9 ms·

Is There a STEM Crisis or a STEM Surplus?

54 points by T-A 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Animats 10y ago
Important subject, nearly useless WSJ article. Mentions the obvious stuff, such as the postdoc glut. No mention of training or retraining to ease moves from one narrow specialty to another.
jessespears 10y ago
The paper that this article is derived from: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem... I found the paper to be more detailed and have a higher signal:noise ratio.
SFJulie 10y ago
Is there a corporatism that is hidden? For IT, a master CS degrees (+5 years after highschool) have still not proven to be better than 2 years of apprenticeship. (Sackman/grant 197x) The global cost of not working (wasted potential outcome hence taxe) is ~ 10% of the potential cumulated income a nation could have. Then, STEM is also used as a regulative barrier to some jobs hence a de facto limitation on competition of workforce to access a market, thus diminishing the competition. Least but not last, the access to the data of employability per diploma is not accessible to future graduated creating an opaque market which access is based on your capacity to either be born rich or to have a crippling loan. It is then creating a market where some workers because of their vulnerability are in poor position for negociating their earnings (thus diminishing the overall potential wages of all workers). And, least, the non reproducibility of scientific experiments yielded by STEM education is growing up, being a clear signal of a «cheating» that arise when stakes are too high in a competition. I would say there is neither a STEM crisis or surplus, but bank and university are clearly fueling a «diploma bubble».
- rimantas 10y ago
  I think the first thing to do would be to start differentiate between science and vocational training again. Otherwise we will be looking at studies how astrophysics degree has little advantage over 2 years of apprenticeship in telescope building.
  - SFJulie 10y ago
    Trained in hard science. Most of the «lessons» are just about learning «math recipes» that are highly suspicious (like lambda calculus in pertubation theories) that works in one and only one case and avoiding the «generic methods» like Hamiltonians. So basically most of my «scholarship» was about learning more than one way to do the same thing other and other again in up to 4 distinct notations (Einstein with 4D vectors), Nabla operators, quaternions ...) Whereas working in labs was a total different story. It was basically «telescope building». I learned computer programming for physicists and to be honest most of CS are pretty clueless about memory, and how to make flow of data kick computers in the balls. So, I really think that even «hard» science as an heavy load of «apprenticeship» and that scholarship have an heavy load of fat vs muscle. If we «optimized» training not to achieve a social status based on how much more years someone studied but based on what is required, the whole society would be improved. So I stick to my gun, for me studies and their indirect cost of «non availability» on the market is excessive and every one (except banks and universities making an awesome lot of money out of it) are losing.
aidenn0 10y ago
This paper gives a good way of looking at it with taxi/passenger. To extend the metaphor, there are lots of people queuing for a taxi, and the driver decides to not pick them up because they don't have enough money to pay for the ride: Companies are not hiring lots of people because they perform poorly in the interview. From what I can tell, a large fraction, if not the majority of those people actually lack the skills the employer is looking for, despite a 4 year degree in a related field. This large pool of people who apply for jobs makes hiring more expensive, and also causes companies to apply low-sensitivity, high specificity tests to the pool of applicants (e.g. I'll interview only people who graduated from these 10 schools).
- untilHellbanned 10y ago
  > I'll interview only people who graduated from these 10 schools Hiring biases create a lot of problems. I can speak to this issue. I interviewed and was turned down by several well-known Silicon Valley tech companies, from big boys to trendy up-and-comers. I did that because I was undecided about accepting a faculty job in a STEM field at a major university. It has worked out for me because not only am I enjoying being a professor but some months later I joined a non-SV startup who was happy to have me. My startup is on a trajectory to outdo all the trendy SV startups where I "wasn't a fit". Without even launching into to biases in university hiring/admissions (so many it's shameful), I can say with good confidence that a large part of the problem is the employers.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    You should see the other side of the interviewing seat before dismissing hiring biases. Yes they are bad, but they exist for a reason. I've seen some incredibly incompetent people apply, and my experience is not unusual: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ Remember, everybody that gets hired stops interviewing, while everybody who doesn't get hired keeps on applying for jobs.
    - untilHellbanned 10y ago
biocomputation 10y ago
If I'm not mistaken, non-profits ( virtually all hospitals, colleges, and universities ) are exempt from cap on H1b visas. It would be interesting to know how many H1b visa holders are employed in STEM positions at institutions that are exempt from the cap. What if it were something scandalous like 800,000 or 1,000,000? If the numbers were this high, it might have something to do with the fact that there's so much double speak about STEM shortage / STEM surplus in the United States. More American STEM degree holders might be able to find jobs if they weren't forced to compete with foreign nationals.
- hga 10y ago
  To my memory, you're not mistaken, but as I recall the numbers are in the very low six figures if that, but it's certainly an big issue for people considering the science route including a Ph.D. and postdoc work before trying to land a permanent job. In fact, it was the nation's science policy establishment that started this whole mess in the late '80s or so when they apparently decided they were paying too much money for scientific labor in universities and akin non-profit research institutions, as I recall the National Science Foundation got the ball rolling, (But my focus on that "industry" back then might have caused me to overlook the same in the E and T in STEM, and certainly "consulting" and the safe tax harbor for it were a very big issue at the same time and cost me my job then, see Section 1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_treatment_of_technical_service_firms_employing_certain_professionals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_tre... .)
  - biocomputation 10y ago
    >> Tax Reform Act of 1986, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_tre.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_tre.... .) Fascinating. I hadn't seen that before.
    - hga 10y ago
      While it's debatably correct policy (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Labor_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Labor_p...), good old Pat Moynihan inserted it into the bill in the dead of night with no discussion, for the benefit of few big IT bodyshops (IBM wasn't mentioned at the time), since we all had to use them going forward, giving them more than a small cut of our compensation. Or just work directly for The Man, one company I worked for in '93-4, for a specific, time limited contract they were fulfilling (a cool NASA science Data Distribution Facility), had their default body shop refuse to hire me for some reason, so I was made a no/small? benefits hourly worker. Anyway, it suddenly smashed the working setup of many, many technical professionals, and very seldom for the better. And rather strange to single us out, yes, an indirect bill of attainder perhaps? Further anyway, starting in the late '80s national/Federal public policy turned irredeemably hostile towards us, and you can see it in the static real wages we've earned since around that period. We may be viewed as essential, but....
matteuan 10y ago
I have the impression that the real shortage is of people that have REAL skills. The number of graduates is certainly correlated but somehow we fail in identifying the talents.
- dalke 10y ago
  I have the impression that the real shortage is because people believe there are "talents", which encourages companies to ignore on-the-job training. There's of course good economic reasoning for this viewpoint. It forces job candidates to learn skills on their own dime, and companies don't end up training someone who then gets a higher paying job elsewhere. This in turn is a consequence of the modern view that people only spend a few years at any one job, rather than decades. This encourages employers to see employees as a resource to exploit, rather than to nurture.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    It's a vicious circle, and what makes it worse (from the outside) is that companies who are willing to take on fresh-from-college talent and mentor them up (and keep their salaries on par with the rest of the industry) tend to have lower churn. Which means they have fewer openings, but more competition for those openings. There's two major tech companies who do this locally, and they have some of the most loyal employees I've seen anywhere.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
Didn't they get the memo. It's "STEAM" now because everybody's job has to be portrayed as a crucial resource with a made up labor shortage.
lifesucks1 10y ago
Here are the facts I know I make 2 to 3 times a person on H1b makes. I have close to 100 examples. I am good but not three times good. H1B is the modern day indentured labor with some American niceties to it. In all honesty as an immigrant I will tell you America treats its immigrants best than the rest of the world. So don't be surprised if there is a never ending line of people wanting to come to america. As for the issue at hand H1B for surely suppresses salary for americans any spin on it is just spin. It does not give americans who want to change their career into IT options. It makes it harder for anyone to change jobs. Newcomers have a lot of competition with people some with real resumes and mostly fake ones. As you reach late 40's it is impossible to find any STEM jobs since no one is willing to hire you. This holds good for naturalized citizens and locals. Since most companies who hire H1B know that the H1B will not leave them and go for a minimum of 10 years they happily sponsor. This is due to the fact that a green card roughly takes anywhere from 10 to 12 years. Cheap labor is always good for business. The government does not care since America needs people to keep growing so they are fine with it. Legal immigration is better and taxable than illegal. Our congress is business friendly so they don't care. This process will continue till the point where in the salaries of STEM jobs will be so low that most of us will prefer flipping burgers. At that point things might balance out since most of the americans will be looking into other fields other than STEM so no one around to complain. Also ask the question differently when there is a serious shortage of doctors in all parts of US especially the smaller cities and towns why aren't they bringing in more H1B's there. What is stopping that from happening? This is the STEM curse. Suggestion for all average americans there is still time try and switch to something where u don't have to compete with H1b you already have a 10 year head start. Here is an idea start a business hire H1B's.
pdimitar 10y ago
Let me be the guy who noticed that this conclusion: “The STEM labor market is heterogeneous. There are both shortages and surpluses of STEM workers, depending on the particular job market segment.” ...is something that somebody actually paid to hear/read. Whatever happened to common sense? I realize this is pulling things out of context, but in what context exactly is this mega-obvious statement contributing anything at all to any discussion? It's an honest question and not an attempt at trolling.

54 points by T-A 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Important subject, nearly useless WSJ article. Mentions the obvious stuff, such as the postdoc glut. No mention of training or retraining to ease moves from one narrow specialty to another.

jessespears 10y ago

The paper that this article is derived from: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem... I found the paper to be more detailed and have a higher signal:noise ratio.

SFJulie 10y ago

Is there a corporatism that is hidden? For IT, a master CS degrees (+5 years after highschool) have still not proven to be better than 2 years of apprenticeship. (Sackman/grant 197x) The global cost of not working (wasted potential outcome hence taxe) is ~ 10% of the potential cumulated income a nation could have. Then, STEM is also used as a regulative barrier to some jobs hence a de facto limitation on competition of workforce to access a market, thus diminishing the competition. Least but not last, the access to the data of employability per diploma is not accessible to future graduated creating an opaque market which access is based on your capacity to either be born rich or to have a crippling loan. It is then creating a market where some workers because of their vulnerability are in poor position for negociating their earnings (thus diminishing the overall potential wages of all workers). And, least, the non reproducibility of scientific experiments yielded by STEM education is growing up, being a clear signal of a «cheating» that arise when stakes are too high in a competition. I would say there is neither a STEM crisis or surplus, but bank and university are clearly fueling a «diploma bubble».

rimantas 10y ago
I think the first thing to do would be to start differentiate between science and vocational training again. Otherwise we will be looking at studies how astrophysics degree has little advantage over 2 years of apprenticeship in telescope building.
- SFJulie 10y ago
  Trained in hard science. Most of the «lessons» are just about learning «math recipes» that are highly suspicious (like lambda calculus in pertubation theories) that works in one and only one case and avoiding the «generic methods» like Hamiltonians. So basically most of my «scholarship» was about learning more than one way to do the same thing other and other again in up to 4 distinct notations (Einstein with 4D vectors), Nabla operators, quaternions ...) Whereas working in labs was a total different story. It was basically «telescope building». I learned computer programming for physicists and to be honest most of CS are pretty clueless about memory, and how to make flow of data kick computers in the balls. So, I really think that even «hard» science as an heavy load of «apprenticeship» and that scholarship have an heavy load of fat vs muscle. If we «optimized» training not to achieve a social status based on how much more years someone studied but based on what is required, the whole society would be improved. So I stick to my gun, for me studies and their indirect cost of «non availability» on the market is excessive and every one (except banks and universities making an awesome lot of money out of it) are losing.

aidenn0 10y ago

This paper gives a good way of looking at it with taxi/passenger. To extend the metaphor, there are lots of people queuing for a taxi, and the driver decides to not pick them up because they don't have enough money to pay for the ride: Companies are not hiring lots of people because they perform poorly in the interview. From what I can tell, a large fraction, if not the majority of those people actually lack the skills the employer is looking for, despite a 4 year degree in a related field. This large pool of people who apply for jobs makes hiring more expensive, and also causes companies to apply low-sensitivity, high specificity tests to the pool of applicants (e.g. I'll interview only people who graduated from these 10 schools).

untilHellbanned 10y ago
> I'll interview only people who graduated from these 10 schools Hiring biases create a lot of problems. I can speak to this issue. I interviewed and was turned down by several well-known Silicon Valley tech companies, from big boys to trendy up-and-comers. I did that because I was undecided about accepting a faculty job in a STEM field at a major university. It has worked out for me because not only am I enjoying being a professor but some months later I joined a non-SV startup who was happy to have me. My startup is on a trajectory to outdo all the trendy SV startups where I "wasn't a fit". Without even launching into to biases in university hiring/admissions (so many it's shameful), I can say with good confidence that a large part of the problem is the employers.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  You should see the other side of the interviewing seat before dismissing hiring biases. Yes they are bad, but they exist for a reason. I've seen some incredibly incompetent people apply, and my experience is not unusual: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ Remember, everybody that gets hired stops interviewing, while everybody who doesn't get hired keeps on applying for jobs.
  - untilHellbanned 10y ago

biocomputation 10y ago

If I'm not mistaken, non-profits ( virtually all hospitals, colleges, and universities ) are exempt from cap on H1b visas. It would be interesting to know how many H1b visa holders are employed in STEM positions at institutions that are exempt from the cap. What if it were something scandalous like 800,000 or 1,000,000? If the numbers were this high, it might have something to do with the fact that there's so much double speak about STEM shortage / STEM surplus in the United States. More American STEM degree holders might be able to find jobs if they weren't forced to compete with foreign nationals.

hga 10y ago
To my memory, you're not mistaken, but as I recall the numbers are in the very low six figures if that, but it's certainly an big issue for people considering the science route including a Ph.D. and postdoc work before trying to land a permanent job. In fact, it was the nation's science policy establishment that started this whole mess in the late '80s or so when they apparently decided they were paying too much money for scientific labor in universities and akin non-profit research institutions, as I recall the National Science Foundation got the ball rolling, (But my focus on that "industry" back then might have caused me to overlook the same in the E and T in STEM, and certainly "consulting" and the safe tax harbor for it were a very big issue at the same time and cost me my job then, see Section 1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_treatment_of_technical_service_firms_employing_certain_professionals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_tre... .)
- biocomputation 10y ago
  >> Tax Reform Act of 1986, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_tre.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_tre.... .) Fascinating. I hadn't seen that before.
  - hga 10y ago
    While it's debatably correct policy (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Labor_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Labor_p...), good old Pat Moynihan inserted it into the bill in the dead of night with no discussion, for the benefit of few big IT bodyshops (IBM wasn't mentioned at the time), since we all had to use them going forward, giving them more than a small cut of our compensation. Or just work directly for The Man, one company I worked for in '93-4, for a specific, time limited contract they were fulfilling (a cool NASA science Data Distribution Facility), had their default body shop refuse to hire me for some reason, so I was made a no/small? benefits hourly worker. Anyway, it suddenly smashed the working setup of many, many technical professionals, and very seldom for the better. And rather strange to single us out, yes, an indirect bill of attainder perhaps? Further anyway, starting in the late '80s national/Federal public policy turned irredeemably hostile towards us, and you can see it in the static real wages we've earned since around that period. We may be viewed as essential, but....

matteuan 10y ago

I have the impression that the real shortage is of people that have REAL skills. The number of graduates is certainly correlated but somehow we fail in identifying the talents.

dalke 10y ago
I have the impression that the real shortage is because people believe there are "talents", which encourages companies to ignore on-the-job training. There's of course good economic reasoning for this viewpoint. It forces job candidates to learn skills on their own dime, and companies don't end up training someone who then gets a higher paying job elsewhere. This in turn is a consequence of the modern view that people only spend a few years at any one job, rather than decades. This encourages employers to see employees as a resource to exploit, rather than to nurture.
- falcolas 10y ago
  It's a vicious circle, and what makes it worse (from the outside) is that companies who are willing to take on fresh-from-college talent and mentor them up (and keep their salaries on par with the rest of the industry) tend to have lower churn. Which means they have fewer openings, but more competition for those openings. There's two major tech companies who do this locally, and they have some of the most loyal employees I've seen anywhere.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

Didn't they get the memo. It's "STEAM" now because everybody's job has to be portrayed as a crucial resource with a made up labor shortage.

lifesucks1 10y ago

Here are the facts I know I make 2 to 3 times a person on H1b makes. I have close to 100 examples. I am good but not three times good. H1B is the modern day indentured labor with some American niceties to it. In all honesty as an immigrant I will tell you America treats its immigrants best than the rest of the world. So don't be surprised if there is a never ending line of people wanting to come to america. As for the issue at hand H1B for surely suppresses salary for americans any spin on it is just spin. It does not give americans who want to change their career into IT options. It makes it harder for anyone to change jobs. Newcomers have a lot of competition with people some with real resumes and mostly fake ones. As you reach late 40's it is impossible to find any STEM jobs since no one is willing to hire you. This holds good for naturalized citizens and locals. Since most companies who hire H1B know that the H1B will not leave them and go for a minimum of 10 years they happily sponsor. This is due to the fact that a green card roughly takes anywhere from 10 to 12 years. Cheap labor is always good for business. The government does not care since America needs people to keep growing so they are fine with it. Legal immigration is better and taxable than illegal. Our congress is business friendly so they don't care. This process will continue till the point where in the salaries of STEM jobs will be so low that most of us will prefer flipping burgers. At that point things might balance out since most of the americans will be looking into other fields other than STEM so no one around to complain. Also ask the question differently when there is a serious shortage of doctors in all parts of US especially the smaller cities and towns why aren't they bringing in more H1B's there. What is stopping that from happening? This is the STEM curse. Suggestion for all average americans there is still time try and switch to something where u don't have to compete with H1b you already have a 10 year head start. Here is an idea start a business hire H1B's.

pdimitar 10y ago

Let me be the guy who noticed that this conclusion: “The STEM labor market is heterogeneous. There are both shortages and surpluses of STEM workers, depending on the particular job market segment.” ...is something that somebody actually paid to hear/read. Whatever happened to common sense? I realize this is pulling things out of context, but in what context exactly is this mega-obvious statement contributing anything at all to any discussion? It's an honest question and not an attempt at trolling.