21 ms·

Driving students into science is a fool's errand

55 points by rflrob 13y ago

davidw 13y ago
A couple of counterpoints: * Science, at least when I went through high school was Not Cool. It was for "nerds", something that you didn't really want to be labeled. I don't know if it's still that way in the US, but counteracting that effect might not be a bad idea. * He talks about flooding the market. I just don't see that as likely to happen, and I don't necessarily see STEM stuff as a "lump of labor" with a fixed amount of work to go around, either. These are people creating and discovering new things!
- dnautics 13y ago
  flooding the market has already happened, as evidenced by poor morale among postdocs (in the biosciences, EG). Or heck, even the existence of the career phase known as the "postdoc". Basically, it didn't exist 40 years ago, when I started grad school 10 years ago the expectation was one postdoc, 2 years. Now it's 2 or 3 postdocs at 4 years a pop. Other signs of market flooding are high rates of fraud, and deception, although there are no good metrics for that, really.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    Also, my experience was this: Grad school: 24k -> 26k over 6 years, at a highly-ranked institution. (MIT, my only other offer, offered me a measly 18k, I declined for obvious reasons). 1st postdoc: 30k for 1 year. I left, because my project was completed. This turned out to be a good choice, because my boss quit six months later (and threw the other postdoc under the bus - he was lazy). Lab tech job: 35k. This was a job that was supposed to go to an entry level post-baccalaureate. I got it within 14 days of moving to San Diego, took it, because I knew the job market was rough. It's worth noting that I took a job that was a demotion, in terms of credentials, but got a pay raise. 2nd postdoc: An "internal promotion" from the previous, 40k.
    - dnautics 13y ago
      I guess it's also worth mentioning, I'm ~30 years old and still making 40k, despite having slaved away as a PhD (talking 80 hour weeks) from a top-ranked school. My peers who went on different career trajectories are making far more than I. OTOH, I have plenty of friends (whom I know through social activities, so did not make it into tech) that are unemployed, which in most cases, is worse.
    - davidw 13y ago
      Ouch, yeah, that's pretty bad. What exactly do you have a doctorate in? Aren't there prospects in industry, rather than academia?
      - dnautics 13y ago
        http://indysci.org/board/ http://indysci.org/board/
      - dnautics 13y ago
        I applied for a job in industry (with http://www.crunchbase.com/company/draths-corporation http://www.crunchbase.com/company/draths-corporation). Cold emailed the CEO (in 1/08). Got an interview with the CEO, in 7/08, was told to "call back in a month and I'll see if I can allocate money for you" - he'd been demoted to CSO by the VC. It was a really fun trip, he was great to me, but I could tell he was an a-hole, and he said, you know, you should really consider being an executive of your own. I thought he was crazy, but now that's exactly what I'm trying to do (but of a nonprofit, which might be even crazier). Again, this was in 7/08, and I'd been watching the Chris Martenson "crash course" videos and following the Ron Paul presidential campaign and knew that the market was about to crash. By 8/08, the market had begun its topspin downward, and I never got a response. Ultimately, draths went out of business, so it was probably for the better. More recently, I applied for a job in industry with these guys (http://www.genomatica.com/ http://www.genomatica.com/) and actually got a job offer that I had to decline because they wanted me to start immediately, and I (perhaps stupidly) felt I had an obligation to finish my project where I work now. OTOH, I seem to have enough freedom to try to do my own thing. So, yes there are prospects in industry. One caveat is that although my publication record is not terribly impressive by the conventional "impact factor metric" (I personally like that I've made innovations in three wildly different aspects of biology - difficult protein expression, small molecule drug development, and bioorganometallic chemistry), I have an extremely good academic pedigree, that gets my foot in the door to interviews and lets me at least try to justify my existence based on the merit that I value and the skillset that I've developed. Inasmuch as I hate that the title is being devalued, I feel sorry for PhDs that have their degrees rubber-stamped, because it's gotta be really tough for them.
- gavinlynch 13y ago
  slightly tangential topic, but I had to respond to this because I do hear this from my fellow US citizens: >>> "* Science, at least when I went through high school was Not Cool. It was for "nerds", something that you didn't really want to be labeled. I don't know if it's still that way in the US, but counteracting that effect might not be a bad idea." I've got to be honest... what High Schools did you guys go to?? I had friends on the football team who were into science. I had friends who didn't care about sports and were into writing. I had friends who had letter jackets, I had friends who rode motorcycles. I was into computers and nobody cared. I first cut my teeth with CSS helping out with the website for our school newspaper. I first learned to program by messing around and making silly ASCII racing games on my graphing calculator in BASIC. Everyone who cared just kind of thought it was neat, or didn't care and we talked about other things. All this labeling of "nerd" and "jocks"... I really don't get it. There were many circles of friends to join. Or you could be a loner and that's fine too. Looking back, I'm not even sure what label I would have been given (never considered myself a nerd, I was too poor of a student :p) Did I miss something, or does everyone else just get caught up in labeling waaayyy too much? That's just not the reality I experienced, and I never saw the ecosystem through that prism. shrugs
  - dnautics 13y ago
    I always suspected the generation above me (graybeard professors) had to deal with that culture, and that's the reason why scientists are such phenomenally bad leaders - they didn't really interact with other people during their formative years. By the time I went to grad school, almost all of my male peers were actually "jock" types (and really nice guys to be honest), and really smart, too, but that could be field-specific, 20 out of my 24 classmates were into synthetic chemistry.
    - jff 13y ago
      I think people who are into science and tech are getting more varied. We laugh about the idea of the football-obsessed "jock", but for some reason locking yourself in a room to play Final Fantasy all weekend was seen as admirably geeky. Most of the guys I studied engineering with had participated in sports, many were quite good. A lot were into cars. When you stop trying to live up to that pathetic Jargon File description of a geek, late nights with techno blasting and Chinese takeout, you can get out and realize that there's a bigger world out there. You join the football team and discover that the quarterback really loves watching Star Trek, rather than dismissing him as a "dumb jock" because he has a number on his shirt.
- stmchn 13y ago
  I think it's definitely possible to flood the market, it's just difficult to make that generalization because STEM can mean a wide variety of things. There's so many STEM fields that it's kind of silly to lump it as one. Just as an example, according to the BLS, chemical engineer jobs are projected to grow 6%, slower than average compared to all occupations. In contrast, software developer jobs are projected to grow 30% over the next decade. Not all STEM fields have equal opportunities so it's certainly possible that some areas get (or already are) oversaturated and not others.
bdc 13y ago
This article reads like a general argument against government subsidies in general - replace "STEM education" with "corn" or "new energy" and the argument is still valid. Given that it was published on nature.com, best known as the publisher of one of the top science journals in the world, I would bet that the intended purpose is to stimulate discussion, not to explicitly endorse this view as written.
sp332 13y ago
A third option is that they're un-distorting the market, counteracting other distorting forces.
- BrianEatWorld 13y ago
  Unless you know what is actually distorting the market in the first place, counteracting a distortion with another distortion seems like a risky approach to problem solving. As the author points out, a good deal of money already goes into this. It seems if something is distorting the market, we aren't very good at targeting it, given the lack of results.
russelluresti 13y ago
The argument that the person is missing here is whether or not there are a significant number of unfilled STEM jobs (either presently or expected in 15 - 20 years). If there are a lot of unfilled STEM jobs, then you should push people into STEM careers to fill those jobs. The reason you don't push students into being lawyers is because there are more law students graduating than there are open jobs for them. Any market, STEM or not, where there is a lack of unqualified workers and more job opportunities than graduates should have programs that encourage students to consider pursuing those careers.
- sp332 13y ago
  If there were lots of STEM jobs (that pay reasonable wages), then wouldn't people move into them without government subsidies?
  - stmchn 13y ago
    Well, frankly, STEM has a reputation of being hard because, well, it IS difficult. It requires certain kinds of critical thinking that the K-12 education system can fail to adequately teach. I know plenty of people who started college in engineering or computer science knowing there's good paying job opportunities in those fields. But a big chunk of those people drop out once they start taking the more difficult courses. Retention is just as important as getting people into STEM in the first place but it's hard to retain students who aren't adequately prepared for the challenge.
  - pjscott 13y ago
    How many students, when deciding on their major, actually look up information on job availability and typical salaries? And then take this into account in their decision? Judging by the number of people majoring in completely un-marketable fields, I doubt the percentage is very high.
    - sp332 13y ago
      Seriously? Who goes to college without checking out job prospects before picking a major? I went to a liberal arts college that prided itself on not focusing on marketable, in-demand or especially practical skills, and I'm pretty sure everyone had a decent grasp of what the job market in their field looked like. (I'm not saying that it was the primary motivation for picking a major, but they at least knew the situation.)
michaelochurch 13y ago
There are two potential labor market realities and we still don't know, as a society, which one is right: 1. Labor finitism: there's a fairly fixed amount of labor that society will pay money for, and us proles are doomed to compete against each other for it, in what ultimately becomes a race to the bottom. 2. Labor progressivism: technical and scientific progress will free up resources for more interesting and higher-yield work, and make everyone richer. To quote Keynes, the rising tide will lift all boats. In a labor-finitist world, the worker's job is to extract as much payment out of capital-holders (for as little work) as possible. The labor-finitist world is almost Malthusian in its ruthless cruelty. In a labor-progressivist world, it's actually good to do the grunt work quickly, so you can graduate to more interesting stuff. Of course, reality is somewhere between these two extremes. In the very short term, it's labor finitist: people have to formally "create" jobs. In the long term, it's labor progressivist; the labor pool does expand, with its rate being an open question. The open question pertains to the 0.1-20 years range over which we actually make career decisions. It's like Efficient Market Hypothesis, whose truth comes down to "what time frame?" (Over very-short or very-long timeframes, EMH is demonstrably not true for well-known reasons. Over typical timeframes, it is.) If labor finitism is true, then we want to drive young people far away from whatever we do. Given that the software industry is already a horrible place to work, just being honest about the low autonomy and shitty legacy code and arrogance of non-technical management-- also, the fact that, even though our salaries might look good on paper, we make about 1/5 of what we should given the bullshit we have to put up with-- ought to be enough. We just need to counteract the Googley propaganda about this career involving actual autonomy and respect. If labor progressivism is true, then since science and technology are the driving forces of that progress, we want as many people in those industries as have the talent, because that will bring us out of scarcity faster. It's unclear which is the case, though. Labor progressivism is true in the underlying "real world", but this society is littered with legacy power relationships that, I'm afraid, make labor finitism a lot more accurate. Just look at the terrorist attack that has been inflicted on the academic job market for the past 25 years if you don't believe that.
- kyllo 13y ago
  Here's to hoping that we as a society have the good sense to decide to reduce the barriers to entry for freelancing and entrepreneurship, so that anyone with skills can simply create their own job and trade their labor freely--without having to worry about "benefits" because the government actually provides those like it's supposed to.
dmlorenzetti 13y ago
It isn't clear what, exactly, Macilwain objects to, because he never bothers to give specific examples of what he finds wasteful. At the outset, he identifies three broad categories of funding: (1) luring young people into STEM careers; (2) promoting science and technology at graduate schools; and (3) raising standards of science education. But the rest of his argument lumps these all together as if all the spending is for category #1, "luring". For example, he points out that "no such government-backed programmes exist to pull children into being lawyers or accountants." And his broad argument, as expressed in the subheading, is that the funding biases the system to producing more scientists and technologists than it needs: "If programmes to bolster STEM education are effective, they distort the labour market..." Only by ignoring the distinction between category #1, "luring", and category #3, "raising standards", can he complain that businesses who want better-educated scientists, if they really meant it, would just pony up and "pay and train newly graduated scientists and engineers properly." Either he thinks that the technical skills businesses want can be achieved by a quick training session after a broad general education, or else he thinks that raising the salaries of engineers will send a market signal to grade-schoolers that they ought to be more interested in STEM education. The problem of poor preparation never seems to enter his head. If all the accounting firms in the country were complaining that few recent college grads can add a column of numbers, and the government responded by trying to improve arithmetic education, would Macilwain complain about the money spent "luring children into accounting"? In short, he might have an argument. But until he grounds it in specifics, he's just hand-waving with the broad idea that trying to improve STEM education distorts the market. This is obvious tripe, because the same broad argument could be applied to education in general: "If programs to bolster education are effective, they distort the market for educated workers. If they aren't, they're a waste of money. Besides, if businesses really wanted educated workers, they would pay and train new hires properly."
- geebee 13y ago
  "He thinks that raising the salaries of engineers will send a market signal to grade-schoolers that they ought to be more interested in STEM education". At the graduate level, this is backed by a RAND study. http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html The authors of the study do address the possibility that poor preparation is the cause - but they conclude that poor pay and job prospects relative to other options available to highly educated Americans is the main driver of low interest in science and engineering. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-science-engineer-jobs_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-scien... "Other approaches such as making K-12 science and math courses more interesting and pushing for more qualified math and science teachers "may have merit in their own right," researchers said, "but we think they pale in importance to the earnings and attractiveness of S&E careers as major determinants of the supply of U.S.-born students to S&E." So the real question is - if the objective research suggests that there is no shortage of scientists and that the American allergy to these fields is rational and market driven, why launch a PR campaign to get young Americans to enter it? There are reasons - many people believe that scientists and engineers create more wealth than other comparably or better paid professions. So society as a whole has a stronger interest in having more engineers than we'd normally get through the normal, individual response to market signals (I'm assuming an individual doesn't really care if his income contributes or detracts to the general wealth as long as it is obtained legally - some people clearly do care as a personal matter). In this case, it might make sense to try to lure some young people in. Rather than hoping to trick them, though, it might be better to actually make it worth their while - perhaps by covering tuition so that all engineers graduate debt-free. Another possibility could be giving a tax break to people in these fields. The Onion said it best... "Study finds 99% of commuters favor public transportation for others." Seems everyone other than scientists is keen on getting other people to study science. Barak Obama, a lawyer, certainly seems to think science is a fantastic career for others.
ttrreeww 13y ago
If the super highly paid job is there, they will come. If it isn't, then no amount of driving is going to help.
jeffdavis 13y ago
Teaching a student chemistry depresses the wages of all chemists, distorts the market, and damages all science. It is just pandering to big business interests. Sarcasm aside, just because it's good for business doesn't mean that it's bad for you.
Yhippa 13y ago
Would it be better to take the money that's being put into hyping STEM and reinvesting it into us K-12 education? Rather than having all of these extra programs to convince kids to move to STEM careers, make the current grade school programs more rigorous so that when they get their diploma hopefully they will have been through a lot in their schooling to be better prepared to take the rapidly changing new jobs opening up in today's society.
- mead5432 13y ago
  I think you are right that it probably isn't a campaign hyping the STEM jobs but I doubt the answer is making those classes "more rigorous" (though it probably does need some work in that area). My bet is that it is not treated appropriately by the teachers. My grade school teachers made science boring, monotonous and repetitive. It wasn't interesting at all. The crazy thing is that it is really cool... So much of it has a ton in common with a fun action movie: explosions and sex. Frame it in terms that make sense and is interesting to students rather than just reading chapter 5 and the interest in STEM fields will naturally increase.
rm445 13y ago
What an unutterably bizarre article. "By cajoling more children to enter science and engineering [...] the state increases STEM student numbers, floods the market with STEM graduates, reduces competition for their services and cuts their wages." It almost makes one wonder whether the author knows what STEM stands for - he seems to see it as just a type of labour, in the sense that an oversupply of plumbers, STEM graduates or scaffolders will depress the wages of that group. Perhaps I'm just irretrievably biased, but STEM seems, as well as being an enormously vast field it seems lazy to lump together, to be the engine of human advancement and economic growth. If student A, an engineering student, is put in competition with student B, who could have been a good lawyer but chose a Maths degree, and student C, who had to choose between music and physics but chose physics at university, then A's wages might end up slightly lower but we are all likely to end up better off. But it's not just that I am a science-biased technocrat - I don't especially want to drive our future judges and music professors into engineering careers. I think it more likely that technical education is just under-taken-up at all levels compared to what would most benefit society, and people who could perfectly well cope with technical careers end up taking jobs in the service sector that provide little training. To take a shortage of technically-trained people, paint that as a benefit for the wages of the currently qualified, and argue to maintain the status quo on that basis is just short-sighted nonsense.
danpalmer 13y ago
I have to call bullshit on this. It's just rubbish from my experience. In the UK, the government is at the point of giving away science degrees just so that there are enough science teachers for primary and secondary school students, and as a computer science student, I have managed to get a paid internship every year of my degree, and last year turned down 4 internship offers, because there were so many companies looking for people with a computer science education. Our STEM graduate rates are falling, and our need for STEM graduates is increasing. On top of this, we don't just need people getting jobs in STEM subjects, we need a population who have a broad knowledge of, and respect for, scientific understanding. If children aren't taught science to an adequate level then the country, and the world, suffers for it.
jurassic 13y ago
I agree with the author that pushing kids into STEM for STEM's sake is stupid. In particular, there is no shortage of scientists, which is why they work insane hours and make fast food wages well into their 30's. We already have enough people wasting their 20's on a PhD who will never get a tenure track faculty job as a full-time researcher. The current job:gradstudent ratio is untenable. Want to make science attractive and more effective? Cut grad student enrollments in half and triple grad student pay so that it is comparable to what other STEM grads make in the workforce; in this case, choosing science would not be a major financial mistake, even for the masses who never get a faculty job. Professors would have fewer students, enabling better mentorship and improved job outlook for each graduate. Increase pay for professors so that they make money comparable to other highly educated professionals. Endow faculty chairs at major universities and set a mandatory faculty retirement age so that deadwood profs aren't hogging positions needed by rising stars. Mandate open publishing. These changes could be implemented easily if legislatures and funding agencies wanted them, but nobody seems to want that. If the government wants people in science, they should spend money making it a better career, not spend money to slap a coat of marking gloss on a relatively bleak situation.
nsomething 13y ago
How about going into STEM to understand how the world works a little better? Would you rather have a society full of too many engineers or that of too many lawyers?

55 points by rflrob 13y ago

A couple of counterpoints: * Science, at least when I went through high school was Not Cool. It was for "nerds", something that you didn't really want to be labeled. I don't know if it's still that way in the US, but counteracting that effect might not be a bad idea. * He talks about flooding the market. I just don't see that as likely to happen, and I don't necessarily see STEM stuff as a "lump of labor" with a fixed amount of work to go around, either. These are people creating and discovering new things!

dnautics 13y ago
flooding the market has already happened, as evidenced by poor morale among postdocs (in the biosciences, EG). Or heck, even the existence of the career phase known as the "postdoc". Basically, it didn't exist 40 years ago, when I started grad school 10 years ago the expectation was one postdoc, 2 years. Now it's 2 or 3 postdocs at 4 years a pop. Other signs of market flooding are high rates of fraud, and deception, although there are no good metrics for that, really.
- dnautics 13y ago
  Also, my experience was this: Grad school: 24k -> 26k over 6 years, at a highly-ranked institution. (MIT, my only other offer, offered me a measly 18k, I declined for obvious reasons). 1st postdoc: 30k for 1 year. I left, because my project was completed. This turned out to be a good choice, because my boss quit six months later (and threw the other postdoc under the bus - he was lazy). Lab tech job: 35k. This was a job that was supposed to go to an entry level post-baccalaureate. I got it within 14 days of moving to San Diego, took it, because I knew the job market was rough. It's worth noting that I took a job that was a demotion, in terms of credentials, but got a pay raise. 2nd postdoc: An "internal promotion" from the previous, 40k.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    I guess it's also worth mentioning, I'm ~30 years old and still making 40k, despite having slaved away as a PhD (talking 80 hour weeks) from a top-ranked school. My peers who went on different career trajectories are making far more than I. OTOH, I have plenty of friends (whom I know through social activities, so did not make it into tech) that are unemployed, which in most cases, is worse.
  - davidw 13y ago
    Ouch, yeah, that's pretty bad. What exactly do you have a doctorate in? Aren't there prospects in industry, rather than academia?
    - dnautics 13y ago
      http://indysci.org/board/ http://indysci.org/board/
    - dnautics 13y ago
      I applied for a job in industry (with http://www.crunchbase.com/company/draths-corporation http://www.crunchbase.com/company/draths-corporation). Cold emailed the CEO (in 1/08). Got an interview with the CEO, in 7/08, was told to "call back in a month and I'll see if I can allocate money for you" - he'd been demoted to CSO by the VC. It was a really fun trip, he was great to me, but I could tell he was an a-hole, and he said, you know, you should really consider being an executive of your own. I thought he was crazy, but now that's exactly what I'm trying to do (but of a nonprofit, which might be even crazier). Again, this was in 7/08, and I'd been watching the Chris Martenson "crash course" videos and following the Ron Paul presidential campaign and knew that the market was about to crash. By 8/08, the market had begun its topspin downward, and I never got a response. Ultimately, draths went out of business, so it was probably for the better. More recently, I applied for a job in industry with these guys (http://www.genomatica.com/ http://www.genomatica.com/) and actually got a job offer that I had to decline because they wanted me to start immediately, and I (perhaps stupidly) felt I had an obligation to finish my project where I work now. OTOH, I seem to have enough freedom to try to do my own thing. So, yes there are prospects in industry. One caveat is that although my publication record is not terribly impressive by the conventional "impact factor metric" (I personally like that I've made innovations in three wildly different aspects of biology - difficult protein expression, small molecule drug development, and bioorganometallic chemistry), I have an extremely good academic pedigree, that gets my foot in the door to interviews and lets me at least try to justify my existence based on the merit that I value and the skillset that I've developed. Inasmuch as I hate that the title is being devalued, I feel sorry for PhDs that have their degrees rubber-stamped, because it's gotta be really tough for them.
gavinlynch 13y ago
slightly tangential topic, but I had to respond to this because I do hear this from my fellow US citizens: >>> "* Science, at least when I went through high school was Not Cool. It was for "nerds", something that you didn't really want to be labeled. I don't know if it's still that way in the US, but counteracting that effect might not be a bad idea." I've got to be honest... what High Schools did you guys go to?? I had friends on the football team who were into science. I had friends who didn't care about sports and were into writing. I had friends who had letter jackets, I had friends who rode motorcycles. I was into computers and nobody cared. I first cut my teeth with CSS helping out with the website for our school newspaper. I first learned to program by messing around and making silly ASCII racing games on my graphing calculator in BASIC. Everyone who cared just kind of thought it was neat, or didn't care and we talked about other things. All this labeling of "nerd" and "jocks"... I really don't get it. There were many circles of friends to join. Or you could be a loner and that's fine too. Looking back, I'm not even sure what label I would have been given (never considered myself a nerd, I was too poor of a student :p) Did I miss something, or does everyone else just get caught up in labeling waaayyy too much? That's just not the reality I experienced, and I never saw the ecosystem through that prism. shrugs
- dnautics 13y ago
  I always suspected the generation above me (graybeard professors) had to deal with that culture, and that's the reason why scientists are such phenomenally bad leaders - they didn't really interact with other people during their formative years. By the time I went to grad school, almost all of my male peers were actually "jock" types (and really nice guys to be honest), and really smart, too, but that could be field-specific, 20 out of my 24 classmates were into synthetic chemistry.
  - jff 13y ago
    I think people who are into science and tech are getting more varied. We laugh about the idea of the football-obsessed "jock", but for some reason locking yourself in a room to play Final Fantasy all weekend was seen as admirably geeky. Most of the guys I studied engineering with had participated in sports, many were quite good. A lot were into cars. When you stop trying to live up to that pathetic Jargon File description of a geek, late nights with techno blasting and Chinese takeout, you can get out and realize that there's a bigger world out there. You join the football team and discover that the quarterback really loves watching Star Trek, rather than dismissing him as a "dumb jock" because he has a number on his shirt.
stmchn 13y ago
I think it's definitely possible to flood the market, it's just difficult to make that generalization because STEM can mean a wide variety of things. There's so many STEM fields that it's kind of silly to lump it as one. Just as an example, according to the BLS, chemical engineer jobs are projected to grow 6%, slower than average compared to all occupations. In contrast, software developer jobs are projected to grow 30% over the next decade. Not all STEM fields have equal opportunities so it's certainly possible that some areas get (or already are) oversaturated and not others.

bdc 13y ago

This article reads like a general argument against government subsidies in general - replace "STEM education" with "corn" or "new energy" and the argument is still valid. Given that it was published on nature.com, best known as the publisher of one of the top science journals in the world, I would bet that the intended purpose is to stimulate discussion, not to explicitly endorse this view as written.

sp332 13y ago

A third option is that they're un-distorting the market, counteracting other distorting forces.

BrianEatWorld 13y ago
Unless you know what is actually distorting the market in the first place, counteracting a distortion with another distortion seems like a risky approach to problem solving. As the author points out, a good deal of money already goes into this. It seems if something is distorting the market, we aren't very good at targeting it, given the lack of results.

russelluresti 13y ago

The argument that the person is missing here is whether or not there are a significant number of unfilled STEM jobs (either presently or expected in 15 - 20 years). If there are a lot of unfilled STEM jobs, then you should push people into STEM careers to fill those jobs. The reason you don't push students into being lawyers is because there are more law students graduating than there are open jobs for them. Any market, STEM or not, where there is a lack of unqualified workers and more job opportunities than graduates should have programs that encourage students to consider pursuing those careers.

sp332 13y ago
If there were lots of STEM jobs (that pay reasonable wages), then wouldn't people move into them without government subsidies?
- stmchn 13y ago
  Well, frankly, STEM has a reputation of being hard because, well, it IS difficult. It requires certain kinds of critical thinking that the K-12 education system can fail to adequately teach. I know plenty of people who started college in engineering or computer science knowing there's good paying job opportunities in those fields. But a big chunk of those people drop out once they start taking the more difficult courses. Retention is just as important as getting people into STEM in the first place but it's hard to retain students who aren't adequately prepared for the challenge.
- pjscott 13y ago
  How many students, when deciding on their major, actually look up information on job availability and typical salaries? And then take this into account in their decision? Judging by the number of people majoring in completely un-marketable fields, I doubt the percentage is very high.
  - sp332 13y ago
    Seriously? Who goes to college without checking out job prospects before picking a major? I went to a liberal arts college that prided itself on not focusing on marketable, in-demand or especially practical skills, and I'm pretty sure everyone had a decent grasp of what the job market in their field looked like. (I'm not saying that it was the primary motivation for picking a major, but they at least knew the situation.)

michaelochurch 13y ago

There are two potential labor market realities and we still don't know, as a society, which one is right: 1. Labor finitism: there's a fairly fixed amount of labor that society will pay money for, and us proles are doomed to compete against each other for it, in what ultimately becomes a race to the bottom. 2. Labor progressivism: technical and scientific progress will free up resources for more interesting and higher-yield work, and make everyone richer. To quote Keynes, the rising tide will lift all boats. In a labor-finitist world, the worker's job is to extract as much payment out of capital-holders (for as little work) as possible. The labor-finitist world is almost Malthusian in its ruthless cruelty. In a labor-progressivist world, it's actually good to do the grunt work quickly, so you can graduate to more interesting stuff. Of course, reality is somewhere between these two extremes. In the very short term, it's labor finitist: people have to formally "create" jobs. In the long term, it's labor progressivist; the labor pool does expand, with its rate being an open question. The open question pertains to the 0.1-20 years range over which we actually make career decisions. It's like Efficient Market Hypothesis, whose truth comes down to "what time frame?" (Over very-short or very-long timeframes, EMH is demonstrably not true for well-known reasons. Over typical timeframes, it is.) If labor finitism is true, then we want to drive young people far away from whatever we do. Given that the software industry is already a horrible place to work, just being honest about the low autonomy and shitty legacy code and arrogance of non-technical management-- also, the fact that, even though our salaries might look good on paper, we make about 1/5 of what we should given the bullshit we have to put up with-- ought to be enough. We just need to counteract the Googley propaganda about this career involving actual autonomy and respect. If labor progressivism is true, then since science and technology are the driving forces of that progress, we want as many people in those industries as have the talent, because that will bring us out of scarcity faster. It's unclear which is the case, though. Labor progressivism is true in the underlying "real world", but this society is littered with legacy power relationships that, I'm afraid, make labor finitism a lot more accurate. Just look at the terrorist attack that has been inflicted on the academic job market for the past 25 years if you don't believe that.

kyllo 13y ago
Here's to hoping that we as a society have the good sense to decide to reduce the barriers to entry for freelancing and entrepreneurship, so that anyone with skills can simply create their own job and trade their labor freely--without having to worry about "benefits" because the government actually provides those like it's supposed to.

dmlorenzetti 13y ago

It isn't clear what, exactly, Macilwain objects to, because he never bothers to give specific examples of what he finds wasteful. At the outset, he identifies three broad categories of funding: (1) luring young people into STEM careers; (2) promoting science and technology at graduate schools; and (3) raising standards of science education. But the rest of his argument lumps these all together as if all the spending is for category #1, "luring". For example, he points out that "no such government-backed programmes exist to pull children into being lawyers or accountants." And his broad argument, as expressed in the subheading, is that the funding biases the system to producing more scientists and technologists than it needs: "If programmes to bolster STEM education are effective, they distort the labour market..." Only by ignoring the distinction between category #1, "luring", and category #3, "raising standards", can he complain that businesses who want better-educated scientists, if they really meant it, would just pony up and "pay and train newly graduated scientists and engineers properly." Either he thinks that the technical skills businesses want can be achieved by a quick training session after a broad general education, or else he thinks that raising the salaries of engineers will send a market signal to grade-schoolers that they ought to be more interested in STEM education. The problem of poor preparation never seems to enter his head. If all the accounting firms in the country were complaining that few recent college grads can add a column of numbers, and the government responded by trying to improve arithmetic education, would Macilwain complain about the money spent "luring children into accounting"? In short, he might have an argument. But until he grounds it in specifics, he's just hand-waving with the broad idea that trying to improve STEM education distorts the market. This is obvious tripe, because the same broad argument could be applied to education in general: "If programs to bolster education are effective, they distort the market for educated workers. If they aren't, they're a waste of money. Besides, if businesses really wanted educated workers, they would pay and train new hires properly."

geebee 13y ago
"He thinks that raising the salaries of engineers will send a market signal to grade-schoolers that they ought to be more interested in STEM education". At the graduate level, this is backed by a RAND study. http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html The authors of the study do address the possibility that poor preparation is the cause - but they conclude that poor pay and job prospects relative to other options available to highly educated Americans is the main driver of low interest in science and engineering. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-science-engineer-jobs_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-scien... "Other approaches such as making K-12 science and math courses more interesting and pushing for more qualified math and science teachers "may have merit in their own right," researchers said, "but we think they pale in importance to the earnings and attractiveness of S&E careers as major determinants of the supply of U.S.-born students to S&E." So the real question is - if the objective research suggests that there is no shortage of scientists and that the American allergy to these fields is rational and market driven, why launch a PR campaign to get young Americans to enter it? There are reasons - many people believe that scientists and engineers create more wealth than other comparably or better paid professions. So society as a whole has a stronger interest in having more engineers than we'd normally get through the normal, individual response to market signals (I'm assuming an individual doesn't really care if his income contributes or detracts to the general wealth as long as it is obtained legally - some people clearly do care as a personal matter). In this case, it might make sense to try to lure some young people in. Rather than hoping to trick them, though, it might be better to actually make it worth their while - perhaps by covering tuition so that all engineers graduate debt-free. Another possibility could be giving a tax break to people in these fields. The Onion said it best... "Study finds 99% of commuters favor public transportation for others." Seems everyone other than scientists is keen on getting other people to study science. Barak Obama, a lawyer, certainly seems to think science is a fantastic career for others.

ttrreeww 13y ago

If the super highly paid job is there, they will come. If it isn't, then no amount of driving is going to help.

jeffdavis 13y ago

Teaching a student chemistry depresses the wages of all chemists, distorts the market, and damages all science. It is just pandering to big business interests. Sarcasm aside, just because it's good for business doesn't mean that it's bad for you.

Yhippa 13y ago

Would it be better to take the money that's being put into hyping STEM and reinvesting it into us K-12 education? Rather than having all of these extra programs to convince kids to move to STEM careers, make the current grade school programs more rigorous so that when they get their diploma hopefully they will have been through a lot in their schooling to be better prepared to take the rapidly changing new jobs opening up in today's society.

mead5432 13y ago
I think you are right that it probably isn't a campaign hyping the STEM jobs but I doubt the answer is making those classes "more rigorous" (though it probably does need some work in that area). My bet is that it is not treated appropriately by the teachers. My grade school teachers made science boring, monotonous and repetitive. It wasn't interesting at all. The crazy thing is that it is really cool... So much of it has a ton in common with a fun action movie: explosions and sex. Frame it in terms that make sense and is interesting to students rather than just reading chapter 5 and the interest in STEM fields will naturally increase.

rm445 13y ago

What an unutterably bizarre article. "By cajoling more children to enter science and engineering [...] the state increases STEM student numbers, floods the market with STEM graduates, reduces competition for their services and cuts their wages." It almost makes one wonder whether the author knows what STEM stands for - he seems to see it as just a type of labour, in the sense that an oversupply of plumbers, STEM graduates or scaffolders will depress the wages of that group. Perhaps I'm just irretrievably biased, but STEM seems, as well as being an enormously vast field it seems lazy to lump together, to be the engine of human advancement and economic growth. If student A, an engineering student, is put in competition with student B, who could have been a good lawyer but chose a Maths degree, and student C, who had to choose between music and physics but chose physics at university, then A's wages might end up slightly lower but we are all likely to end up better off. But it's not just that I am a science-biased technocrat - I don't especially want to drive our future judges and music professors into engineering careers. I think it more likely that technical education is just under-taken-up at all levels compared to what would most benefit society, and people who could perfectly well cope with technical careers end up taking jobs in the service sector that provide little training. To take a shortage of technically-trained people, paint that as a benefit for the wages of the currently qualified, and argue to maintain the status quo on that basis is just short-sighted nonsense.

danpalmer 13y ago

I have to call bullshit on this. It's just rubbish from my experience. In the UK, the government is at the point of giving away science degrees just so that there are enough science teachers for primary and secondary school students, and as a computer science student, I have managed to get a paid internship every year of my degree, and last year turned down 4 internship offers, because there were so many companies looking for people with a computer science education. Our STEM graduate rates are falling, and our need for STEM graduates is increasing. On top of this, we don't just need people getting jobs in STEM subjects, we need a population who have a broad knowledge of, and respect for, scientific understanding. If children aren't taught science to an adequate level then the country, and the world, suffers for it.

jurassic 13y ago

I agree with the author that pushing kids into STEM for STEM's sake is stupid. In particular, there is no shortage of scientists, which is why they work insane hours and make fast food wages well into their 30's. We already have enough people wasting their 20's on a PhD who will never get a tenure track faculty job as a full-time researcher. The current job:gradstudent ratio is untenable. Want to make science attractive and more effective? Cut grad student enrollments in half and triple grad student pay so that it is comparable to what other STEM grads make in the workforce; in this case, choosing science would not be a major financial mistake, even for the masses who never get a faculty job. Professors would have fewer students, enabling better mentorship and improved job outlook for each graduate. Increase pay for professors so that they make money comparable to other highly educated professionals. Endow faculty chairs at major universities and set a mandatory faculty retirement age so that deadwood profs aren't hogging positions needed by rising stars. Mandate open publishing. These changes could be implemented easily if legislatures and funding agencies wanted them, but nobody seems to want that. If the government wants people in science, they should spend money making it a better career, not spend money to slap a coat of marking gloss on a relatively bleak situation.

nsomething 13y ago

How about going into STEM to understand how the world works a little better? Would you rather have a society full of too many engineers or that of too many lawyers?