<p>State legislators who want to cut funding in public university allocations for everything else but STEM (and football, of course) should read this:</p>
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Ironically the vigorous claims of shortages concern occupations in science and engineering, yet manage to ignore or reject most of the science-based evidence on the subject. The repeated past cycles of “alarm/boom/bust” have misallocated public and private resources by periodically expanding higher education in science and engineering beyond levels for which there were attractive career opportunities. In so doing they produced large unintended costs for those talented students who devoted many years of advanced education to prepare for careers that turned out to be unattractive by the time they graduated, or who later experienced massive layoffs in mid-career with few prospects to be rehired.
<p>As usual, an article that tries to suggest that all “STEM” majors are similar in labor market characteristics, even though that is not the case. This is true of both articles claiming that there is not a shortage and articles claiming that there is a shortage.</p>
<p>Also, information systems is a business major, not a “STEM” major.</p>
<p>My interest in the article is that it counterbalances two persistent narratives: 1) everyone should major in STEM because it’s a golden ticket to a job, and 2) nothing that is outside of STEM deserves public/taxpayer funded support because those are the only economically useful fields. </p>
<p>IMO, a problem with the STEM fields is that it seems that a lot of colleges and universities chase kids out of these majors of it with classes that are super demanding and competitive and a grading structure that is out of whack with the rest of the college. I’m not saying that the classes should be watered down, but the grading should be more on par with the rest of the school.</p>
<p>Seems that the opposite is more common on these forums. Go to the science major section to see persistent griping from biology and chemistry graduates about their poor job prospects, for example.</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf</a> indicates that humanities GPAs are about 0.3 higher than natural science grades, while engineering and social studies GPAs are about 0.2 higher than natural science grades. While that may be relevant to a pre-med or pre-law student who needs to grade-grub for the last 0.2 to 0.3 GPA to get into a medical school or a highly ranked law school, is it that big a difference for other students?</p>
<p>ucb – The article I read made clear that there is no one, homogeneous STEM labor market, and it explicitly said there are fields – albeit sometimes small ones – where labor shortages exist. And all it says about “information systems” is that it is a field where shortages may exist, and implicitly that people with science or engineering degrees might find work in it. Are you saying that’s not true? If so, that would seem to strengthen the case against STEM-emphasis.</p>
<p>Not sure which article you are referring to (the first one refers to high unemployment rate in information systems, while the second refers to high pay rate in information systems, so they do not exactly point the same direction). But information systems majors are typically housed in business schools, and they tend to be mostly business with lightweight technical stuff about managing computers. Because the technical skills barrier to entry into employment in that field is not particularly high, people from other backgrounds could enter employment into it based on self-educated knowledge (not unlike a lot of types of employment where graduates from unrelated college majors enter).</p>
<p>I was just talking about this yesterday with a friend of mine who was a headhunter for information systems jobs. It used to be an available career for an accountant or a teacher with some computer networking skills, but that is changing. Most require a CS degree, experience, and a list of programming languages. She was getting lost in the jargon of all the technical requirements and switched to executive recruiting.</p>
<p>My observations are pretty much what the story says. Engineering salaries have dropped 30% over the past 30 years. Fewer can afford to retire. Companies will not hire older engineers. Some new graduates get no offers. A minority is doing really well and helps perpetuate the myth. None of this would be true if there were a real shortage.</p>
<p>This becomes an issue with companies bringing in H1B workers instead of hiring new American grads or older American engineers, claiming that there is a need for this because we are not graduating enough engineers. IEEE has been on this for years. (And not to mention outsourcing…)</p>
<p>I would also keep in mind that the first iteration of <em>What Color Is My Parachute</em> was addressed to newly unemployed engineers. Old news indeed.</p>
<p>I don’t want the bridge I am crossing to be designed by someone who got grades in line with the rest of the school. I want to know they earned the “A”.</p>
<p>He cites 4 studies to refute the claims about labor shortages and yet NONE of them actually refute the claim.
The closest one refutes the claim that the US is falling behind other countries in STEM graduates.</p>
<p>Seems that if we can get the outsourcing companies out of the H1-B visas, most of the problems surrounding the H1-B visas in particular will go away. Of course, that won’t prevent companies from thinking that they can run overseas to the cheapest offshore outsourcing companies they can find, but that often backfires because the cheapest outsourcing contract employere come with quality to match (good employees in those same countries cost more).</p>
<p>What you’ve seen in the rock star engineer salaries is salaries for those who quit every year or two, spend lots of time to stay current, and work insane hours among other things. Salaries for the rest of us who stay with a company for decades, stay current, and do interesting things that nobody outside our immediate boss knows about are not quite as lavishly rewarded. </p>
<p>Salaries have not dropped per se but the value added by engineers (in the light of outsourcing, vendor engineering, and other schemes) has dropped. Thirty years ago being an engineer meant something much different than today.</p>
<p>I am married to a chemical engineer (ivy league creds), had an electrical engineer father (MIT) and uncle and have two mechanical engineer (Cornell) best friends. Engineering degrees are not the golden ticket. Once the engineer is a decade into the career, salary growth tails off rapidly and layoffs increase. IEEE magazine just did an extensive report on the STEM myth six months ago and there is little data to support the ongoing drumbeat of “we need more engineers.” Companies need more engineers they don’t have to pay well… they don’t need them badly enough to pay good, career long salaries. The high point is getting a decent salary upon graduation. Downhill from there. </p>
<p>That is true for any job in which you are not improving and adding more value every year.</p>
<p>There was a Q&A at my first job where some bold person asked “I saw the average raise last year was X%. How can I earn more than that?”</p>
<p>The answer was that they have to make sure they are adding far more that X% of value over what they are doing today. That value has to be what is valued by the boss, has to be above the average that everyone else is adding, including aggressive new hires. If you are an average employee, surprise, you get an average raise. And those averages go down over time since they want to highly motivate the way above average employees since they add more value, are harder to replace, and have more options for leaving the company.</p>
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<p>That is an odd statement. You get paid based on what you did that year - not based on a long term career salary. </p>
<p>It is more like: You get paid based on what you will do for the company in the near future, i.e., next year.</p>
<p>Because of this, many engineers will focus their energy on building up their job skills that may be useful for their next task that may be assigned to them in the same company, or even next job in other company. The immediate manager’s job is to prevent this frrom happening, to the neglect of the current project. The higher level managers (esp. those mostly with the MBA title – often obtained with company’s dimes – so they care deeply about building up their own resume using the company’s resources also) often do not know much about what is really going on at the engineering level.</p>
<p>@sylvan8798, my freshman physics instructor (at an Ivy with one of the best physics departments in the world) filled out the information in a student guide on courses. I will never forget his answer to the question about grading philosophy: He wrote only, “This is a course in which we don’t give a D student a C.” I’m not criticizing humanities courses, but how many humanities profs would have this be the only statement of grading philosophy. It was a course that weeded out prospective majors from others. You won’t be surprised to hear that it was a very hard course. I think I got an A, but I am better at math than the average bear (PhD from a top-ranked school in an applied math area) and the homework and weekly quizzes and midterm and final required a lot of work. Anyone without mathematical talent (all the people in the course probably had A’s in B/C Calculus but that was probably necessary but insufficient) and the willingness to work hard probably didn’t do so well. Although I would have preferred to avoid humanities, I took several humanities courses (two literature, two philosophy) as well as language, Political Science and Psychology courses. None required nearly as much work and none graded as hard, though the Metaphysics course was challenging . </p>
<p>When I was in college – and I was almost exclusively a Humanities person, with some side trips into a near-math-free version of Economics – no one suggested they would give a D student a C. But what many teachers did was to give a D student a choice between a D and and F. A D counted as credit toward graduation, but an F could be re-taken and the F grade replaced by the re-take grade.</p>