I know some BJ regulars get a bit tired of my constant media criticism. Here’s a perfect example of why I think it’s so important.
David Plotz has kicked off a big project dedicated to fixing the problem that we don’t have enough scientists and engineers in this country. He wants to stop the fact that we’re suffering from a lack of qualified STEM students graduating from our colleges. There’s just one problem: that is absolutely untrue. The basic premise of this grand project of his is simply not correct. Here’s Congressional testimony from Dr. Ron Hira, professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and someone who possesses both expertise and empirical evidence to support his claims:
At present, “there are too many skilled workers chasing too few jobs.”Focusing specifically on computer and mathematical occupations, “a field where Mr. Smith argues there’s a shortage of workers,” Hira also finds “unemployment rates…much higher than we would expect at full-employment.” These two fields, which constitute “the largest of all STEM occupations,” suffered “unemployment rates of 5.2% in 2009 and 2010,…more than twice the levels at full-employment” based on historical data. In fact, in 2010, the unemployment rate for computer and mathematical workers exceeded that of all college graduates by half a percentage point. The unemployment rates for electrical and electronic engineers and for medical scientists in 2010 were 5.4% and 4.1%, respectively, Hira writes. Again, he finds that, instead of any “broad-based shortage” in these fields, “there are too few jobs for those skilled workers.”After laying off 5,000 workers in 2009, Hira goes on, Microsoft has “an offer-acceptance rate [of] 93%, meaning that 93% of job applicants who were offered a position accepted it. A rate this high would indicate that Microsoft is experiencing little competition in attracting job candidates,” he states.
Arguments that students are not prepared for majors and careers in STEM are not supported by this data. The trends indicating increased proportions of students
majoring in STEM show that students are interested in and/or sufficiently prepared to major in STEM fields. The decline in the retention of the top achievers in the late 1990s
is of concern, however. This may indicate that the top high school graduates are no longer interested in STEM, but it might also indicate that a future in a STEM job is not attractive for some reason.The decline in retention from college to first job might also be due to loss of interest in STEM careers, but alternatively top STEM majors may be responding to market forces and incentives. From this perspective, the problem may not be that there are too few STEM qualified college graduates, but rather that STEM firms are unable to attract them.
Phil Perspective
David Plotz has kicked off a big project dedicated to fixing the problem that we don’t have enough scientists and engineers in this country.
You do know what he’s really trying to say, right? Is it one of Slate’s hobby-horses to push the idea that we need more Indian and Pakistani scientists to come here and work for peanuts? Neo-liberalism at its finest!!
ArchTeryx
What utter nonsense – I’ve been hearing that “we need more STEM graduates!” bullshit all my life.
And I’ve lived it. Took me most of my life to get a molecular virology Ph.D. and got postdoctoral experience at the NIH. Pretty good record – but a year long job hunt and over a hundred applications got me zero. Nada.
I’m currently working as a technician at the U of Michigan, making about half of what junior faculty make, with a year-to-year contract. Shortage of STEM graduates, my tailfeathers!
gwangung
Hm. ALso consider a lot of applied and pure math grads are being hired by financial companies, at big bucks, to create models for the 1%.
Marc
Freddie, this is odd. You’re not addressing his actual points, instead focusing on things he is not saying.
Here is the relevant quote:
“In 2010, only 4.9 percent of American jobs were in science and engineering, down from 5.3 percent in 2000—the first such decline since 1950. Recent studies, including this one, warn that we’re falling behind the rest of the world in innovation and education. Science test scores are stagnant, and a majority of American eighth-graders score below proficiency. U.S. companies are building factories overseas because they can’t hire enough competent engineers at home. And many of our best mathematical and scientific minds are snatched up by Wall Street: Instead of paying smart kids reasonable wages to design drugs and engineer cars that benefit almost everyone, we’re paying them unreasonable wages to develop financial models that benefit almost no one.”
Your points could be useful addressed to someone else, but you really shouldn’t attack people for points that they don’t make. A lot of mathematically oriented people really are drawn out of the sciences and into useless finance jobs. A large fraction of our doctoral programs do have shortages of domestic applicants (which is made up for by a large influx of foreign students.) And it is becoming more true that the scientific center of gravity is migrating away from the US.
Job statistics in a recession address some things, but they do not capture everything. I usually agree with you, but think that you’re simply doing an apples and oranges argument here.
gwangung
@Marc: @Marc:
Hm? My understanding that the thrust of Plotz’ work is to work on the supply of majors. That particular approach is not what’s fitting the reality. Why shouldn’t that be criticized?
El Cid
Perhaps too many of the current STEM crop are blacks, women, gays, libruls, and Al Gore cult enviro-whackoes, so maybe once they purge the STEM’s of the impurities, we’ll all be back to 1950s Bell Labs quality.
WB
In pretty much the same boat at ArchTeryx. Just finishing my PhD in biomedical sciences, and having serious trouble lining up anything for when I graduate. And I’ve seen first-hand many new “faculty” at my institution that are merely year-to-year contract “instructors” with no benefits and relatively lousy pay, and have waited in those positions for 5-10 years for a real career position.
For years now the sentiment among my peers here is, unless you plan on doing something “non-science” with your science degree, you’re in for a very hard road. There’s simply no demand for scientists.
Marc
Because his point – that we lack *domestic* applicants for postgraduate training of scientists and engineers- is, in fact, true. Now we can decide that we can import international talent and rely on the people who don’t return home. But the job numbers for college graduates – when many of the positions require postgraduate education – are only tangentially relevant to training PhD scientists, for example. And the pool of qualified domestic applicants is shallow in a lot of postgraduate programs.
JustMe
@Marc: Your points could be useful addressed to someone else, but you really shouldn’t attack people for points that they don’t make. A lot of mathematically oriented people really are drawn out of the sciences and into useless finance jobs. A large fraction of our doctoral programs do have shortages of domestic applicants (which is made up for by a large influx of foreign students.) And it is becoming more true that the scientific center of gravity is migrating away from the US.
The reason there are a shortage of domestic applicants for science graduate school is because the jobs aren’t there on the other side– at least not the sort of jobs that pay well enough to make graduate school worthwhile. Having more Americans fill those spots in graduate school will just end up creating a lot of Americans with advanced degrees that can only be used for low paying jobs.
Training more people in STEM won’t help: US companies would prefer to hire STEM majors overseas because in the US, they either want more money or would prefer to get a job in finance than in the sciences.
gaz
As far as accepting positions at MS, I was one of the other 7%’ers – three times, and I didn’t regret it in any of those cases. One was a research position. Too bad it was in social computing. I wasn’t particularly interested in that, and there’s not enough horizontal moves from department to department in R&D over there (I’m not sure if that’s still the case).
In any case, I’m sick of I.T. and not looking at going back. I’ll still do some of it within my local community, and for orgs like the Boys & Girls club, but that’s about the extent of it.
I.T. isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For the most part, the people that think it is have probably never worked in those particular trenches.
And in any case, Plotz sounds like a putz. It’s not like you even need a degree to go into I.T., or to go as far as you like in it if you have the raw talent and build experience off of that. As I’ve said before, it’s the new vocational trade.
Barry
@Marc: “A large fraction of our doctoral programs do have shortages of domestic applicants (which is made up for by a large influx of foreign students.) And it is becoming more true that the scientific center of gravity is migrating away from the US.”
This has been covered before. The reason is that Ph.D. programs in science and engineering were the first to be truly globalized. US-born students had options which didn’t include 5-7 years in a 30% pass program to hunt for jobs which didn’t exist.
Marc
You’ll get more scientists if you make finance jobs less attractive, and science jobs more attractive.
What is the alternative proposal here: advocate for fewer science majors in universities? As opposed to having people do what else? What are the unemployment rates for graduates in other fields and for non-college graduates? In short, *alternatives* please, not pot-shots.
stickler
Some people seem to be talking past one another here. Is the problem that we (the USA) aren’t turning out “enough” STEM majors? Maybe, but the unemployment rate seems so suggest it’s a hard claim to prove.
Could it also be the case that US corporations can’t hire “enough” American STEM majors AT THE MISERABLE WAGES THEY CAN IN INDIA? Sorry for shouting, but the above quoted article seems to be just one more in a long, long line of BS arguments which essentially blame the victims of wage stagnation, instead of blaming the perpetrators.
Those are two different questions, and given the behavior of our corporate masters since about 1980, I know which answer I’m leaning toward.
Litlebritdifrnt
This is all wrapped up in the “everyone must go to college and get a degree” bullshit. It is about damn time that the education system placed as much emphasis on VOCATIONAL education as it does on college prep.
ArchTeryx
@stickler: The other side of that is the endless state budget death spirals of the last 30 years. As support for state universities – the second leg of the three-legged STEM stool – dropped, the number of tenure-track faculty positions plunged. And for the survivors, more and more of their salaries were expected to come from “soft” – i.e., outside – grant money.
Then along came the Republicans…
JustMe
@Marc: I’m certainly not going to argue that more people should study journalism to make our country more economically competitive.
Marc
This is shaping up to be a dialog of the deaf. The opinions of people actually training graduate level scientists, or practicing scientists, probably won’t matter here.
For example, we saw a dramatic increase in quality of the graduate applicant pool in the year after the financial crash (in a good physical sciences program.) We obviously don’t know what we’re talking about.
Virtually all of our PhD graduates over the last decade have good jobs. But they’re mostly not professors (60% still in the field), so there is no use to apply.
Seriously – PhD scientists have strong employment histories, and make good salaries. The fact that everyone doesn’t get to be a Harvard professor, or that academic job prospects are a lot worse in the humanities, doesn’t change that.
Carry on.
gene108
@gwangung:
It’s a chicken-egg situation. Why set-up job openings for STEM graduates, when there aren’t enough STEM graduates? Why study STEM, when there aren’t job openings?
This is where a focused government policy would really help get industry and academia on the same page for everyone’s benefit.
@JustMe:
It’s not that jobs don’t pay well enough, it’s the fact a Master’s in Electrical Engineering really isn’t going to do much more for your career than a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering.
The value addition of a STEM graduate degree isn’t marginally significant enough to make Americans want to get those degrees.
There’s nothing wrong, with having foreign STEM grad students either. It’d be interesting to see how many Americans have won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics, who were foreign born. The number would be significant.
That’s keeping innovation within U.S. borders.
Also, too the disparity between what people in IT get versus something like engineering is playing a big role in the lack of engineers. If a computer science guy isn’t any smarter than you, why bust your hump in engineering for 50%-75% of what the IT guy gets?
gaz
As I recall, the MBAs started exploding around the same time that Wall Street was so deregulated as to make anyone with an IQ above 50, a nice suit, and a few connections obscenely wealthy.
Maybe if we re-regulated Wall Street, prosecuted the fraudsters for fraud, and maybe even * gasp * imposed some limits on the ridiculous compensation packages the clowns get, the rest would at the very least, begin to sort itself out in the end in terms of the degrees people pursue. * shrug * I don’t know. It’s just an idea.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Marc:
I do not know about other fields but the unemployment rate for law graduates has skyrocketed in recent years. I read an article two years ago that said there were 100 jobs created in the legal field in August of that year in the whole of the US, the same year that 45,000 students graduated law school. We have a Notre Dame grad working at our local DA’s office and her salary is being paid by the college, just so they can report better hiring stats than other colleges. Once the 6 months of salary runs out she is gone. There are lots and lots of law grads that are still unemployed/employed in other than the legal field four years out of law school.
ornery_curmudgeon
some BJ regulars get a bit tired of my constant media criticism
Not me … I’ll take ‘media’ bashing over pet pics, thank you. The media is the root of the misinformation epidemic.
Amanda in the South Bay
I think a part of the problem is the term STEM to begin with. Really, what most people talk about are the T jobs-meaning IT,software engineering, etc. If you graduate from college with a BS in CS and look for a job as a developer, you really aren’t in any competition (or really in the same category) as S and M grads. And heck, has anyone done any research on what the job market is for traditional engineering disciplines, like civil, mechanical, chem, etc?
I dunno, getting a job in Silicon Valley as a dev or IT drone has nothing to do with post-graduate science training. Really, a lot more granularity is needed in these discussions.
JustMe
@Marc: Not everyone can go into the sciences. The sciences require a certain level of quantitative talent, dedication to hard work, and a certain length of time spend in school/training. If you have that talent, background, work ethic, and willingness to invest time training, you can get a much, much better return on your investment doing something else, which better employment prospects. This isn’t about finding middling students who would otherwise be communications majors and point out that they’d have better future prospects with a science degree. It’s about finding dedicated talent and trying to convince them that their future would be better if they got a Ph.D. in microbiology rather than go into management consulting. And convincing them of such a thing would be completely dishonest.
Fezzik
Let’s get to the heart of the matter: there needs to be more DEMAND for STEM graduates, not in terms of salary but simply applicable jobs. If we had our priorities straight in this country, we’d be running an Apollo-style program for energy and infrastructure. If we were doing that, then demand would go way up, and so would the people entering those majors. This is not rocket science. ;)
gaz
@gene108:
FTFY
Amanda in the South Bay
@gene108:
I dunno about that-a lot of jobs you get with a BS in more traditional engineering disciplines pay pretty decently. Maybe not “developer at Google” rates, but still pretty damn well (and those kind of jobs are more of an outlier in the big picture). Also, I don’t think hte kind of people who go into civil engineering, for example, are the kinds of people who are normally attracted to CS.
Fezzik
Follow-up: getting a J.D. right now is probably the worst possibly educational decision you can make. See Paul Campos’ series of posts over on LGM blog if you don’t believe me.
Getting a social sciences or humanities PhD is right up there (I know, I have one which I am currently unable to apply to anything but the most haphazard of contract work). But at least with this there are “transferrable skills” and I’m not $100k + in debt.
Keith
Last thing the world needs is a bunch of people being pushed into programming. Smartphone apps are shitty enough as it is.
Martin
Ok, but this is a shitty analysis of the US economy as it assumes it’s zero-sum. One of the principal roles for engineers in our economy is innovation and job creation as a result. Every successful tech startup succeeded on the backs of engineers in jobs that didn’t exist prior to the startup. That is, engineers often create their own jobs out of nothing but demand for new products, and in turn create new jobs. All of those jobs that Microsoft had no problem filling came out of this process.
Let’s take the interest in Apple bringing manufacturing back to the US, which came up again just last week. When Apple pretty much fully committed to keeping their manufacturing in China, one of the key problems was getting enough industrial engineers to ramp up and maintain production. Apple estimated they needed 8700 industrial engineers to oversee 200,000 production workers. Apple now has over 700,000 and would need closer to 25,000 industrial engineers. The US only awards about 4,500 industrial engineering degrees annually. If Apple presented this demand to the US labor market, the supply would take 6 years to arrive. That 8700 estimate came in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced, which was only 5 years ago. Apple would be completely fucked if they had relied on the US to meet their demand, even if schools were willing to increase enrollment and create new programs, it’d still take 5 years to turn out graduates.
But here’s what Apple’s CEO said just the other day – and he’s not the only one saying it:
Now, tool and die is just one component of this, and involves more than just engineers, but it’s ultimately going to be an engineering driven industry and everyone from Ohio to Texas knows that it’s a industry that’s in trouble in the US. But you’re not going to get teams of engineers from China or Germany coming to the US to build that industry out. They’re going to build it out in China and Germany.
And the ‘fundamental changes in the education system’ is the complete unwillingness of the US system to treat 2 year engineering programs as worthwhile for students and for investment in. We’ve got a notion that any school lacking a division 1A sports team is shit, and that 2 year degrees are only worthy for truck drivers and bookkeepers. And that too needs to change. We don’t need 4 year degrees everywhere, but we do need more than high school. But we are completely, totally, unquestionably failing to recognize that problem or to act on it.
Marc
@JustMe:
The job satisfaction for pure research is real. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that everything is about money. I wouldn’t trade my job for a finance position regardless of the salary I was offered. But it is true that the best jobs are extremely competitive. So you need to have clear options for people that don’t include running a big lab at an Ivy League school.
But, seriously, isn’t the attitude that you describe itself a huge problem? If we funnel most of our creative people into socially harmful activities like financial games, isn’t that a serious social problem that we should tackle?
Bob
Ah, one of my betes noires, the “STEM industry”. Mediocre students are being encouraged by politicians, educators and administrators, to major in STEM – they will not find jobs, it is a fraud for them.
We need more good STEM students though, we need them to be highly trained with intellectually challenging, rigorous course work, and those mediocre students, trying their best, but encouraged by educational administrators and politicians, wanting everyone to succeed, are watering down the project. Good students need to know what they need to know, and they need to be challenged, or else they can’t compete for good grad school positions much less professional positions.
Science and math are hard work. The culture has given young people the message that they can succeed with “smarts” and “attitude” rather than study. The cultural leaders are clowns – back in the 60’s the scientists, and scholars in general, were culturally celebrated (not auctioned off to the highest corporate bidder). The days of easy jobs are over and, except for med school, no one knows what to do about it.
Science, math, computers, are subjects that are an “international game” and students instinctively know that it’s dangerous to compete with several billion people that are more motivated, harder working, just as smart as, and willing to work for less than, you. The 40-50K starting jobs after 5 and 6 years of postgraduate work (if you’re lucky) cannot be expected to draw the best and the brightest, and industry will not raise salaries when there are many good international students out there.
If you want to help our kids and our country out, make sure the support is there, with special programs at all levels of education – grab those kids, give them after school clubs, special classes, summer camps – and then college scholarships, and sufficient graduate funding so that every good student can get support. Without the funding to back it up, it’s all hot air. And don’t pour those funds down rat holes, funding crony projects created simply to get grants. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all a political/educational conspiracy to extract money so a bunch of people can get elected and others (sometimes the same people) make money.
And, I don’t know how to do it, but reduce the media emphasis on clowns (political clowns, entertainment clowns, business clowns, media clowns, they’re all over!) and increase it on substance and science.
Otherwise just relax about STEM, there are plenty of good international students, we’ll save a lot of money by getting them here on the graduate level, having their home countries pay for their prior education.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Maybe Apple shouldn’t have moved its manufacturing overseas to begin with, so there’d be a healthy domestic demand for people with IE degrees.
JustMe
@Marc: The job satisfaction for pure research is real. But if those jobs don’t exist, people are going to do something else. Sure, one might choose a pure research job over a finance job, but a highly talented person willing to work 80 hours a week is going to take a finance job over a perma-postdoc job or a technician job.
What you might be saying is that we should have more people go into STEM careers to support someone else’s job satisfaction in a pure research career. And that’s just silly!
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay: Median salary for engineers is about $80K – over 50% higher than the national median. Average starting salary for BSEEs is nearly the national median for all workers. Engineering reliably pays higher per degree and years of practice than most other fields of study.
And it’s a perfect counter to Plotz statistics. He’s assuming an elastic market for engineering jobs based on acceptance rates but failing to explain why BSEE salaries are ahead of all other non-professional degrees. If we’re going to accept an economic model to justify labor demand, than we can’t just ignore salary as part of that economic model. Median salary suggests that demand is consistently outstripping supply. And engineering salaries are not inherently high due to some invisible hand force as you can easily watch engineering salaries plummet when supply outstrips demand as happened after the dot com crash. And we’ve seen civil engineering salaries predictably fall and rise based on demand as well.
schrodinger's cat
Well that is all well and good but Freddie’s new hero, Hira, wants to make it tremendously more difficult for the said international student to be able to get a temporary visa to work here or God forbid get a Green Card.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay: It was a catch 22 for them. Had they not moved it, they would have gone out of business, and there’d be nothing today to debate bringing back to the US. And an entire segment of the economy should not be dependent on one company. Talk about too big to fail. But go ask the big 3 about the real challenges about finding qualified workers in the US. Go ask Microsoft who does all of their manufacturing in China. Or Motorola.
The US managed to keep durable good and some heavy manufacturing in the US, but completely dropped the ball on retaining anything which was even marginally technical or in a fast-moving industry by being glacial in the pace of keeping educational programs in touch with technological advances (how many mechanical engineering programs still lack digital control instruction?) and by running educational systems that are incredibly inefficient at turning out such workers. Consider that it takes a minimum of 5 years to get a student from application to degree. The entirety of Apple’s manufacturing growth started 5 years ago. They went from tens of thousands of workers to ¾ of a million in that period. Even if they had kept their manufacturing in the US, they’d have had to bring in tens of thousands of IEs on H1B visas just to meet demand.
Hoodie
The number of STEM graduates is only part of the picture, because most graduating engineers don’t know jack shit about how to design and produce real products. What I’ve seen from my IP clients is that a huge amount basic product and production engineering moved offshore over the last 15 or so years. A lot of the knowledge in those areas is gained on the job, rather than in undergraduate or graduate classrooms. The offshoring means lack of opportunities to develop that kind of expertise domestically, so the majority of the people having those kinds of qualifications are increasingly not Americans. Case in point, my cousin is production engineer for an old line US industrial manufacturer. For the last 15 years he’s been building plants in Asia. His company hasn’t hired any new engineers the entire time, and they have no one in their engineering department under 50. He says that, after he retires, the only folks who will know how to do what he does will be Chinese.
Dang, see Martin hit on the same topic. He’s dead on.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Well, that’s the whole fucking point, big business thinking only about the bottom line, not with you know, helping to keep manufacturing here. Its not just Apple, its the whole load of PC makers.
Martin
@Bob:
And then go back home and build the industries that we aren’t building here. The single biggest driver of the current technological shift has been touch screens – starting with the iPhone and continuing with the iPad, and these are increasingly moving into things like cars and the like. Virtually none of that R&D and manufacturing is done in the US. A lot is in Korea and Japan and a surprising amount is originating in China. Those could be US jobs. It’s not like we don’t have a decent semi industry here – Intel has done a good job on that front, and even companies like Samsung have fabs here in the US, so we’re capable of doing it, but we’re a non-entity in that industry.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay: But Apple was literally going out of business. They were weeks from bankruptcy. They moved more out of desperation than anything else. And then when they looked at coming back, there was nothing here – there was nobody to hire to do it.
Consider that the current production model employing nearly a million people just for Apple is almost certainly going to shift to automated manufacturing and assembly. Apple’s already investing massively in CNC, and all of that equipment comes out of Germany and Japan. And following that will be automated assembly once the robotics are capable of working on that scale (consumer electronics tend to be too small and require agility for robotic to currently do the work) they’re going to replace those almost-million workers with a gazillion robots, and the jobs we’ll be looking at are engineers to keep those in operation and the workers back up the chain that produce the robots. But again, the US is a non-entity in robotics, and is still doing jack shit to prepare workers for automated production. The next phase will replace a lot of skilled, but non-college educated workers with a lot of college-educated ones, and those jobs could be here in the US, but they aren’t going to be, because we’re again doing nothing. My guess is that China will produce those workers with Japan and Germany picking up the bulk of the higher level engineering. They’re building the educational programs now. We aren’t. Not only did we miss the last manufacturing shift, we’re set up to miss the next one.
elm
Plotz doesn’t seem to have a coherent thesis.
Who the fuck cares.
That sounds like there is not enough demand for science and engineering employees.
That’s not great, but not relevant to the topic. If only 5% of U.S. jobs are in these fields, then proficiency of the bottom 50% of students is hardly relevant.
I’ve never heard that one before. U.S. companies build factories abroad because they can pay people peanuts in China and Vietnam, not because there’s a shortage of engineers in the U.S.
He never demonstrates that there’s an under-supply of scientists, programmers, technicians, and engineers in the U.S. If anything, he suggests that there’s insufficient demand for them.
At the same time, all of his proposed solutions are things intended to drive up the supply of scientists & engineers, which is actually easy to solve. Pay scientists and engineers more.
Rafer Janders
@WB:
I’m curious, as this is not my field: but why is that? What’s causing the lack of demand? Is this a short or a long-term trend?
slim's tuna provider
you’d think that if there was such demand for geeks that people would be building special science and math private schools… which they ain’t.
also, i must again stress the idiocy of lumping scientists, physicians, engineers, coders, and IT guys in one bucket. one of my brothers is studying to be a doctor, the other a scientist. they have completely different, almost opposite intellectual strengths, and that is why they chose their future professions. they both had to do some math and science to enable their choices, but being a doctor is “curing living, suffering people that you (mostly) cannot see inside of” and science is “trying to show that certain stuff has certain predictable properties”. as different as clams and sturgeons.
JustMe
Plotz appeals to that ever-American claim that “education can solve everything!” It’s a way of shifting the blame and shifting the responsibility for “doing” anything entirely on the backs of the dispossessed. It also allows us to avoid having the government do things with which we are uncomfortable, like blatantly engaging in any kind of industrial policy. The amount of political will and capital that would have to be expended to rebuild our engineering, manufacturing, and research infrastructure would be huge. It’s easier just to throw money at “research” and fund some more educational programs and hope that everything will work itself out. And if it doesn’t, you can criticize the unemployed and underemployed scientists and engineers for not taking enough responsibility for their careers.
PIGL
@JustMe: depends how you measure alternate futures, of course. If your only metric is “make more money” then of course you are correct.
elm
@Marc:
There’s good reason why it’s true. Graduate school is a poor investment for a great many people.
I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Computer Science. I like the practical and theoretical aspects of the field. I would enjoy pursuing higher education in the field and I’m sure I could handle it academically.
But I’ll never do it.
If I had an M.S. or Ph.D. rather than my B.S., I’d earn approximately 0% more in private industry. I could teach at a university or apply for postdoc positions, but I’d earn even less in those positions than I do now.
And in order to get that pay cut, I’d have to forgo two or more years of income and pay for tuition and fees, which would wipe out all of my savings.
Only a fool would sign up for that deal.
elm
@PIGL: Pursuing higher degrees has both direct costs and opportunity costs, so it’s pretty reasonable to look at whether or not more education is going to pay for itself or not.
JustMe
@PIGL: How nice for you that you are willing to work very very hard and very long hours for jobs with much lower job security and lower pay. And we’re not talking 10-20% less money. We’re talking substantially less.
Getting a Ph.D. if you are a foreign student from China or India is a great deal– it allows you to come to the USA, your skills become specialized enough that you have a great likelihood of being able to stay, and even the low-paid postdoctoral positions and other 3rd-tier research staff jobs will provide you with total lifetime earnings that are several times higher than what you could ever hope to achieve in your home country.
But if you’re American, you could simply become a nurse, or even a surgical technician and do just as well as those perma-postdocs or lab techs.
There just aren’t that many pure research positions out there. And it seems like everyone and his brother has a Ph.D. in neuroscience.
Mike G
And here’s a big clue right there. Neither Germany nor Japan are low-wage countries, yet they have maintained technical proficiency in these fields because they don’t have the same strip-mining, hire-and-fire MBA mentality you find in the US. Industrial projects requiring long-term thinking and a multi-year payback are an uphill battle when you have a shortsighted management relentlessly focused on quarterly numbers.
Engineers are roadkill in this environment — companies won’t put any effort into on-the-job training and they get laid off at the drop of a hat — and they know it. Most of these “We don’t have enough engineers” articles sound suspiciously like spin for the “We need more H1-Bs (to drive down salaries)” corporate tools.
Seanly
There are several problems with just saying that we need more STEM majors.
A) Most folks mean we don’t have enough domestic STEM undergrads. This is true though the issue isn’t as severe as made out. There is some disappointment that a lot of graduate students are foreign-borne and get some of the best engineering graduate education & research in the world and then take that knowledge out of the US when they return home.
Sub to A) – we are lacking diversity. There are lots of women & minorities compared to 30 years ago, but it’s still much a smaller percent than it should be.
B) Due to specialization, it is very difficult to transition between different branches of engineering & science. For instance, people often talked about using all the out-of-work aeronautical engineers on, say, infrastructure. Not very realistic. I’m a structural engineer who’s worked 99% with bridges. I could do roadway design, but would have a steep learning curve if I were to do structural design on a building. Forget cross-training or career switches.
C) Future market. I was unemployed for 7 months just last year & ended up moving 2500 miles for a job making about 5% less. I landed on my feet. The job market is tight right now in the infrastructure market. But part of the complaint about lack of STEM is that in 5 or 10 years, we’ll have a serious lack of talent. I don’t agree that we’ll need another 100k civil engineers in 10 years, but if we get back on track fixing our infrastructure, we will need more engineers.
D) Another issue is that if we don’t keep up a steady supply, there’ll be a lack of knowledge. Engineers don’t come out of college knowing everything. When the infrastructure market was very bad in the late 70’s & early 80’s, the state DOTs had hiring freezes & such. Jump forward to the early 2000’s and they had a lack of well-qualified replacements as folks retired. We’ll see the same thing in another 10 to 15 years as a results of the last 5 years practises at the DOTs.
I don’t agree that we need to drive up STEM numbers way up. I want there to be a bit of need for engineering services so that the money stays good & that I don’t ever get let go again.
My favorite part of the STEM battle is that many of the academics and professional organizations (such as ASCE to which I belong) seem to think that the key to increasing STEM majors is to make engineering a 5 year program in college. I think that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but if they drive even more American-born students away from engineering, I will be well-employed until I can retire at 67 (or 85 if the R’s get their way).
Martin
@elm:
Fallows did a whole series on this very issue when he was stationed in China. Reliably, the justification for almost every company that moved production to China was time-to-market. That was overwhelmingly more important than labor costs. That was in fact Apple’s argument for setting up iPhone production in China in the first place.
Now, there’s a very valid argument whether an employer should be able to put 8,000 workers on the job within 30 minutes or not. But let’s take a more worker-friendly view and give them 2 weeks instead of 30 minutes. You’d be hard pressed to even hit that target here in the US. And it’s not just Apple that is in China for those reasons:
China’s physical market concentration in cities like Shenzen allow something that’s simply not possible in the US – at least in terms of manufacturing. Not only can they easily (and cheaply) move components from one place to another, but they can more easily take labor trained in one factory and hire them in another, without trying to move the person’s entire family. That’s why tech is so concentrated in the bay area, even though it’s absurdly expensive to hire there. Google’s loss becomes Facebooks gain – they’re practically in the same school district. And we’ve seen it employed here in the US as well – it’s why Detroit is the Motor City, and why so much finance is in Manhattan – we employ the same market concentrations. China, though state support, has simply ramped it up to 11 and done it on a scale we’ve never even considered.
Blaming the problem solely on cheap labor simply denies the roots of the problem. Sure, cheap labor is nice, but compared to time-to-market it’s almost trivial. Apple loses more in a week’s production than it would cost them to cover a years worth of US labor over Chinese labor. Clearly labor cost isn’t the problem – it’s getting that production up a week faster that is the key. And it’s a real problem too. Apple (or anyone else) can’t make their product until the component makers they rely on have made theirs, so the faster you can close that gap from component acquisition to production, the better positioned you’re going to be. And the really successful companies are, frankly, great at that.
YoohooCthulhu
@Marc:
That depends on your definition of “strong” and “good”. Compared to the broad employment pool, other bachelor’s graduates, high school-level education people–sure. But the comparisons STEM Ph.Ds are generally making for themselves are to other highly trained professionals, where it’s lacking. There’s also a generational component, which is that starting salaries for new Ph.Ds are much worse recently than they used to be (similar to starting salaries of B.S. graduates in moderate-demand fields, around 50k). This would be fine if Ph.Ds were 22 year olds; but they’re most likely to be around 30, with all the life changes and increased income stresses that requires.
Martin
@Seanly:
Indeed it is. They’re mainly looking to bridge the lack of MS degrees by collapsing MS and BS into one program. It’s the kind of thinking that has killed off the 2 year programs, and making the pipeline even longer and harder to complete isn’t going to improve matters.
foo
@Phil Perspective:
You are speaking of Indian (the “Indo” in Indo-European non-muslim science oriented people) and Pakistani (the largest anti-science and Islam-religion based perpetrator of anti-India and anti-west terror in the world)…in the same sentence, as if they are in any way equivalent ?
Weird.
YoohooCthulhu
@Rafer Janders:
Declining R&D investment by pretty much every American company. Struggling state budgets that decrease funding for and thus number of academic research positions. Struggling federal funding that cuts funding for the grants necessary to actually perform the research. And increasing specialization, such that people who are trained in one field (say cancer research) are not considered to be competent for working in another field (say, metabolic diseases) even though the techniques and problems are largely interchangeable.
Dr. Squid
@ArchTeryx: I was doing postdoc work for almost 10 years until I lost a job, then it took a year and a half just to get another postdoc job that paid less than I got in ’04. Now I’m out of that one, so no more science for me.
Anyone in the market for a tech writer? At least writing a PhD thesis and being part of 30 papers prepared me to write something.
foo
@stickler:
You are talking about Indian STEM majors taking away US jobs ?
Weird.
India has approx 0% of hi-tech manufacturing jobs that have taken away millions of hi-tech us jobs over the past 20 years.
I bet you love getting that Dell or Apple on sale don’t you ? I can’t stop laughing about how pathetic it is to type on use an entirely china made computer (who you gleefully support) to complain about Indian stem majors and the evils of outsourcing (remember: india 0%, china 100% of manufacturing jobs, the jobs that required infrastructure, the ones that are impossible to move around quicky and the ones that really matter).
But people like you are exactly what is wrong in the country, the ones who would never pay $4000 for a computer, which is what the real cost is, when environmental and other standards are taken into account, as they would be if manufactured in the USA.
Hurry on now, I heard a macbook air is on sale this week.
JustMe
@Dr. Squid: Don’t worry! The lack of jobs and money are more than made up for by all the job satisfaction you received from Pure Research™!
elm
@Martin: That’s completely unresponsive to what I wrote.
What I quoted originally was:
Fallows’s piece says very little about Chinese engineers in China and lots more about foreign engineers. There’s one mention of Chinese engineering services and two mentions of Chinese engineers near the end.
Nor is that Apple anecdote about the availability of engineers. It’s about the availability of armies of factory workers who live at their factory and work for bad pay in shitty conditions. Tim Cook’s “flexibility” is actually 8000 Chinese factory workers being woken up at midnight to make his products for a couple of bucks per day.
Dr. Squid
@JustMe: High-quality snark aside, 18 years of Pure Research™! doesn’t pay for 3 kids under 4 like it used to.
I do get the impression though that corporate America thinks that those of us in academia are skill-less lumps not worth looking at. You just look at the ads and they seem to want to perpetuate the corporate circlejerk by looking for those with really specialized skills and not paying them dick. And only employed people need apply, of course.
RSA
Here’s something, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 2010-20 projection of growth across different occupations:
(Scroll down to Chart 5 for a graphical representation.) This is the second largest category, after “Healthcare and social assistance”. Elsewhere in the report: “Employment in the information sector is projected to increase by 5 percent, adding 140,300 jobs by 2020.”
We could argue about the relationship between these categories and STEM (they should be tightly coupled), and whether STEM workers are being paid enough for what they do (they’re not). And maybe I’m interpreting these projections incorrectly. But they seem to be part of a reasonable argument that we need more STEM graduates. At least, as much as any other kind aside from healthcare graduates. (The only STEM field I know anything about is computer science, and I’m no expert; there are some obvious cycles, dependent on technological advances.)
Martin
@elm:
Look, I know exactly how many IE degrees are granted in the US each year, and it’s half of what Apple needed just for the iPhone rollout. Before you can even address the question of ‘where to we get the workers in the US’ you’ve failed the ‘who can we hire to even set this up’.
Again, keep deluding yourself that this is solely a wage labor issue. It’s not. And there are tons of companies that will illustrate it in perfectly clear terms.
elm
@Martin: Your claims would be a lot more convincing with evidence.
It’s also unclear why you’re comparing unrelated quantities: annual graduation numbers in the U.S. on one hand against the total number of people you’d need to employ to “set this up” (you phrase it as though that’s temporary employment).
Is there some barrier to employing both people who graduated this year and also some who graduated in prior years?
Anoniminous
@Martin:
I would argue the US never had the “amorphous,” ad-hoc, manufacturing web needed for today’s hi-tech manufacturing environment.
MosesZD
The problem in science is that government is the one that funds most of it. Which means that after decades of reductions/flat funding, getting a grant is twice as hard and only about half the scientists who should be getting money are getting money.
mclaren
But you need to ask why a serious journalist would get the story so wrong. And the answer, when you delve into it, turns out be blindingly obvious — it’s because the giant corporations have bombarded America for decades with the Big Lie that we lack enough trained STEM graduates, the better to import dirt-cheap engineers and science PhDs from China and Thailand and Singapore, who will eagerly work for $7 per hour plus a green card.
J-1 and H2B visas are used to displace expensive American workers with dirt cheap foreign STEM graduates. The evidence is overwhelming. This Economic Policy Institute study proves it.
You can only get information this wrong, from journalists this serious, as a result of a massive 30-year-long disinformation campaign by major corporations at every level of the media, government, and the schools.
mclaren
@Martin:
Since Martin is a manager, he is by definition a sociopathic compulsive pathological liar. Everything he says is provably false. A tiny team of engineers designed Apple’s iPhone and iPad and iPod. You could fit ’em all in a classroom.
Only by redefining “engineer” to mean “guy who sits in a slave labor tinshack factory in coastal China sticking scratchproof glass piece onto iPhone chassis” can you make Martin’s obvious and flagrantly false lie seem like anything remotely close to the truth.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Mike G:
This goes for civil engineers, too. When the housing market tanked, it took land development with it, and anyone who designed anything that had to do with moving dirt. Highway, water, sewer, utilities, etc.
mclaren
Martin needs to crank up his lying skills. He really needs to explain why the data in this Economic Policy Institute study is fraudlent and made up.
But of course, Martin won’t provide us with any evidence to shore up his baseless assertions. Instead, he’ll merely double down and scream insults as well as screaming more lies…standard operating procedure for a manager.
Studies have shown that corporate managers have on average lower IQs than the workers they manage. Martin offers us a superb case study.
Martin
@elm:
You think Apple should be able to suck up 100% of US graduates for, what, 5 years? Even NASA + Boeing doesn’t get more than 10% of aerospace graduates annually. You’re assuming that workers have no free will here, or that there is no other market for these employees. There is – a pretty big one. Median salary for an Industrial Engineer in the US is already $70K. There’s already a pretty decent demand for these workers.
@mclaren:
The tiny team is actually a few thousand people taken all together including software, so no. Even the design of the case involved more than a classroom worth of engineers when you consider the materials engineering, the antenna design and testing, and so on.
But you seem to think that you can back a dump truck worth of semiconductors and batteries (from different manufacturers, no less) into a shack with nearly a million workers and they’ll magically turn out what are considered some of the best assembled devices available. Not to mention the CNC milled body, the liquidmetal components, and the various other things that no other company is doing. Yeah, there are thousands of honest to god engineers involved in the production. They even have a title’s like, shocking I know, Production Engineer. You also need factories and production lines designed and laid out, how each step of production will work, in what order, using what processes. And no sooner than your get that set up for one product than you need to start setting it up for the production of the product that succeeds it.
Another Halocene Human
@stickler:
Late to thread, but it’s not even the wages because Americans DO apply for the jobs with relatively shit wages. It’s that H1B visa fire-at-any-time candy that they’re looking for, the treat-you-like-shit-and-fear-no-lawsuit. They like being able to hang the threat of deportation over employee’s heads.
Also, the qualified STEM peeps in Ausland have pretty much been exploited, but stupid manager types keep attempting to outsource for negative returns. There’s something to be said here about stupid PHB fads.
Another Halocene Human
@mclaren:
And not only that, they broke American law because, by law, they are supposed to advertise these positions to Americans first. They would use tactics like tailoring specific requirements to the H1B they already had lined up to hire (of course, many times the H1B’s credentials were bogus) and then rejecting all the resumes that didn’t meet these very specific and unusual criteria.
Not all H1B hires are the same but knowing how some of them rolled in academia, I have no doubt they simply flouted this law entirely because they only wanted employees on easily-revoked visas.
Another Halocene Human
@MosesZD: Innovation is going by the wayside because only established labs can get grants (and the PI spends all her time trying to get grants) and young scientists are cut out, or labs doing novel things.
This is really, really bad for American competitiveness.
Another Halocene Human
@YoohooCthulhu: R&D by corporations sank with the corporate tax rate.
Clean Willie
“What I have described to you is the inevitable outcome of our present Free Trade policy without Socialism. The theory of Free Trade is only applicable to systems of exchange, not to systems of spoliation. Our system is one of spoliation, and if we don’t abandon it, we must either return to Protection or go to smash by the road I have just mapped. Now, sooner than let the Protectionists triumph, the Cobden Club itself would blow the gaff and point out to the workers that Protection only means compelling the proprietors of England to employ slaves resident in England and therefore presumably–though by no means necessarily–Englishmen. This would open the eyes of the nation at last to the fact that England is not their property. Once let them understand that and they would soon make it so. When England is made the property of its inhabitants collectively, England becomes socialistic. Artificial inequality will vanish then before real freedom of contract; freedom of competition, or unhampered emulation, will keep us moving ahead; and Free Trade will fulfil its promises at last.”
—Shaw
Merryl
As a PhD student in the Ocean Sciences for the past 6 years (did a brief stint in the Physics department for 2 years prior to this), I can say from personal experience and the experience of my peers that the problem (for our field, at least–extrapolate from this however you like) is most definitely NOT that there aren’t enough qualified domestic applicants to our graduate program.
Over the past 5 years, we’ve seen state funding to our department shrink, as well as an increase in the difficulty of getting grants from places like the NSF and NOAA, leading to fewer TA and GSR positions. Colleagues ahead of me in the program have graduated and then stayed on as lab techs while continuing to search for postdocs and other positions, sometimes remaining at the University for more than a year after graduation.
I’m personally investigating some positions in industry that are mostly unrelated to my area of expertise (physical oceanography, remote sensing, data analysis), but it’s very very bad out there, in terms of finding jobs.
So at least from my perspective, the problem isn’t a lack of qualified graduate students, it’s a dearth of open positions within our field, exacerbated by a decrease in funding for training said grad students. I’d be hard-pressed to recommend applying to our program to any aspiring undergrad, simply because it’s mostly turning into a long-term investment with no substantial payout on the horizon (the satisfaction of finding out new things in Pure Research is fine and dandy, but it doesn’t really do much to help pay the rent).
bemused senior
Martin is describing the current state of US electronic manufacturing infrastructure vs. China correctly, but of course this didn’t happen by some magic spell. I have been an engineer in Silicon Valley since the 1970s and used to do a lot of work on real-time embedded system software for companies building hardware in the valley. SV had the kind of infrastructure that Martin and others describe in China. Gradually however companies built plants outside the US to take advantage of cheap manufacturing labor. Inevitably those industrial engineering jobs moved too. Now the components are manufactured in Asia, and it is even difficult to get English language data sheets for the newer components for designers working here, as I very recently observed in a consulting project my firm worked on. There is more impact than just the jobs. If you have read about the problem of counterfeit components in equipment bought by the US government, consider the security implications of this for our military and infrastructure. China would not need to write a virus like Stuxnet to attack our hardware systems. They build them. The eradication of a US electronics manufacturing infrastructure is a serious blow to our country, yet the corporate tycoons see it as nothing more than getting their parts and assembly (and now software) cheaper.
Cerberus
It’s part of a con they’ve been running for awhile to convince university-level students to care more about the sciences than humanities, not because of a genuine interest or because of the values of sciences, but because that’s the “valuable majors” that will “pay off in the job market”.
So yeah, you get kids to oversaturate the science degrees, thus devaluing one of the last avenues of middle class advancement and as a bonus, they themselves undermine and ridicule the humanities as worthless because of a perceived lack of financial value and thus don’t learn about patterns of social manipulation, bigotry, and dividing the public against itself.
Now that kids have been graduating and realizing the jobs are the same whether they get a science degree or not and letting the younger groups know, there’s been an extra push to reinforce the “science (but only if it’s an engineering degree) good, humanities bad” dichotomy.
bemused senior
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/y-big-story-why-t-job-210829464.html Timely news article.