, It doesn’t take another degree, let alone a masters.
I’m not saying it’s a great deal, but it’s a living. The fact that we can’t find these people suggests that those who graduate with STEM degrees have better options–which is the central argument of this thread.
First part of your nquestion - you take those top kids OUT of those crappy inner city schools. Those schools can not and will not be a place for them. I sued to work in such a school and those top kids I advised the parents to transfer them to another district or a magnet school.
As for the shortage of teachers in those areas, could it be because those teachers (in short supply) are paid the same scale as the history teachers? Plus those STEM teachers still have to “pay their dues” and teach the worse kids in the worse conditions (like off a cart) and put up with other frustrations all new teachers must endure.
Also maybe your school prefers teachers who can also coach basketball?
$50k a year is pretty crap pay. Certain things that require minimal or 0 education pay that much or even more around here. For example, many metro workers in my area do far better than that financially; and we’re not even getting into the pensions and other benefits. Most skilled trades are going to have a path towards making more money than that with much less unpaid training than is required for most STEM degrees.
However, there is a huge disconnect between public perception of how education and compensation are related. The fact that your school pays so little shows that a) they can find enough people to fill those roles and b) there is actually less real interest from the public in paying for this kind of education. There’s a lot of lip service about the importance of STEM, but when it comes time for society as a whole to put their collective money where their collective mouth is, there is silence.
I’m guessing its because those education courses never fully prepare one to deal with inner city kids (meaning black). How does one teach to a high level when they wont do homework, wont listen, or wont even bother showing up for class?
Plus how can a teacher teach when you have the halls filled with truent students interfering with classes?
I already said I teach at a top STEM magnet. We don’t have sports. We have two full time CS positions for 400 kids–everyone takes at least two years of CS. This job is basically paradise for STEM teachers and even we can’t find them.
Beyond that, nothing you said makes sense. I’m not talking about why there is a teacher shortage–I’m familiar. I’m talking about why there is a NOT a STEM major shortage, which is the premise of this thread. If we had surplus STEM grads, we could find STEM teachers as easily as we find other types.
That’s starting pay, not average pay. And I am aware that it’s not great money. But this thread started with the premise that STEM majors can’t get jobs and that we are misleading people by encouraging them to get STEM degrees. I think the truly appalling shortage of STEM teachers suggests that there must be better options than that for all the STEM majors out there, and so the job field can’t be that bad.
You seem to be saying that black kids specifically don’t do homework, don’t listen, roam the halls in truant packs.
Do you think there’s something about black people that makes them like this?
I said nothing about inner city teaching. This was a heavily-white college in heavily-white, fairly-rural central Pennsylvania and her student teaching was local as well. I think her major complaints were an overemphasis on elementary education (to the point where she was doing craft projects for a college class) to the detriment of secondary education and not enough emphasis on actual pedagogy. I’m trying to remember how her double-major worked. I’m pretty sure her senior year student teaching took the place of the undergraduate research the rest of us were expected to do. I don’t remember what she took in terms of advanced undergraduate courses. (P Chem, fourth semester organic, third semester inorganic, etc.) It’s a somewhat weird college in any case when it comes to majors, and one where it might have been easier to do such a double major than at a school like Penn State.
No idea where she is now, but I doubt it’s somewhere where your post would have any relevance.
It’s been mentioned here but “STEM” covers an enormous range of disciplines in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Of the four, “Technology” is in some ways the odd man out, because to be a very talented IT professional in many cases requires no knowledge of science or engineering. It does require a highly rational mind with good organizational and logic skills. “Technology” also includes computer science, and there is surely some crossover to pure science/math if you are coding engineering software, or designing hardware, but in many cases, “Technology” jobs don’t really require a degree at all.
Engineering on the other hand (chemical, nuclear, civil, mechanical, aerospace) always requires a rigorous knowledge of science and math.
Having done the mechanical engineering gig for a long time, I can attest to the shrinking demand, primarily due to the automation of many tasks that formerly required a lot more engineers. So if you were going to pick one of the STEM disciplines, choose Technology, and try to get as far as you can without a degree or with a minimal degree/certifications. There are plenty of IT professionals making $90K or more a year with nothing more than a high school diploma. It’s tough to find many Engineers making that kind of money even with graduate degrees.
I was mentioning a PhD as the extreme end of “can’t find a job, guess I’ll teach.” It sounds like you wouldn’t want me either, as my education ended with a MS in chemistry. You really want the TE part of STEM, or failing that, someone with a math or physics degree (which are generally considered even harder to find a tenure-track job with than biology or chemistry.) But someone with a math or physics degree can probably find a well-paying job that’s unrelated to their field more easily than one with a biology or chemistry degree. And even then, do you really want someone who takes up teaching as a last resort? I know I’d be a terrible teacher who wouldn’t be willing to put up with all the non-teaching crap (parents, legislators, boards, administration, etc.) involved in doing the job “because I love teaching despite all that.” So you definitely wouldn’t want me.
As for those who might be interested in teaching, do they know they only need to get a certificate and not a separate degree? How hard is it to get while simultaneously teaching? What’s the cost of the certificate? A lack of people applying to teach doesn’t mean that there isn’t a shortage of STEM jobs. It could mean that very few are interested in teaching in the first place. It could mean that those who might be interested give up on the idea because they assume they’ll have to spend more time and money picking up another degree. Lots of possibilities.