The STEM crisis

This post is my opinion on this article: The STEM Crisis Is a Myth.

Despite professional, scientific phrasing such as "Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle", I suspect that this article may not be completely trustworthy. In the name of skeptics everywhere, let us dive straight into this conspiracy theory, and see whether it makes any sense.

The first time that the article tries to explain why the STEM crisis is a myth, it uses self contradicting logic. It picks someone's estimates for the number of new STEM bachelors and the number of new STEM jobs, and shows that not all of these bachelors will be able to get a job. This would make a lot of sense if the article hadn't mentioned just a few paragraphs earlier what a stunningly high percentage of STEM bachelors don't work in STEM jobs - 20% abandoned the field less than 2 years after graduating (and another 38% in the following 8 years). So why bother comparing these total numbers which are already known to be irrelevant?

According to the next paragraph, a third of recent CS graduates aren't working in their profession, and a third of those say that the reason is a lack of jobs. So basically, out of a group of young inexperienced workers fresh out of an unknown educational institute, only 11% say there is a lack of jobs. These numbers do an even better job of showing how irrelevant the previous claim is - most of the people who don't work in that field don't even do that as a result of a lack of jobs!

Point for thought: has anyone checked the numbers of bachelors of various arts who work in their fields? Animators, movie directors, musicians? How about historians? English majors? The article says that "Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job". The use of the word "surprise" here is entirely unsubstantiated, and I suspect that it was picked mostly for effect.

One paragraph I found worth focusing on is the one that says: "That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen". By what criteria exactly does anyone make that comparison? In CS alone, as a sub-field of STEM, the differences in salaries across time and space are absolutely staggering. The job offer I am probably going to accept tomorrow pays a whopping 40% less than the job offer I am almost certain to get later this week. And keep in mind that I myself am neither a complete newbie nor a rock-star developer; top software developers easily get a monthly salary 4-5 times higher than the lowest rank of code monkeys. So what conclusion is anyone expected to draw out of some average numbers? If the price of labor has not risen, is it because the ratio of supply and demand has stayed exactly the same, or maybe there are simply many places that now require the aforementioned code monkeys? Perhaps due to financial considerations it has become impractical for many places to pay rock-star developers quite as much as they used to, in a way that some may even refer to as the "bursting" of a certain "bubble"? Such averages tell us nothing of value here.

Moving on to the explanations about the conspiracy itself, we see sentences like "... an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense". Yes, this is absolutely correct, in the same way that petrol is widely viewed as an important engine for transportation: accurately. With all due respect to philosophy majors and certified homeopaths alike, their professional contribution to the overall well-being of a country is somewhat less than that of your average engineer. Sure, if 100% of the population are scientists, this may cause some friction, but we're hardly at a point where we have to worry about that sort of freaky phenomenon.

This approach is, in fact, seen more than once in the article. "Without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow their worldview—and their career options", apparently. It continues to quote the CEO of Lockheed Martin, who tells us that while his engineer employees are all excellent engineers, "the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly". Forgive me for getting all scientific here, but that's not particularly controlled or randomized, is it? The ones who advance in that organization are clearly still engineers. And what's the connection between non-STEM studies and broad thinking/ clear writing, anyway? Are you trying to say that a STEM degree actively inhibits one's abilities in the fields of broad thinking and clear writing?

This, sadly is where the article ends, without having provided any real basis for its fantastic conspiratorial claims, leaving me quite unconvinced.

This is a good place to note that this article makes the same mistake as literally every other article I've ever seen on this subject: the implicit assumption that graduating with a STEM degree qualifies a person to be a valuable STEM worker. This assumption is what we in the biz refer to as "bullshit".

I obviously lack the tools and data to exactly quantify the amount of STEM graduates who are incapable of actually working in the position they studied for, but from what I've read in data compiled by bigger men than I, the percentages are in the high double digits. If we focus on my particular field, software engineering, I can count at least 3 sources that claimed that over 80% of the people they interview for software development positions fail in the most basic of code-writing tasks. This pretty much invalidates any numeric comparison that anyone can ever make between the number of STEM graduates and the number of STEM workers; if, as was mentioned above, 11% of STEM bachelors say that there is a lack of jobs, isn't is likely that these are the lowest 11%, the ones wholly unqualified to work in their field? The ones who just barely passed their exams without understanding any of the material? The ones who graduated from the highly professional college that Uncle Joe runs in his basement? Possibly the ones who cheated their way to the degree? Not all of these industries are lousy automated production lines; a company that needs 1 skilled engineer cannot possibly fill that position with 1000 unskilled ones.

This is the real reason for the perpetual shortage of STEM workers. In industries where skill matters, anyone who lacks these skills simply doesn't exist. As long as jobs remain empty, no amount of unemployed STEM graduates would be evidence that there is no shortage of workers.