Fascinating piece on STEM studies at the University of Washington

I thought this long article in the Seattle Times about the increase in STEM majors at the University of Washington was really interesting, if a bit odd in places. Here are the core facts: 

...The number of history majors nationwide is down about 45 percent from its peak in 2007, and the number of English majors has fallen by nearly half since the late 1990s, according to research by Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University who has been documenting the trends. 

Since 2008, on the UW’s Seattle campus, the number of students studying in STEM programs (science, technology, engineering and math) has increased 37 percent. Among all three campuses, it’s up 50 percent. On the main campus, non-STEM programs have declined by 13 percent. 

At UW Seattle, there are now almost as many students studying in STEM programs as in non-STEM programs. That’s a dramatic flip: Just 10 years ago, there were twice as many students in non-STEM majors as there were in STEM majors....

Because humanities classes cost less (professors are less costly, no startup packages for new laboratories, etc) and some unique budgeting rules in Washington, this shift is costing the universities money.

...It’s not true, Cherniavsky says, that there’s no job market for graduates who can write, do critical analysis or have the ability to view knowledge from diverse ethnic and cultural perspectives — a concept known as multicultural literacy. “It’s not that the corporate world has no use for these skills,” she said. Instead, companies tend not to pay much for the jobs that require them, she said.... 

...Both Microsoft and Amazon offer mentorships exclusively for College of Arts & Sciences majors. “We are using these programs not as recruitment tools, but as myth-busting,” said Matt Erickson, manager of college-to-career initiatives in the College of Arts & Sciences. 

Erickson said the UW is sometimes guilty of reinforcing the idea that only STEM degrees lead to good jobs in Seattle. But UW humanities majors have found jobs at every big tech firm in Seattle — including majors in history, English, art history, sociology, German, French and linguistics. They’ve found roles in human resources, community engagement, customer outreach and marketing, he said.

Microsoft President Brad Smith has also written about the need for tech companies to hire liberal-arts majors, particularly in artificial intelligence. “As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important,” Smith wrote in an introduction to the book “The Future Computed.”

Brad Smith is well-known as a proponent of tech-related immigration, i.e. H1b visas. I am grimly amused that Mr. Smith is both a big fan of saying that there is a shortage of STEM workers in the United States, and that we don't have enough* liberal arts majors as well.

Overall, I don't think it's a surprise at all that people are piling into computer-oriented fields. What is the field that seems to have stable, well-paying jobs that lead to seeming riches? It seems like it's computer-related stuff more so than any other field.

*Okay, he really doesn't say that. 

A couple of pieces on the "skills gap"

A good piece from the Los Angeles Times' Michael Hiltzik: 

Alice Tornquist, a Washington lobbyist for the high-tech firm Qualcomm, took the stage at a recent Qualcomm-underwritten conference to remind her audience that companies like hers face a dire shortage of university graduates in engineering. The urgent remedy she advocated was to raise the cap on visas for foreign-born engineers. 

"Although our industry and other high-tech industries have grown exponentially," Tornquist said, "our immigration system has failed to keep pace." The nation's outdated limits and "convoluted green-card process," she said, had left firms like hers "hampered in hiring the talent that they need."

What Tornquist didn't mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people. 

The mismatch between Qualcomm's plea to import more high-tech workers and its efforts to downsize its existing payroll hints at the phoniness of the high-tech sector's persistent claim of a "shortage" of U.S. graduates in the "STEM" disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics....

Actions speak louder than words.

Also, an interesting piece from the Boston Globe's David Scharfenberg on the "skills gap":

But critics insist there is a superficiality to those surveys. Ask any chief executive if he has trouble finding workers, and he will say yes. 

MIT labor economist Paul Osterman and then-doctoral candidate Andrew Weaver conducted a more detailed survey of manufacturers in 2012 and 2013 and found most were seeking basic skills: reading a simple manual, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. And while a substantial minority, 38 percent, sought more advanced math skills for their core manufacturing jobs, most cited disciplines offered at a decent high school — algebra, geometry, trigonometry. 

Weaver noted that employers, for the most part, are simply not demanding the high-level talents that the skills gap rhetoric would suggest. And policy makers err, he said, when they argue workers are falling behind. “The standard story that you hear a lot is ‘American workers just aren’t prepared for the 21st century . . . [they] just haven’t gotten the memo that they need to get a bunch more education,’ ” he said. The reality, he added, is that workers are, by and large, developing the skills they need to fill the available jobs. 

And when Osterman and Weaver asked managers the proof-in-the-pudding question — do you have any long-term vacancies? — more than three-quarters said no. 

Back at his humming Oxford factory, Kenneth Mandile reported no long-term vacancies of his own when the Globe visited. And after a lengthy chat in a small conference room off the factory floor, it was clear his story did not quite match the skills gap narrative. His difficulty finding workers who can operate the firm’s Swiss screw machines is not the result of some broad, new mismatch between 21st-century jobs and the skills of the workforce. It is, instead, a niche problem that goes back decades. 

These days, Mandile says, his chief concern is not technical skills; he can teach those in-house. It’s finding workers with a good attitude and a good work ethic. The problem, he suggests, is not mechanical, it’s cultural. And that may be harder to fix. 

I hadn't heard of the Osterman/Weaver study; I'll have to look it up. Good stuff, more soon.  

David Harwell and the STEM panel: no hope

From a random clicking around, I happened upon one of my old bugaboos, Bayer MaterialScience, and a YouTube of flogging of the "STEM crisis" in a December 2013 panel. If you'd like to listen to it, there's over 90 minutes of self-congratulatory hogwash from a variety of people who claim that there is a vast shortage of STEM workers. I was pretty irritated at it, but then I heard this exchange from Dr. David Harwell, an American Chemical Society staff member, asking the panel a pretty darn good question (starts at 1:21:17 on the video): 

David Harwell, American Chemical Society: Thanks for the conversation, it's been great. I'm David Harwell, from the American Chemical Society. It's National Chemistry Week, so yay! 

Our unemployment rate in chemistry is 3.5% - that's good, until I look at new graduates. So new graduates, new bachelor's in chemistry are over 16% unemployment, new PhDs, 9%. 

So I'm not so worried about those more experienced people -- we've been able to place them. What I can't place are the new grads because I think that we overshot, there's this miscommunication that you've been talking about, where people have been encouraged and there's uh, for these students, or students that can't find a job, they feel that there's a broken covenant. Often times when I'm counseling them, they're saying "You told me" -- I didn't tell them anything -- but somewhere along the way, somebody promised them, "Get a degree in STEM and you'll be taken care of." And so they end up going for their master's or their Ph.D. because they can't get a job and at least they'll get paid in grad school in chemistry. That's the good thing about chemistry. 

So how do we, how can we address this - you have two lost boys, I have 6,000 lost students. How do we address their needs, can we get them back into the workforce somehow? Is there demand for them, or is it only at the manufacturing level?  

Laurel Rutledge, VP for Human Resources at Bayer MaterialScience: www.bayerjobs.com (laughter) I'm like, you know, chemists, you know seriously, I'm thinking about some retirements that we've had and some very serious changes in our workforce and Bayer is a company that's 150 years old, 150 years of making science make sense, that's Bayer. And so, we have, and it's a place that people don't leave. They come to Bayer and they retire from Bayer. What means is that if you look at the way the generational curve is happening, we are approaching a point in time where we are going to have more people retiring as fast as we need them. So, I'm not sure what's happening everywhere else, but we are looking for people daily. Daily. Entry as well as experienced, bachelor's, 2 year degrees, master's degrees, Ph.D.s, we want 'em. We want 'em.  

Nicole Smith, Research Professor and Senior Economist: And you know, it's not much consolation to tell them, well, your 16% is much lower than the 27% for some other degrees. But, what I would say is that you need to extend your search. All chemistry majors don't have to become chemists and first evaluate what your competencies are, sit down and you can go to the end O*NET site, discover what your knowledge, skills and abilities are, what your interests are and look outside of that. 40% of jobs require STEM competencies today that are not your traditional chemist, mathematician, actuary job. They're way beyond that, so just broaden that set and you can have a lot of opportunities outside of the chemist occupation. 

I've heard Dr. Harwell talk a few times, but I don't think I've ever heard him grok the #chemjobs problem for younger chemists as well as he does here. "Broken covenant" is a great way to put it. And the answers that he gets are appalling -- the VP for Human Resources basically tells him that, from where she sits, he's wrong, and the economist basically tells him to tell students to look elsewhere (gee, no kidding.)

I don't know what kind of long game the STEM shortage myth makers are playing, but it is clear that (much like many of us) when they are confronted with contrary evidence, they dismiss it pretty easily.  

STEM is TE: salary edition

Interesting graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that Matt Yglesias has highlighted. I've annotated it. Fairly obvious that, in terms of salaries, STEM is TE (and a little M.) 

Morning tidbit: 538 on why STEM is TE

Ben Casselman, an economics writer for 538, Nate Silver's data website, has written "an economic guide to picking a college major". Here's a rather lovely paragraph:

All STEM fields aren’t the same 

Politicians love to tout the importance of science, technology, engineering and math majors. But when it comes to earnings, the “S” majors don’t really belong with the “TEM” ones. Engineering majors are nearly all high-paying. So are most computer and math majors, and math-heavy sciences like astrophysics.³ But many sciences, particularly the life sciences, pay below the overall median for recent college graduates. Students who major in neuroscience, meteorology, biology and ecology all stand to make $35,000 or less — and that’s if they can get a full-time job, which many can’t. Zoology ranks as one of the lowest-paying majors of any category, with a median full-time wage of $26,000 a year. 

3. There are a few exceptions to this. A few technology-related majors, such as “communications technologies” and “computer networking and telecommunications” are relatively low-paying. But these are mostly lower-level, technically oriented majors. 

His data set comes from the New York Federal Reserve. Here's what they had to say about chemistry:

Interesting data, more later. Read the whole thing. 

Why STEM is TE: inflation-adjusted wages edition

Many of you have read Michael Teitelbaum's article about the lack of a STEM shortage. I've actually purchased and mostly read his book, "Falling Behind?" Naturally, I enjoyed it, but I found it a bit weak in spots. Here's a link to a YouTube video of an Economic Policy Institute colloquy between Dr. Teitelbaum and number of prominent scholars about the book and science/technology workforces issues in general, including a very interesting critique of the book by Jonathan Rothwell, a research associate at Brookings.

My impression of Dr. Rothwell is not particularly positive; I found him irritating in the debate between himself, Salzman, Atkinson and Hira that I've posted on before. But I enjoyed listening to his portion of the colloquy, especially once I turned off the ARRRRGH part of my brain and just considered his data. Most of his data comes from US government datasets. I don't agree with many of his conclusions, but it is important to engage with the best of your opponent's data. 

Anyway, I found this graph by Dr. Rothwell particularly demonstrative of the difference in real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) wages over the years between people working in certain sectors of the computer industry (in this case "computer software developers") and chemists and biological scientists. It's apparent (to me, anyway) that when people say that STEM workers make good salaries with strong wage growth, they just mean TE. 

Shortage Watch: AWIS

From a minor kerfluffle on Twitter this morning, an interesting June press release from the Association for Women in Science's executive director (emphasis mine): 

STEM Worker Shortage can be Tied Back to Lack of Family-Friendly Workplace Policies
On June 23, 2014, the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) joined the White House Council on Women and Girls, the Center for American Progress, and the Department of Labor (DOL) for the Working Families Summit in Washington, DC.  The goal of the Summit was to foster a conversation regarding policies that will benefits the working families of today. In order for America to remain competitive in today’s global economy, we need to transition workplace environments into the 21st century through work-life balance and good employer practices. AWIS couldn't agree more with this goal and frankly it’s time for elected officials and employers to recognize the needs of the families of today. 

It’s no secret that the United States is facing a worker shortage in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). There are more opportunities in the STEM fields than ever, but where are the workers? AWIS recently conducted the largest international survey of working researchers to study their approaches to work-life balance, career decisions, and career conflicts. AWIS surveyed more than 4,000 researchers in both academic and corporate settings from 115 countries around the world. We found that due to rigorous schedules and outdated work policies, which often conflict with personal time and family life, both men and women are leaving the STEM fields...

It's always interesting to me how thoroughly entrenched the STEM shortage myth is in elite circles.

[FWIW, I don't really have a problem with organizations advocating for better family-friendly policies - it's just a goofy newshook, that's all.] 

Slate/NSF: The modal outcome of a chemistry Ph.D. is a postdoc

Credit: Jordan Weissmann

Jordan Weissman has tabulated the NSF's Survey of Earned Doctorates' "employment status at graduation" data into a really great set of graphs at Slate. He did it for life scientists, chemists, physicists (holy moly, look at all them physics postdocs), mathematicians, computer science Ph.D.s and engineering Ph.D.s. It's really worth a look. His comments on chemists:

The near-term picture for chemists isn’t a whole lot rosier. Again, postdocs are hovering above 40 percent. Employment, after popping in the ’90s, fell to a plateau around 25 percent in the ’00s.

Of course, if you look at the percentage of employed computer scientists and engineering Ph.D.s, you will soon find yourself saying "STEM is really TE." Here's how Weissmann puts it:

One of the problems with the entire concept of STEM is that the acronym combines several distinct disciplines with different job markets, and encourages politicians and journalists to talk about them as if they were one and the same. 

I couldn't agree more. The term "STEM" makes us stupid and mashes together categories that don't belong together. 

Like music to my ears: Vox on STEM

From the comments and also via Twitter, Vox's Danielle Kurtzleben looks at the STEM shortage debate and comes away with a couple of great quotes. From STEM shortage skeptic Hal Salzman:

..."STEM makes no sense as a category. What you have is science and engineering, and then you have this IT labor force," says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "It's a non-differentiated category that makes no analytic sense." 

[snip]  

"Frankly, if you're talking about he jobs that a graduate of a chemistry or biology program can get without getting a Ph.D. or an M.D. aren't necessarily the best jobs out there," says Salzman. Likewise, he adds that even looking at "engineering" isn't useful — a petroleum engineer is going to have far different opportunities than a civil engineer....

Yes!

Also, this interesting quote from Matt Sigelman, the CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, the company behind the data that I posted about yesterday (emphasis mine):

"Biologists and computers scientists are pretty far from one another, and it's not clear that grouping them together as STEM jobs is useful in itself," says Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass, a job market analytics firm that helped produce a recent Brookings report on STEM job vacancies. But the classification does have another use, he says: "STEM is a useful categorization when you start thinking about it as a range of skills to have in the job market." 

[snip] 

"If you're an anthropology major and you want to get a marketing job, well, guess what? The toughest marketing jobs to fill require SQL skills," Sigelman says. "If you can ... along the peripheries of your academic program accrue some strong quantitative skills, you'll still have the advantage [in the job market]." Likewise, some legal occupations (such as intellectual property law) and maintenance and repair jobs stay open for long periods of time, according to the Brookings report, if they require particular STEM skills. 

I mostly agree with Sigelman that quantitative skills are useful, but it seems to me (especially with the comment in the article about 'analysts') that the business world wants folks who have a general understanding of statistics and some coding experience. While I suppose that I could broadly refer to these as "STEM skills", I think that's not particularly helpful. Also, this helps explain why I believe that STEM is really TE ("T", in Mr. Sigelman's case.) 

President Obama: "I'm putting a big emphasis on STEM in part because we have a shortage"

From yesterday's Tumblr chat with President Obama*, an interesting section where he talked about "Why STEM?" (emphases mine) (ht @belehaa):

[E-mailed in question]: How can we promote growth in the STEM fields without putting humanities on the back burner? 

The President: Well, first of all, I want to say, I was a humanities major. So... I majored in political science, I majored in English. I was pretty good in math. I actually loved math and science until I got into high school and I misspent those years. And the thing about humanities was, you could talk your way through classes which you couldn't do in math and science, right? So a great liberal arts / humanities education is still critically important because in today's global economy, one of the most important skills you have is the ability to work with people and communicate clearly and effectively. 

Having said that, what is also true is that technology is going to continue to drive innovation and just to be a good citizen, you need some background in STEM. And we are not producing enough engineers, enough computer scientists, enough math teachers and science teachers, and enough researchers. And so I'm putting a big emphasis on STEM in part because we have a shortage, not because I'm privileging one over the other but because we don't have as many people going into the STEM fields.  

And it starts early. Part of what we're trying to do is work with public schools to take away some of the intimidation factor of math and science. Part of what we're trying to do is to make sure we're reaching to demographics that are very underrepresented. And, yes, I mean you, women. Girls are still more likely to be discouraged in pursuing math, science, technology degrees. You see that imbalance in Silicon Valley, you see that imbalance in a lot of high-tech firms. 

We're trying to lift up curriculums that are interesting for kids, work with schools in terms of best practices. One of the things that we're also discovering is that young people who have an interest in math and science, often times they're steered into finance because that's been perceived as the more lucrative option. And we're trying to work with universities and departments of engineering, for example, to help mentor young people to understand that if you look at the top 100 companies in the country, you've got a lot more engineers running companies than folks who have a finance background. 

So there are great opportunities. So that's one of the things that every young person should be thinking about: A) what's their passion - what do they care about? But they should also be taking a look at, where's there a demand? And frankly, if you've got a science or engineering background, the likelihood of you being unemployed is very low. And it doesn't preclude you from you know, writing haiku at some point and figuring out some creative outlet. But having that discipline and skill set is still going to be invaluable. 

This is a frustrating thing to hear from the President. I have my differences with him and his Administration's policies (perhaps not a surprise), but I think that he's an intelligent, honorable man who genuinely tries to do what he thinks is best for the country. Let's recap what he has revealed he thinks:

1. The country is "not producing enough engineers, enough computer scientists, enough math teachers and science teachers and enough researchers." 
2. The country has a shortage of STEM workers. 
3. This shortage has to do with students being discouraged from thinking about STEM as a career path, especially women.
4. This shortage is exacerbated by STEM students going into finance. 
5. If you've got a science or engineering background, the likelihood of you being unemployed is very low. 

Suffice it to say that my understanding of the bulk of the actual social science we have available is that there is little evidence of a shortage of engineers or computer scientists. I do not know enough about the number of science and math teachers in this country, so I can't speak to that.

But President Obama is apparently aware of the travails of lawyers, considering his statement in the next part of the conversation:

...by the way, we have enough lawyers. It's a fine profession. I can say that because I'm a lawyer. 

We all have our own perspectives, I guess. He's probably talked to a lot of law school grads who've had trouble finding work than unemployed scientists.

*Relevant section starts at 14:30, goes to 18:00. 

Some Terms Engender Madness: A contest

As you all know, I hate what the term "STEM" has become. Let me resummarize my position:

• Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics are distinct fields with their own definitions, traditions and employment needs. 
• Because politicians, businesspeople and education professionals simplify when they communicate,
  "STEM jobs" is the panacea for the world's economic ills.  

(You can really see this now with the term "STEAM", where Arts is trying to get itself some sweet corporate/non-profit cash by hopping on the bandwagon.)

Because I really dislike this obfuscation, I've decided to do what I can to destroy the term "STEM" through the use of humor. I am offering a certificate, a handwritten thank you note, a box of the finest Chemjobber business cards and a bag of hard candies to anyone who comes up with (by acclamation) the best alternate ironic, sarcastic abbreviation* for STEM. A few that I've come up with on my own: 

Stupid Terminology Excludes Medicine

Silly Thoughts Engineer Mendacity

Something That Excites Media

Stuff That Engineers Manufacture

Scientist Trends Exclude Money

Nominations/entries all week, I'll pick the 5 top ones next Friday morning and we'll vote then. Enter by e-mail, Twitter, comments on the blog, I'll take it all. 

Including health care as "STEM jobs" is a huge distortion

Thanks to a handy link from @belehaa, the US Census Bureau's definition of STEM, as it applies to occupations (emphases mine):

...In April 2012, the Standard Occupational Classification Policy Committee, a consortium of nine federal agencies charged with standardizing occupational definitions, issued a recommended STEM occupation classification. This classification places workers into three primary occupational domains: STEM, STEM-related, and non-STEM. STEM includes computer workers, engineers, mathematicians and statisticians, life scientists, physical scientists, and social scientists. STEM-related includes architects and health care workers. Non-STEM includes all other occupations. This classification is designed to make comparisons of the STEM workforce more consistent across federal agencies and organizations....

So, who do we have in the STEM PR wars this week? Burning Glass Technologies, which released this report on "entry level STEM jobs" this week, redefining "STEM" not as what the occupation is traditionally known for, but by the skills asked for in job postings:

...For this analysis, we have taken a job seeker- and student-centric approach to defining STEM occupations. We define STEM jobs as those that have substantial math and science requirements included within the standard course of training or as part of the qualifications that employers specifically request in postings. This contrasts with traditional methodologies which tend to focus only on jobs that are primarily engaged in scientific, mathematical, or technological activity.  

STEM jobs cover the following areas: Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Math (labeled here as Analysts) and Healthcare. Unlike many traditional definitions of STEM jobs, we have included those clinical healthcare roles which require that job seekers undertake substantial coursework in the biological sciences to qualify. Additionally, we have included a range of “analyst” jobs such as Data Analysts, Logistics Analysts and Business Intelligence Analysts, which call for significant mathematics training. These analyst jobs represent a far larger portion of the demand for mathematics skills in the labor market than traditional “math” roles such as Statisticians or Actuaries.  

In order to provide the most relevant comparison for job seekers, we compare STEM jobs that require a Bachelor’s degree or higher to all other jobs at those degree levels. We compare Sub-BA STEM jobs to other sub-baccalaureate jobs that typically require post-secondary training or provide career advancement opportunities.

Well, when you decide to include the one-sixth of the American economy that was more or less excluded before, you suddenly get very different results. Moreover, what is truly hilarious is that the "S" part of "STEM" gets really, really small according to their numbers*:

Credit: Burning Glass Technologies

What's more absurd, of course, is that when you broaden the definition of "STEM" and "entry-level", you start getting some really crazy things included:

To categorize medical assistants and registered nurses as "STEM jobs" is quite a stretch of the term "STEM" in my opinion. While, yes, nursing is far more biochemically-oriented than years past, I don't think nurses see themselves as "STEM workers." To categorize physicians (even wet-nosed new medical school graduates) as "entry-level" doesn't pass the laugh test. Moreover, that's one of the top occupations for this categorization!

Of course, the STEM shortage mythologists at U.S. News and World Report are there to happily transcribe, with the article titled "Report: STEM Job Market Much Larger Than Previously Reported":

The demand for students trained in science, technology, engineering and math fields may be significantly larger than previous studies have estimated, according to new data from Burning Glass Technologies. The new analysis of millions of job postings found there were 5.7 million openings in STEM fields in 2013, 4.4 million of which required at least a bachelor's degree and 2.3 million of which were entry-level jobs that call for less than two years of experience.  

"The market for STEM jobs is bigger, actually significantly bigger, than most other studies have reported in the past," says Burning Glass Chief Executive Officer Matt Sigelman. "We also found that graduates in STEM fields have much better prospects, both because they are competing for a large number of jobs...but also because they make substantially more."...**

I await the report from Burning Glass that reports that the market for professional football players is much larger than expected, when you include the Arena Football League and the possibility that entry-level football players can use their transferrable skills to sell insurance.

(There are other places where this redefinition has been used in the past -- Change the Equation, another pro-STEM PR organization is one of them. I addressed their attempt to obfuscate this issue in the past, also by slipping in the health care field into their calculations.)

Naturally, I find this extremely frustrating. That there are lots of high-paying jobs in health care is not news! That there are jobs that use math skills (like data analysts) -- also, not really news. And yet, our business, media and educational elites cannot bear to say what the data really shows: that most actual STEM job growth is in computers and other electronic/information technology, and that science has little to do with it.***

*According to Burning Glass Technologies, there were 6,807 entry-level chemist positions advertised online in 2013. Bluntly put, I don't believe it, but I haven't seen the data. (For example, how many of those positions are duplicated? What counts?)

**Read later in the article where he refers to CNC machine tool programmers as a high-demand field. No s__t, Sherlock. 

***That is not to say, of course, that we should stop kids who are interested in science from pursuing it. We should just quit lying to them about the opportunities available. 

Three dumb quotes from the Chronicle's article on the "STEM crisis"

There's yet another article discussing whether there is or is not a "STEM crisis." I don't have time to get into the details of the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Anft, other than to say that the usual skeptics (Matloff, Hira, Teitelbaum) are in there, as well as the STEM boosters (Carnevale, Atkinson.) It's the STEM boosters that I want to point out for ridicule (emphasis mine):

STEM majors, no matter where they work, in STEM fields or out, do better than other types of majors and tend to move into management pretty quickly," says Anthony Carnevale, a research professor and director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, which has published papers that point to a shortage of STEM grads. "Having experience in technical matters helps them land good non-STEM jobs. They might work in places like marketing or medical-device sales, where their technical backgrounds helped them get in." 

So, even if there were no STEM worker shortage, it still might be a good idea to graduate more science and tech majors? 

"That's about it," says Mr. Carnevale. "You have to produce STEM workers like crazy just to have enough of them in the work force. Unemployment rates for grads in those fields are lower than the overall national average for college graduates"—3.4 percent for computer and math grads, compared with an aggregate figure of 4 percent for all college grads, according to the Department of Commerce—so "STEM is still a place you go where you have a pretty good shot. But we don't want to overdo it. You don't want to pump a bunch of people out there who, in the end, have nothing to do."

Because after spending 2 years in the lab, there's nothing a B.S. chemist or a biologist wants to do more than marketing or medical-device sales.

From IT trade association head Robert Atkinson, no expressed concern about downward wage pressure in IT/computer science (emphasis mine):

"There's no question that to keep our innovative edge, we need more people coming into technology fields," says Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, an advocacy group that receives the bulk of its funding from tech companies. It urges the federal government to widen the so-called STEM pipeline from school to work. 

The wage issue shouldn't be used to discredit the idea of a worker shortage, Mr. Atkinson believes: "Companies can go overseas for workers, so wage growth in the U.S. is more limited." There will be work in IT for people with the right set of skills, he says, adding that lower wages probably won't keep them from accepting jobs.

[stunned silence]

He also makes less modest proposals—ones that echo the United States' longtime love affair with machines and material progress. That includes a desire to funnel college students into what he calls "more useful" majors. 

"We should be making some value judgments on what kind of people we'll need for the nation to move forward," Mr. Atkinson says. "The distribution of degrees right now is entirely up to students. Shouldn't we be steering them into degree types that are of more value to society, such as computer science or engineering? The American tradition is one of hard-core pragmatism. We're at risk of losing that, and we're in trouble now in regards to competitiveness."

You know, I don't typically say things like this, but if Atkinson actually said this, he's* what he said was really stupid. Jaw-droppingly stupid. I'd really like to believe in science and engineering as careers, but why would we be trying to force them into these careers? What more enticements can we offer them other than -- I dunno -- higher wages and more job security?

*UPDATE: 11/11/2013, 6:31 Eastern: While it may be a distinction without a difference, it was wrong of me and overly personal to refer to Mr. Atkinson as "stupid", as opposed to his statement. My apologies to Mr. Atkinson. Once again, though, I wildly disagree with his statement and its logic.  

Bayer/Change The Equation: there's a STEM shortage

Q: Is Difficult Recruitment Due to The Fact That I Won't Offer More?
Answer: A) No. B) No. C) Absolutely Not.
Credit: Bayer Powerpoint

Imagine my bemusement when I got an e-mail recently from a Bayer PR representative saying:

Dear Chemjobber, 

This week, Bayer launched its 16th Facts of Science Education Survey. I thought it might make a great blog for Chemjobber. 

Some story ideas: 

The STEM Workforce Shortage is NOT a Myth according to Fortune 1000 Talent Recruiters:

• New Hires with STEM Degrees are Difficult to Find

• Rising Demand and Fierce Competition for STEM Degree Holders

• Unfulfilled STEM Jobs are Bad for Business (lost productivity, limits business growth and lower revenue)

Of all the gin joints in the world...

Robert Charette of IEEE (definitely the new hotness of STEM shortage skepticism) has done an admirable job taking this Bayer/Change The Equation survey of Fortune 1000 recruiters apart already, pointing out that, while about half of the recruiters say that there having difficulties finding talent, half of them say that they don't. Of course, in the comments, a recruiter shows up to prove his point (emphasis mine):

I'm currently trying to recruit engineers (CS and EE) in both the US and the UK and am finding it hard to pull in good hires even at degree level. At least in the UK we can draw on talent pools elsewhere in the EU so we're doing a lot of hiring from Greece and Spain. 

And yes, we are having to offer more money, but this just draws the workers to those with the deepest pockets and doesn't address the fundamental issue of a lack of good STEM graduates.

To the deepest pockets -- for shame! I'd be crying, if I wasn't laughing.

I'd like to point out the Powerpoint presentation that Bayer offers has the slide (on the above right), which indicates that 94% of the recruiters interviewed blamed their issues with recruiting on not having enough STEM graduates. I wonder if there should have been a followup question about whether or not these recruiters felt that offering higher wages might work. (I also wonder if they should have asked if they were simply bad at their jobs, but probably 94% of them would have said "No.")

Finally, I want to point out that all of this nonsense about "STEM" is really about computers, information technology and engineering, not biology, chemistry or mathematics. See the above table, where TE makes up 75% of the expected job growth in "STEM degree" positions. Yet one more reminder of 1) how stupid of an overgeneralization "STEM" is and 2) how "STEM" is really TE. 

I like this study on the 'S' in STEM

Via Beryl Benderly at Science Careers, a very interesting report from College Measures, an organization affiliated with the American Institutes for Research (an organization that I can't really put my finger on, in terms of where they're coming from...):

Politicians, policy makers, governors, and many others trumpet the need for STEM education to feed the STEM workforce. Despite such rhetoric and clamoring, the labor market is far more discriminating in the kinds of degrees it rewards. Data from College Measures show that employers are paying more—often far more—for degrees in the fields of technology, engineering, and mathematics (TEM). Evidence does not suggest that graduates with degrees in Biology earn a wage premium—in fact, they often earn less than English majors. Graduates with degrees in Chemistry earn somewhat more than Biology majors, but they do not command the wage premium typically sought by those who major in engineering, computer/information science, or mathematics. 

...Because three states—Texas, Virginia, and Colorado—have sufficient numbers of students in large STEM fields, this study was able to explore the link between STEM education and first-year earnings. 

Overall, data show that graduates with degrees in the fields of technology, engineering, and mathematics (or TEM) experience greater labor market success than graduates in other fields and that graduates with degrees in science-related fields (or S) do not generate any greater labor market returns than, for example, the non-STEM field of English Language and Literature....

Obviously, I believe these numbers are true, but I would like a little more confirmation (not just 3 states' worth of data.) Nevertheless, I think this represents a core challenge to both academics and those concerned about the chemical enterprise as a whole. If young chemists are earning consistently less than young professionals in other fields, why should young chemists stay chemists? (Love of the field, I guess.) 

Ask CJ: Why are we telling people that we need more scientists?

Someone who happened on the blog via Google writes in:

I found your blog while doing some research into careers in the sciences for my [child.] My [child] is a senior in high school, and has really enjoyed and excelled at biology, chemistry and physics. 

[They] wants to major in college in some sort of science, and is leaning towards chemistry or  biochemistry. But what I keep finding in my research is how difficult the job market is for scientists. We keep hearing in the media, from the government and from our schools that the US needs more kids to major in STEM fields. Our school district just opened our third high school, specifically for STEM students.  

I wonder if you could address in your blog why it is that we are encouraging more kids to go into STEM majors, while the reality of the job market seems to indicate not enough jobs for our current scientists?

Here was my partial response:

...The answer to your question is that there's quite a difference between the need for more STEM training for K-12 students, and a need for more scientists/engineers/mathematicians. My standard answer is that we do not need more scientists; what we really need is more computer types, because that's where the projected job growth is supposed to be. (And, deep down, that's where everyone knows the jobs of the future are. If you look at your district's new high school, I suspect that it will be IT heavy.)  

(There is also the "we need more people to think like scientists" idea, which is usually what scientists mean when they agree with "more STEM training.") 

I think that no one (i.e. no politician) wants to say "We need more computer programmers, and more petroleum engineers", because it's not very sexy nor exciting. But if you say, "we need more cancer and Alzheimer's researchers", it gets people excited and it gets juices flowing in a way that no one can accomplish with the more complex truth.  

Also, the parent wanted to know how to get their child involved in academic or industrial internships. There are a variety of sources for these positions:

• Look online for local area companies/universities -- sometimes, they'll post listings. 
• Talk to your high schooler's science teachers; they may know of openings or organizations that look for summer students annually. (It's how I got my first two science internships.) Ask them to look, or ask their contacts. 
• Talk to science-related organizations (local American Chemical Society chapter, science museum, etc.)
• It's a shot in the dark, but you could always cold call/cold e-mail local universities to see if there are professors who might be willing to take on a summer student. 

Readers, any more ideas? This parent is in the Philadelphia area -- are there any good organizations around there that coordinate STEM (ugh, that phrase) internships? 

By the way, is dentistry a STEM field?

How does the Senate immigration bill (that has passed the Senate) define "STEM"? (oh, how I hate that term.) Here's the section that I found (page 661):

INCREASE IN ALLOCATION FOR STEM NON-IMMIGRANTS.—Section 214(g)(5)(C) (8 U.S.C. 1184(g)(5)(C)) is amended to read as follows:  

‘‘(C) has earned a master’s or higher, in a field  of science, technology, engineering, or math included in the Department of Education’s Classification of Instructional Programs taxonomy within the summary groups of computer and information sciences and support services, engineering, mathematics and statistics, and physical sciences, from a United States institution of higher education (as defined in section 101(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1001(a)) until the number of aliens who are exempted from such numerical limitation during 4 such year exceed 25,000.’’

In reading the Issa*/House Judiciary committee (?) version of the STEM green card bill, a slightly different version in a definitions section (page 6):

The term ‘field of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics’ means a field included in the Department of Education’s Classification of Instructional Programs taxonomy within the summary groups of computer and information sciences and support services, engineering, biological and biomedical sciences, mathematics and statistics, physical sciences, and the series geography and cartography (series 45.07), advanced/graduate dentistry and oral sciences (series 51.05) and nursing (series 51.16).

Is dentistry a STEM field? Nursing? Yes, they require a deep understanding of Science and Mathematics, but it is not what I consider Science, or Technology, or Engineering or Mathematics. Health care is its own field, with its own terminology (and its own immigration issues, I might note). It's all very exasperating to me.

This is why this term is so appallingly stupid -- for some reason, it means A Good Thing, and so all sorts of things get shoehorned into STEM.

[Hey, what happened to the biomedical sciences section in the Senate version? I gotta understand this stuff better.]

*Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), member of the House Judiciary Committee