That tells us that they continue to be in demand. You think you have a tough time being unemployed as an IT workers, engineer or mathematician, try having a degree in sociology or philosophy.
The reason we need STEM graduates is that these are the people who actually create wealth in society by inventing new products or processes. And I would even go so far as say we need them to actually go into engineering instead of investment banking or law.
Indeed. We need engineers far more than investment bankers and lawyers. Back in the 50s every kid wanted to be an engineer, then for some reason that changed. I don’t know why that is. It’s strange because you’d think all of those engineers would have had kids who passed on the idea of being engineers to their children.
Part of it is our progressively greater embrace of ignorance and an anti-science backlash, I think. In the space race days, engineers and scientists could be almost rock stars - people were amazed by the new technology and new achievements we’d make. Now no regard is given to those pointy-headed scientist types who just so happen to make all our lives massively better. The number of people who know about Britney and Federline’s relationship compared to scientists out there making big advances has to be several orders of magnitude. We don’t celebrate the people who actually make society great - we focus on stupid bullshit. Part of the cost of this is that our kids aren’t inspired to be the next great scientific mind out there - there are fewer people around to make the new great discoveries that improve our lives.
Yes, but that doesn’t really address the cause, that’s more addressing the underlying symptom that causes the symptom. Why was there an anti-science backlash? Why did we stop loving our engineers and start loving pop-stars instead? Why did we choose to send our best and brightest into banking instead of engineering?
Sometimes I wonder how much of it is from the view expressed by athelas, i.e., “Asians are so good at math and engineering that we should just let them do it all.”
I’ve heard that refrain about how we need more math and science people for over 40 years and yet I’ve never seen any industry actually willing to pay for those skills. I suspect that engineers make a decent starting salary but when I graduated with a degree in math the only advice I ever got was “see if you can become an actuary.” The truth is that businesses like those base skills, critical thinking and such, but they don’t want to pay for them.
There is no rule that you have to pursue a career in the field you study in college. I think STEM education gives people a wonderful, critical framework through which to think. They can then use that framework in just about any field.
I heard somewhere that many of the people running Honda are engineers. Is this true? I say that is a good model.
I don’t agree with you and don’t think you know what you are talking about. A math degree, according to payscale.com, gives you the 21st highest starting salary out of the 75 top paying college degrees. 4 of the top 5 are engineering disciplines for reference. The mid-career pay for a mathematics degree is 13/75. According to CNN, an actuary is the 6th highest paid job in the country. What do you expect industry to do, pay engineers like professional athletes are paid? Engineers, mathemeticians, staticians, etc… make good money. I make slightly above the median salary for my education and field and according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, I am in the top 10% of wage earners in the US (and, for the record, I make much less than and actuary or software engineer (#6 and #8 according to CNN).
First of all, the benefits of better STEM education are much greater than just producing more people with science and math degrees. Perhaps if we did a better job fewer people would have been conned into exploding mortgages. Perhaps with better biology education people would understand what eating junk does to you. It will never be perfect, but it could be a lot better.
My wife ghost-wrote part of a high school biology text, and she hated it. There are a ton of state requirements that have to be met. There has to be room for the pretty pictures while keeping the size and thus the price of the book down. It wound up so that she had barely enough words to explain the necessary concepts, without being able to tie them together or expand on any. My kids high school history books were the same way - event, date, name, tiny amount of explanation. Fewer facts and more learning how to learn, and critical thinking, would be a lot better.
I grew up in the '50s, and it is not like there weren’t pop stars then - you might remember a guy named Elvis? I don’t remember a lot of famous scientists, though the astronauts were pretty popular - not the same thing. What was different is that back then doing science was going to help us beat the Commies, so there was little or no controversy about the benefit of science education.
Not long ago Bill Gates was almost a rock star - except that those of us doing computer things, while envied, were also considered nerds and geeks. I don’t remember that attitude about scientists in the '50s and '60s. Hell, from the movies we learned they all had beautiful daughters.
There was also no crap about the evils of public schools. My teachers, and my parents, grew up in the Depression and learned that teaching was one of the safest occupations to be in. People understood that the quality of a school depended on its students. No one thought that a troubled school in a poor area meant public schools in general were bad. My very large public school, in a nice middle class part of New York, beat the academic crap out of the local private ones.
If people who get 1600s on their SATs (or whatever the equivalent is now) got as many girls or boys as the football squad/cheerleader squad, the education problem would be solved, if you ask me.
I am talking about my own experience so I’m going have to disagree with you as to whether I know what I’m talking about. The helpful links you give do rank jobs by the undergraduate degree but click on your actuarial link and read the part about an additional 10 years of study and exams. It is a bit disingenuous to say you can make good money with a BS in subject X (with 10 more years of study). To become a well paid actuary requires a little more than a 4 year degree. They also don’t mention the number of jobs in those areas that are available or the number of people who got a BS in those subjects and didn’t ever find a job in the field. I am kind of wondering where they got some of their information because, if you click on the same site to see the average pay for a mechanical engineer for example, you will see that most jobs in the field do not pay what they show as the mid-career salary.
I don’t question whether a math/science degree is a useful starting point in a career. I do make a good salary, just not in my fields of study (math and physics). In fact, I work with a number of people with math undergraduate degrees who went into computers because they couldn’t find a job otherwise. If the US really needs math/science degrees as critically as I have heard for the past 40 years then you wouldn’t have to look up statistics on who makes the most money - mathematicians would rank up there with lawyers, doctors and athletes as one of those jobs that everyone knows makes a lot of money.
If you think I am just sour because I don’t make more money you would be (partly) wrong. I just want people to stop crying about the horrible lack of trained science people in the US. We will get more engineers (or whatever) when we pay the existing engineers (or whatever) enough to attract more people to the field - even if they currently make more than some others jobs.
shiftless, my statement above was pretty snarky but was sincerely not meant to be so. I didn’t notice when I posted earlier, but it is obvious to me now…
Regarding the rest of the content, I will be back later to respond…
Are there really that many unemployed IT workers, who are not unemployed by choice? I would suggest that it’s regional. A quickie search of CareerBuilder showed 2242 IT positions being advertised within 30 miles of Wash DC, where I live. That’s one jobs website, one location.
I’m constantly being pinged by recruiters looking to fill positions. I know I’m not the only one… Perhaps STEM needs are also regional?
I know that the unemployment is still a bit high (but not as bad as in some other countries, especially where it’s tougher to fire people). Seems to me, though, that there are still jobs out there. STEM (a new term for me, thanks) only makes sense if it translates into some skill that makes the company money; IT, medical, etc, right?
The fad for teaching students to “critically think” about nothing has been in full swing for decades, with none-too-promising results. An integral part of being able to approach a claim skeptically and reason about it is being able to command other facts to compare. It’s also not an either/or choice. Someone who knows how to apply logic and also knows the facts about evolutionary mechanisms is the most likely to respond appropriately to a creationist claim. Someone who only knows facts about evolution is in the middle. Someone who’s been taught “critical thinking” in a vacuum is the worst-prepared, because without a strong factual basis, “critical thinking” just reduces to “believe whatever you want and argue in circles with people who believe differently.”
Has it really? I didn’t have much emphasis on critical thinking in my education - mostly just teachers trying to cram us full of memorization for the state mandated proficiency tests.
I don’t think your definition of critical thinking is very useful or accurate. Approaching things critically includes the desire to try to evaluate any evidence or arguments in front of you objectively. If you don’t have the relevant facts about the issue at hand, you can try to learn them. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to teach facts in school or anything like that - just that there should be a great emphasis on how to think rather than what to memorize. You seem to be creating a non-existant dichotomy out of what I said.
Well, my general position on these standardized tests is that if your history class doesn’t include the super-basic information that the tests cover, you’re doing something wrong. People who have to change their usual lesson plan to make sure someone comes out of an 11th grade American History course knowing that Reconstruction was something that involved the South after the Civil War have no grounds to complain about being forced to teach to the test or make people memorize things. Of course an ideal class gives people both a good factual background and the ability to analyze and question those facts; the problem that I have found is that when people flog the “critical thinking, not memorization” horse, they almost always mean that they are OK with people coming out of classes knowing almost nothing besides how to waste their next teacher’s time arguing about things that are not opinions.
I have never encountered that position nor do I advocate it. Obviously teaching people facts is valuable - it’s just that in my educational experience, it was essentially a few years of cramming for a test, rather than learning anything. Almost no effort is spent trying to get kids to understand how to think and evaluate evidence rather than simply trying to cram some facts into their heads.
It’s a false dilemma (since there’s no reason we can’t have both), but I’d actually rather have them be empty headed but with an ability to understand where to go for information, and how to evaluate that information critically to establish a solid view, than to be able to recall various facts but not truly understand anything.