WSJ: "If you're a high math student in America... it's crazy to go into STEM"

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>
[quote]
"...only a third of science and engineering college graduates actually take jobs in science and tech fields, according to a 2007 study by Georgetown University professor B. Lindsay Lowell and Rutgers University professor Hal Salzman.</p>

<p>That may partly be because the jobs don't pay enough to attract or retain top graduates. Science, technology, engineering and math majors who stay in a related profession had average annual earnings of $78,550 in 2009, but those who decided to go into managerial and professional positions made more than $102,000, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.</p>

<p>"If you're a high math student in America, from a purely economic point of view, it's crazy to go into STEM," says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown center.</p>

<p>Some science and math graduates also say they would rather channel their analytical skills into fields that pay higher and seem less tedious. Charles Mokuolu, 23, graduated from Georgia Tech in 2010 with a civil-engineering degree, and now heads the finance club at Duke University's master of engineering management program. He recently secured a business-strategy job in the commercial leadership program of a large global manufacturing company.</p>

<p>After interning at an engineering firm, "I realized that although I did enjoy learning about all this cool stuff and doing math problems that no one else could solve, it's not something I wanted long term as a career," he says.

[/quote]
</p>

<p><a href="http://student.fins.com/Articles/SBB0001424052970203733504577026212798573518/College-Students-Find-Math-Science-Engineering-Just-Too-Hard%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://student.fins.com/Articles/SBB0001424052970203733504577026212798573518/College-Students-Find-Math-Science-Engineering-Just-Too-Hard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.docstoc.com/docs/102315506/Students-Pick-Easier-Majors-Despite-Less-Pay---WSJ%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.docstoc.com/docs/102315506/Students-Pick-Easier-Majors-Despite-Less-Pay---WSJ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

2

<p>It seems like only the top students have that opportunity to be in management instead of a regular job. It makes sense though. Why work harder and get paid less when you can have an easier job and get paid more?</p>

3

<p>The article makes a false claim. It says that because STEM careers pay less than professional careers, STEM undergraduate degrees are not worth it. What the article misses is that STEM undergraduate degrees are often the path to top professional careers.</p>

<p>If you look at the top MBA programs, you’ll see that they are heavily populated with engineering and economics undergraduates. And many of the top jobs for business majors (consulting, banking, VC) heavily recruit engineers (often more so than business majors).</p>

<p>Would Charles Mokuolu have gotten into Duke’s MEM program without a Georgia Tech BS in engineering? And how much easier is it to get into a top engineering program like Georgia Tech’s compared to a top undergraduate business program like Duke’s?</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>First, I agree about the “top students” comment. If you’re a 3.0 GPA mechanical engineer at a good school, you’ll have more options after college than a 3.0 GPA business major from a similar school. Basically, engineering has more of a safety net than other areas.</p>

<p>Second, I wouldn’t say that some jobs are easier than others. As a career, Engineering is actually very easy and low stress in most cases. Other career paths (notably banking and consulting) require many more hours and are much more demanding.</p>

4

<p>Engineering does have more of a safety net that other areas. And many who start out in a STEM job move on to something else eventually. Other things to note: Engineering Management is a cross over degree from engineering to business and the jobs they get are frequently more business than engineering. So What! Science majors include Biology and probably Psychology. So What! We know you are muddying up your data and we are not impressed! Tech degree - what is a tech degree? Is it an Associates? Is it a BSMET? Is it from one of these for-profit schools? Do we care? Are we impressed? And lets get back to this only 1/3 of STEM grads work in STEM jobs - How is their unemployement rate again? Because if I have a STEM degree, but I’m working on wall street and I like it there -Who cares! I guess I pushed somebody who got a BA in fine arts and then went back for an MBA out of my way didn’t I? Or if I went from running my own construction, to running my own real estate management firm with my civil degree. Is that still a STEM job? And more importantly DO I CARE! And what if I retired at 45 or 50 because I was investing in real estate on the side all along. Would you consider flipping houses a STEM job? Bottom line: We are the math geeks and we know when somebody is writing a fluff piece and leaving out important details because in actual fact they have nothing to say! Is engineering lossing good students to business because the business sector pays better? Sure! And why is that? Write that piece and do some real research hot shot! And btw engineering is a profession. Go look up the meaning of PE.</p>

5

<p>

</p>

<p>Actually, not only does the article not make the false claim that you assert, it actually makes an argument similar to yours. The article endorses earning STEM degrees…but then upon graduation not taking STEM jobs. The problem is therefore not with the skillset of a STEM education, but rather with the salaries of a STEM career; the argument is that a STEM skillset can be more productively used elsewhere. </p>

<p>For example, the article explicitly states (emphasis mine):</p>

<p>*Research has shown that graduating with these majors provides a good foundation not just for so-called STEM jobs, or those in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, but a whole range of industries where earnings expectations are high. Business, finance and consulting firms, as well as most health-care professions, are keen to hire those who bring quantitative skills and can help them stay competitive. *</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Well, you can’t expect every article to cover every possible topic, however interesting. The fact that the majority of STEM majors do not actually take STEM jobs is itself a highly interesting finding. </p>

<p>But I agree with you that the truly interesting question is why - specifically, why don’t STEM jobs pay as well as finance/business jobs? What we seem to have is a mismatch of skills and therefore a loss of educational efficiency: students being trained for STEM jobs but then not taking them. If businesses want quantitatively rigorously trained students, then why don’t universities meet that demand by providing a quantitatively rigorous business undergraduate major? Why do businesses have to utilize the indirect method of raiding STEM students?</p>

6

<p>Something about this argument continues to smell bad to me. Explain to me again why the market doesn’t self-regulate itself in this case? In other words, if having more engineers would add that much more value, why aren’t engineers paid more? Seems like any guy off the street could start a firm and make a killing by offering top engineering talent 5% more than other engineering companies.</p>

<p>Maybe I’m naive or stupid, but it seems like if the market were working like it should, engineers would be getting paid exactly wha they deserve, and the phenomenon whereby engineering talent leaves engineering only demonstrates that some people who have studied engineering deserve more than an engineering career could provide in terms of monetary compensation.</p>

<p>All that being the case, is there really an impetus to change anything about how these students are being educated? At that point, it seems like playing musical chairs: rearranging the professors, departments and course names so that what was “engineering” becomes “business”, and the same students perform the same jobs, possibly with the same efficiency. Or are you arguing that it would be more efficient to give top engineering talent more education in business, since that’s what they are going to be doing (and rightly so) anyway?</p>

7

<p>

The market doesn’t self-regulate. It’s a myth. It’s proven when we bailed out banks as opposed to letting it fail like Iceland and Sweden (?) did.</p>

8

<p>

</p>

<p>You seem to have answered your own question. As rheidzan pointed out, labor markets do not perform as they should, which I take to mean behaving in an economically efficient manner, as we don’t actually live in a truly free market system but rather one that is riven with distortions. Large sectors of the worldwide finance industry were insolvent at some time during the last 3 years; a truly free market would have resulted in scores of firms failing and armies of financiers losing their jobs. That was avoided only because of extraordinary non-market intervention by governments and central banks. On the other hand, during the dotcom bust, thousands of companies failed and the government refused to bail anybody out. {Granted, the government did bail out the auto industry, but by offering only a tiny fraction of capital and liquidity that was made available in the finance bailout.} </p>

<p>Furthermore, let’s keep in mind that plenty of employers are not profit-maximizing agents anyway and are therefore not amenable to invocations to the free market. As an example, one of the largest employers of STEM graduates (especially science and math graduates) is academia - where not profit but rather ‘intellectual value’ is being maximized, yet where such intellectual value is at best only weakly correlated with salaries. As a clear case in point, why is it that economics professors tend to be paid far higher than are professors of physics or engineering when even most economics professors would readily concede that physics and engineering as disciplines have produced far more intellectual value in terms of actually producing reliable and precise predictions about the world? {And indeed, core economics principles such as market equilibriums are directly drawn from thermodynamics and other physics theories.} Put more starkly, why is it that even many newly hired assistant professors of economics who have yet to publish even a single paper can nevertheless be paid more than many full professors of physics? Has the former - despite not having published even a single paper - nevertheless somehow created more intellectual value than the latter?</p>

<p>Finally, I would ask: if labor markets truly behaved efficiently, then why don’t starting pay packages in, say, the investment banking industry decline? After all, the Ibanking industry exhibits a general labor glut: far more people want to enter Ibanking than the number of available jobs (at the current pay levels). In any supply glut, Basic economic theory would indicate that prices (in this case, salaries) would decline while the quantity of jobs would increase until a market-clearing price and quantity was reached. Why doesn’t that ever seem to happen? What you continue to see are high pay packages for those fraction of applicants who do garner Ibanking offers with plenty of applicants not getting any offer whatsoever. This is clear evidence of a market failure.</p>

9

<p>The market is regulating itself. We don’t have a shortage of new engineers. Anytime they say there is a shortage of engineers it is with a certain kind of experience. You can’t have 10 years experience in touch screen glass when it was only invented 5 years ago. Plus, we have an abundant suppy of forgein students who frequently get better math education in 5-12th grades who are willing to take the jobs for less money here, willing to take the jobs for less money there, and are willing to move to whatever backwoods location the company is stuck in. </p>

<p>A couple of my problems with this group of articles that is being posted all over (I’m not sure we read the same link) is 1) They are complaining that engineering programs are too hard. Well fine the solution to that is to make the current BS in Engineering that takes so many of us 5-6 years to complete into an MS and pad your first few years with easy math and science courses so that it is spread out and more people can pass. Then of course the 4 year degree would be the equivalent to a BA in the Humanities. Having a BA in Humanities means what in the job market again? So to actually get a job in Engineering you would have to get a Masters. Then I suppose all the stuff that is currently considered a Masters in an Engineering field would have to be reclassified to PhD and then of course if you wanted to be a professor you would need PhD’s in at least two areas. Unless of course you were only teaching Freshman and Sophmore level stuff. That sounds good now doesn’t it! Let’s just make everything take forever so that more people can get a trophy!</p>

<p>My second problem with the article I read is the quote from the yahoo who said students would have to be crazy to GO into STEM, when the fact is they would have to be crazy to STAY in STEM. The true progression is you get your degree, you go to work, you move up the ladder, if you are lucky somebody pays to send you to get your MBA, if not they assume you are smart enough to figure it out on your own. Then how can the author of this article can possibly say that moving into managment is abandoning STEM. That is total fluff! That M stands for MATH. How can they possibly say that anything financial isn’t part of math?
Yes, engineers need more business classes. That is why so few I know got a Masters in Engineering and so many of them got MBA’s Duh!</p>

10

<p>This is the line that burns me up the most “Science, technology, engineering and math majors who stay in a related profession blah blah blah, but those who decided to go into managerial and professional positions” WTH First of all engineering is a profession! GO LOOK IT UP! It is the highest paying professional that only requires a Bachelors! But wait a minute going into management even in an engineering company is leaving the profession. WHAT! Did he mean business. Did he mean that those students who graduated with a BS in Computer Science and took a job in software sales made more money that those who took a position writing code? Or did he mean that those who were still writing code 15 years later were making less money than those who (wait for it) had been Promoted to management? Oh my heavens those years of study were a waste of time. I’m sure he could have gotten to exactly the same place with only a BA in English. Is he that stupid or does he think we are?</p>

11

<p>

</p>

<p>Actually, I believe that the article is spot-on, because the true progression, at least for students from the top science/engineering schools, is indeed not to ever enter STEM careers at all, but rather to take business jobs such as consulting or banking immediately right out of undergrad and hence bypass the STEM career ladder entirely. Either that, or they may enter MBA programs directly. Hence, they’ve been trained in STEM but never actually work a day in their life in STEM jobs - a clear example of abandoned and wasted training. </p>

<p>As a case in point, take Ankur Luthra, arguably Berkeley’s greatest engineering undergrad in history: Rhodes Scholarship winner who broke the record for most A+'s ever earned by any Berkeley undergrad. Yet after completing his MSCS at Oxford, he went directly to Harvard Business School and now he’s a private wealth manager. Except for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stint at Microsoft (just to fill the months between Berkeley graduation and Oxford matriculation), he’s basically never worked in STEM his entire life despite being a brilliant STEM student. </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Well, it isn’t. At least, not the types of finance jobs that STEM undergraduates are likely to obtain. STEM PhD’s often times indeed obtain highly quantitative finance positions. But the truth is, the types of finance jobs that STEM undergraduates obtain are analyst positions that, frankly, require little more than fast arithmetic and maybe algebra. The vast majority of finance analysts have forgotten how to use even basic calculus, let alone mathematical proofs, because they never use it. They’re basically just Excel and Powerpoint monkeys…but lucratively paid monkeys.</p>

12

<p>

</p>

<p>I don’t understand your concern: nowhere did the author indicate that engineering was not a profession. Indeed, the author states: “Science, technology, engineering and math majors who stay in a related profession”, which implicitly indicates that engineering is indeed a profession. </p>

<p>I believe the problem has to do purely with semantics. </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>I would actually take it to mean that the guy who graduates with the BS in Computer Science but then takes a job in consulting or finance immediately after graduation has indeed left the engineering profession, or more accurately, never joined the profession in the first place. </p>

<p>As a case in point, consider MIT, widely considered to be one of the world’s premier STEM schools. Yet the fact is, before the crash, nearly half of all MIT graduates who entered the workforce took jobs not in STEM, but rather in finance or consulting (and even after the crash, over 1/3 of the graduates continued to take such jobs). Hence, despite graduating from one of the world’s most prestigious STEM schools, a substantial fraction of graduates choose not to enter careers in STEM. That seems to be a case of abandonment of STEM careers, does it not? </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Is it? Remember, we’re talking about a ‘market’ where the entire finance industry was bailed out by taxpayers, not just in this country, but in other regions throughout the world besides (read:Europe). But the thousands of EE and CS majors who were laid off from the dotcom/tech bust were not bailed out. The civil engineers laid off from the real estate bust were not bailed out. {Granted, the auto industry was bailed out, but via only a tiny fraction of the capital of the continuing worldwide finance bailouts.} </p>

<p>If the market was truly regulating itself, then most of the finance industry, along with high-paying finance jobs, should have been eliminated.</p>

13

<p>

</p>

<p>My experience is that marketing an engineering degree for banking and consulting is really difficult, and far fewer engineers get placed into those careers than people who major in business.</p>

14

<p>Yadda, yadda, yadda…then you have senior Java developers with undergraduate degrees from HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges) and M.S. degrees from Univ of Maryland UNIVERSITY COLLEGE (not College Park) pulling $200,000 for jobs with full benefits (not 1099) to utilize their TS/SCI+Poly security clearances.</p>

<p>I personally know DBA’s with just an associate’s degree but knows Oracle inside and out snatching $130,000/year (using his clearance). Of course it is supporting the Feds so you KNOW it isn’t all that stressful.</p>

<p>But hey…scare off the future STEM students. That means the ones who go into STEM will still get all of those recruiter calls during recessions.</p>

15

<p>Globaltraveler, I first have to state the the article never stated anything about not majoring in STEM. Quite the opposite, in fact - it endorses majoring in STEM. The question is regarding what career should a STEM graduate choose once he’s finished his major. </p>

<p>I therefore feel that I now have to pose the same question that I asked you long ago. Could you please provide us with a list of reliable, actionable, yet non-obvious steps by which a non-CS STEM graduate (or, heck, even a CS graduate) can obtain those positions of which you cite? The average engineer or CS graduate, let alone the average science graduate, makes nowhere near the type of salaries of which you cite. What are all these people doing wrong? </p>

<p>As a case in point, according to the BLS, the average engineer - across all experience levels - makes a median salary of only $70-100k a year. The average software engineer across all experience levels makes about $80-90k. I’m sure that many of them would prefer to have a cushy job making $130-200k. What sorts of actionable, reliable, yet non-obvious career advice are you willing to give them? </p>

<p>To reiterate, what I want is non-obvious advice - that is, advice that they can actually act upon yet would not know to do without this discussion board. For example, the advice of “be talented” is not actionable advice, because if you’re not talented, that’s not going to change. Advice to “work hard” is trivial: we surely all know of the importance of hard work. As many STEM graduates are apparently not earning what they deserve, perhaps you can help them.</p>

16

<p>Remember guys, they must be non-obvious, actionable steps!!</p>

17

<p>“I believe the problem has to do purely with semantics.” </p>

<p>I believe that somebody whose job it is to write (espeically for the WSJ) should be aware of semantics. Several terms are being used too losely for inclusion in a piece about statistics and trends. “Profession” for example: it seems to be defined as any job that requires specific training such as engineering or nursing in one part of a sentence and as one of the well respected offical professions that require a graduate degree in another part of the same sentence. That is a problem for me! Or “Consultant”. I’m not complete sure what your defination of a consultant is. Mine involves people who come into a work place on a temporary basis and are generally paid by 1099. The first consultants I think of are my college professors who all had consulting gigs on the side to keep them connected to industry and up to date. Those professors would have been engineers. Yet when you use the term you seem to be saying that a consultant is not an engineer. So what exactly is your idea of what a consultant does? Until it is defined I will continue to object to its sloppy use. You do the same thing with the term Manager/management. Isn’t it kinda important what the person is managing. In your world are all managers managing stock portfoils or something? Yes, when we write we have to pay careful attention to sematics. The definations of words are important.</p>

18

<p>@sakky:</p>

<p>GLOBALTRAVELER’s one song on these boards is that if you’re in software and not working for the government with a security clearance, you’re a sucker because you could be making $200k. My list of issues with this is the following: first, I doubt it’s as easy or frequent as he lets on; second, I’d gladly take a 50% pay cut not to have the government as my employer.</p>

<p>As a side note, it is not at all uncommon for good CS/SwE majors to be made starting offers significantly better than the numbers you cite. Don’t know about other disciplines. I guess what I’m saying is that it might not be an apples to oranges comparison to compare average engineering salaries to average I-banking salaries… since only the best engineers (who would have made the best salaries in engineering anyway) leave engineering.</p>

19

<p>I’m thinking the dirty little secret used to be that the top engineering grads got the coolest technical positions and the bottom (thank goodness I even graduated) grads got the financial analyst excel monkey positions back in the day. And that was fine because it enabled cost effective state university to crank out 10-15% more engineering grads than the market needed. But now with the outsourcing of manufacturing and the “too big to fail” financial sector suddenly the thing that has changed is that the top grads are going into finance and the bottom grads are struggling. I guess the tech sector is getting the middle grads.<br>
I’m just reading through a related article on Mechanics not Chefs, and I’m wondering why they don’t just higher the bottom grads with BSME and BSMET for the machinist positions. It doesn’t seem like that much of a strech to me. [Help</a> Wanted: Mechanics, Not Chefs - WSJ.com](<a href=“Help Wanted: Mechanics, Not Chefs - WSJ”>Help Wanted: Mechanics, Not Chefs - WSJ)</p>

20

<p>The topic of I-Banking and consulting frequently comes up on this board. Hey, if you can get into I-Banking/Consulting then by all means do it because YES, it pays a lot. You have to remember that I-Banking/Consulting is VERY competitive to get into and it many cases, you are eliminated once you select most colleges.</p>

<p>First let me state this…</p>

<p>My posts on this board are for the down-to-earth folks who are don’t get into all of that beating of their chest shouting “My school is better/my major is better/I can quadruple major/I can take 25 credits in a semester”. I look more at the practical and less on academics being the end all.</p>

<p>I like to point out things in the industry (mainly software development) that can help with having at least a decent career without having to spend 90% of you time focusing on competing, competing, competing, networking, networking, networking, I need a 3.999, I need a 3.999, I need a 3.999.</p>

<p>Now if you like knowing that you received a job offer after 4 rounds of interviews and were selected out of 200 applicants, that’s great but at the end of the day, AMEX cares that you have the money to pay the bill. ACME Mortgage cares if you can pay the bill. The entity that manages your 529 college savings program only cares if you can contribute to it. If you are able to obtain a pretty good income (in relation to most of the USA) without really having to go up against 100 folks everytime, why not use that path?</p>

<p>…and you get to inteview wearing the same jeans and polo shirt your wore to your current job, but I digress.</p>

<p>Now Sakky asked about obtaining “cleared” work. The best way I could outline the steps is:</p>

<p>1) Need to move near the Washington DC area</p>

<p>2) If presented, take a job in which the employer will sponsor you for a security clearance. What you want is the Top Secret/SCI with Full-Scope polygraph. The major players are NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA and NRO.</p>

<p>3) Make sure your credit, finances, police record is in order. Ummm…you may wanna get rid of any international romances.</p>

<p>4) Have to be willing to allow folks to pretty much dive into your life history</p>

<p>5) Maintain your clearance</p>

<p>6) Stay ahead of the technology curve.</p>

<p>Now I would recommend having some private-sector experience before contracting to the Feds. Private-Sector work kind of molds you into being a self-starter and you will probably be ahead of the technology curve as compared to the Feds, so once you start working and supporting the Feds, you will stand out more.</p>

<p>7) Pledge to be a lifetime student. Whenever that a new technology is getting “hot”…learn it. Buy the necessary books, white-papers, etc and that PC and lock yourself in the home-office or basement for the weekend.</p>

<p>Again, the money in cleared software engineering work is not going to come close to I-Banking/Consulting. Then again, you don’t need a Cornell degree with a 3.9999 GPA and competing with 200 other applicants per job. Since the number of “cleared” folks is so small compared to the number of opportunities, you are pretty much asked the following questions at an interview (if you meet the technical skills requirement):</p>

<p>1) Is you clearance active?
2) When can you start?
3) What salary are you asking for?</p>

<p>I see the diplomas in the offices and alumni license-plates in the parking lots:</p>

<ul>
<li>University of Maryland</li>
<li>University of Maryland at Baltimore County</li>
<li>University of Maryland University College</li>
<li>Howard University</li>
<li>Towson Uniiversity</li>
<li>University of Virginia</li>
<li>John Hopkins University (who has an agreement with NSA to allow many cleared folks in the area to get M.S. degrees and I KNOW many of them are from smaller schools and/or sub-3.0 GPA’s).</li>
</ul>

<p>Let’s also throw in the social aspect of this line of work. As long as the USA has enemies, this line of work will exist.</p>

<p>I am just throwing out other options that are not just the “usual” that is mentioned on this board.</p>