Hal Salzman, sociologist and professor of public policy at Rutgers University, says there is a shortage of jobs for graduates who have studied science and engineering. The so-called STEM jobs, he says, have an excess of applicants.
Salzman wrote recently in U.S. News and World Report:
“All credible research finds the same evidence about the STEM workforce: ample supply, stagnant wages and, by industry accounts, thousands of applicants for any advertised job. The real concern should be about the dim employment prospects for our best STEM graduates: The National Institutes of Health, for example, has developed a program to help new biomedical Ph.D.s find alternative careers in the face of “unattractive” job prospects in the field. Opportunities for engineers vary by the field and economic cycle – as oil exploration has increased, so has demand (and salaries) for petroleum engineers, resulting in a near tripling of petroleum engineering graduates. In contrast, average wages in the IT industry are the same as those that prevailed when Bill Clinton was president despite industry cries of a “shortage.” Overall, U.S. colleges produce twice the number of STEM graduates annually as find jobs in those fields.”
The “crisis narrative” about these fields is wrong, he says.
“Cries that “the STEM sky is falling” are just the latest in a cyclical pattern of shortage predictions over the past half-century, none of which were even remotely accurate. In a desert of evidence, the growth of STEM shortage claims is driven by heavy industry funding for lobbyists and think tanks. Their goal is government intervention in the market under the guise of solving national economic problems. The highly profitable IT industry, for example, is devoting millions to convince Congress and the White House to provide its employers with more low-cost, foreign guestworkers instead of trying to attract and retain employees from an ample domestic labor pool of native and immigrant citizens and permanent residents. Guestworkers currently make up two-thirds of all new IT hires, but employers are demanding further increases. If such lobbying efforts succeed, firms will have enough guestworkers for at least 100 percent of their new hiring and can continue to legally substitute these younger workers for current employees, holding down wages for both them and new hires.
“Claiming there is a skills shortage by denying the strength of the U.S. STEM workforce and student supply is possible only by ignoring the most obvious and direct evidence and obscuring the issue with statistical smokescreens – especially when the Census Bureau reports that only about one in four STEM bachelor’s degree holders has a STEM job, and Microsoft plans to downsize by 18,000 workers over the next year.”
Read his article for the links.
Thanks for this, Diane.
There is nothing wrong with hearing from the other side of this debate and it IS a debate, no matter how many times politicians and CEO’s insist it isn’t.
It’s crazy not to take the obvious self-interest of those two parties into account. Politicians need a reason to excuse flat wages and unemployment and CEO’s want someone else to pay to train or provide the specific workers they need, and they don’t want to pay any more for labor than they absolutely have to. The lack of “skills” of the US workforce are an obvious and easy scapegoat for some very powerful people.
That isn’t an attack. It’s common sense. The fact that this “skills gap” was swallowed whole and is repeated endlessly by everyone in government is really, really disturbing. It should bother EVERYONE who actually has to live and work in the “real economy” because it seems to indicate our political leaders are either completely captured or incredibly, ridiculously naive. They can’t fix it if they don’t know what’s broken.
If I hear one more person in government repeat what someone in business told them as if it’s etched on stone tablets and “true” because someone powerful said it, I am going to scream.
One lie fits seamlessly into, and supports, the next.
Another example of how “education reform” is a business plan masquerading as an education model.
How about a new slogan—“mandated unemployment is not destiny.”
Don’t think we’ll be seeing that soon.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Isn’t Bill Gates purported to fire thousands of workers while at the same time calling for more Visas for out of the country workers for his own ventures? Bait and switch. Smoke and Mirrors. Up is down, down is up. Nice dovetailing into an education crisis too.
If you are here on a Visa and its time to go home, your job has to be that of some sort of specialist, a job that can’t be readily filled by “natives” – so this fits into Gates’s want to fill holes cheaply. Create a demand by the narrative that there aren’t enough trained specialists, fire the ones you have, hire on Visas for cheap. Eureka. Voila. Now, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.
This is Duncan.
“So we all have to — again, this isn’t a Republican or Democratic or — I could care less about politics and ideology. This is about we need an educated workforce. And it’s fascinating to me that in a really tough economic time like this, we have 2 million high-wage, high-skilled jobs that are unfilled because we’re not producing the employees with the skills that employers are looking for. I can’t tell you how many CEOs I’ve met with and the President has met with who have said, we’re trying to hire now; we’re not trying to export jobs, but you’re not producing the workers.”
That’s fascinating to him. But is it true? We don’t know. CEO’s told him it, so it must be, right?
Here’s Jamie Dimon saying it. He must be one of the 15 people they talked to.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/closing-the-skills-gap-101478.html#.VCAqaytdVH1
I think it’s more along the lines of CEO’s don’t want to pay workers what they are worth after obtaining a degree and or require them to speak a certain foreign language other than just English. That way they can say they can’t find qualified workers, while bring in less expensive workers settled we less or no school debt or a family to support.
Well, what I do see is that here in NY, I know a lot of people looking to hire CS talent. I spoke to one person who said that he needed to hire n new hires in the next 3 years and he’d love for them to be from the US but if he can’t find local talent….
There are jobs in CS related fields but they’re looking for good people with strong skill sets – something we are, by and large, not producing.
If there’s a shortage, perhaps some perky Ivy type might start CS for America. Train up some chirpy do-gooders for 5 weeks and problem solved!
Seriously, I’d love to know what “good” means and what specific “skill sets” are not available locally.
Most importantly, what wages are being offered with these jobs?
The one person you spoke to could be one of the guys Arne talked to.
It’s already being done–there are programming bootcamps that take 12 weeks or a similar amount of time for a hands-on crash-course in programming for bright liberal arts grads. They claim high placement rates and salaries above $80K for their students.
Actually, I’ve talked to a lot of people in the NY Tech community – personally I have hundreds of graduates working in Tech.
Good means kids that know some technical skills but can really think not just ones that learned the flavor of the month. Good means those with a strong overall education with strong CS. Exactly the opposite of what the NYC DOE is trotting out (which is akin to what you mention.
Perhaps the person you spoke to is being too restrictive — eg, to folks with a CS degree.
From my experience working in high tech, some of the best software developers were actually trained in other areas: physics, math, chemistry, biology, engineering.
I’ve worked alongside both types and I’d have to say that, in general, those trained in science and engineering are actually better problem solvers and “engineers” than those trained in CS.
And I’ve worked with some very good software engineers — eg, at a highly respected software development firm in the Boston area who employs, among others, a fellow who was once the network admin at Bell Labs. The latter has a science degree, as do most of the other software engineers there. My own training was in physics, by the way.
PS I would be remiss if I did not point out that one of the very best software engineers I have known has a philosophy degree.
Again, it’s the thinking and problem solving skills that are most important.
The programming skills can be picked up as needed.
Following is from
STEM labor shortages?Microsoft report distorts reality about computing occupations
By Daniel Costa
“The Microsoft report projects a labor shortage over the next eight years by incorrectly assuming that only individuals with a bachelor’s degree in computer science can fill jobs in computer-related occupations. Data analyzed for this memorandum as well as other studies show that less than one-fourth to less than one-half of workers in computing occupations have a computer science degree.”
“Computer science graduates aren’t the only workers in computer-related occupations
“The first significant problem with Microsoft’s report is the assumption that job openings “in computing” not filled by college graduates with computer science (CS) degrees will go unfilled. It is a well-known fact that computer science graduates are not the only source of new hires in computing. In the late 1990s, the Department of Commerce (DOC) published a report warning of looming labor shortages in the information technology (IT) sector, citing the lack of college graduates with CS degrees as a principal reason (DOC 1997). The Government Accounting Office (GAO)1 later published a report chastising the DOC for its faulty methodologies, noting that “IT workers come from a variety of educational backgrounds and have a variety of educational credentials such as master’s degrees, associate degrees, or special certifications” (GAO 1998, 8). National Science Foundation (NSF) data at the time indicated that “only about 25 percent of those employed in computer and information science jobs in 1993 actually had degrees in computer and information science” (GAO 1998, 5).”
What is “CS talent”?
Computer “science”, which is not really a science in the traditional sense.
Thanks, SDP!
This has been going on for over 40 years, since the “Career Education” campaign of Nixon’s Comm of Ed Sidney Marland. At the very moment the US job market for college grads was crashing(phd’s driving cabs in NYC), Marland organized a national project to focus k-12 and college curricula on “job prep.” Preparation for jobs that don’t exist is a cynical betrayal of teachers, students, and families, of course. But, job-training has always been the elite curriculum of choice for the 99%, not for their own kids who get lavish liberal arts and humanities curricula in their pct schools and then their pct colleges. Keep attacking the lies of the STEM crusade–we already have more than enough STEM grads waiting for the good jobs promised them.
The side of the coin Dr. Salzman is writing about is that American workers do not want to do the work for the pay being offered. When some complain that American workers don’t want to do a particular job, they forget the other half of the statement. American workers don’t want to do that work for that pay under those conditions.
We see the same thing in education. It is the working conditions are abhorrent.
Yes, high-tech employers like Gates are especially eager to increase importation of low-wage high-tech grads from English-speaking nations like India. Even American grads wait and wait for hiring class that don’t come after interviews. The attack on labor rights and labor’s standard of living is especially aggressive in this STEM domain.
I agree, teaching, planning, grading/ assessing, managing class room, parents, administrators and your own personal time is extremely difficult in teaching. Most would be teachers give up or take a break after 4 years. So there is plenty of certified and unemployed teachers that are refreshed now and ready to go again.
What get me more though is id it appears the Turkish charter schools and now, others foreign led charter school corporations, coming here and getting HB1 visa to bring over teachers who hardly speak English. Clearly these immigrant workers have no teaching background. This charter system which is part a much larger team of Turkish charters bring in their own county people to create sympathy for their own countries causes, and profit from their workers labor through bonuses paid out with an expectation that the immigrant working will pay back to the corporations that brought them over. It’s a kick back for a job offering the US where the dollar ratio is $ 1:3. Interestingly enough too in Turkeys case, is the teachers that are brought in actually score lower on international test in science and math than the US.
No politicians going to close that loop hole though, as they get too much money from charters through campaign donations. Oop’s, That’s it… Campaign donations from the private sector to allow greedy mean corporations to bring in a cheep and temporary work force.
Part 1
Many of those who criticize public education in the United States also insist that we need to emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to move our nation ahead. They are wrong.
There is no public education “crisis.” There never has been.
Although the central theme of A Nation at Risk was that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened American national security and “economic competitiveness,” there was no truth to the claim.
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, examined carefully its specific claims. The Sandia researchers concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
“average performance of ‘traditional’ test takes on the SAT has actually improved over 30 points since 1975…”
* “Although it is true that the average SAT score has been declining since the sixties, the reason for the decline is not decreasing student performance. We found that the decline arises from the fact that more students in the bottom half of the class are taking the SAT than in years past…More people in America are aspiring to achieve a college education…so the national SAT average is lowered as more students in the 3rd and 4th quartiles of their high school classes take the test. This phenomenon, known as Simpson’s paradox, sows that an average can change in a direction opposite from all subgroups if the proportion of the total represented by the subgroups changes.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
Part 2
Despite a larger, poorer, and more ethnically-diverse student population, public schools are doing pretty well for most students. Richard Rothstein recently reported this overlooked fact:
“The only consistent data on student achievement come from a federal sample, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Though you would never know it from the state of public alarm about education, the numbers show that regular public school performance has skyrocketed in the last two decades to the point that, for example, black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago.”
The need for more emphasis on STEM is equally suspect. A 2004 RAND study “found no consistent and convincing evidence that the federal government faces current or impending shortages of STEM workers…there is little evidence of such shortages in the past decade or on the horizon.” The RAND study concluded “if the number of STEM positions or their attractiveness is not also increasing” –– and both are not –– then “measures to increase the number of STEM workers may create surpluses, manifested in unemployment and underemployment.”
A 2007 study by Lowell and Salzman found no STEM shortage. Indeed, Lowell and Salzman found that “the supply of S&E-qualified graduates is large and ranks among the best internationally. Further, the number of undergraduates completing S&E studies has grown, and the number of S&E graduates remains high by historical standards.” The “education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand.”
Part 3
Lowell and Salzman concluded that “purported labor market shortages for scientists and engineers are anecdotal and also not supported by the available evidence…The assumption that difficulties in hiring is just due to supply can have counterproductive consequences: an increase in supply that leads to high unemployment, lowered wages, and decline in working conditions will have the long-term effect of weakening future supply.”
Lowell and Salzman noted that “available evidence indicates an ample supply of students whose preparation and performance has been increasing over the past decades.”
Beryl Lieff Benderly wrote this stunning statement recently in the Columbia Journalism Review:
“Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.”
So why the STEM emphasis by the likes of Bill Gates and Norm Augustine (former head of Lockheed Martin)? Benderly continues:
“Simply put, a desire for cheap, skilled labor, within the business world and academia, has fueled assertions—based on flimsy and distorted evidence—that American students lack the interest and ability to pursue careers in science and engineering, and has spurred policies that have flooded the market with foreign STEM workers. This has created a grim reality for the scientific and technical labor force: glutted job markets; few career jobs; low pay, long hours, and dismal job prospects for postdoctoral researchers in university labs; near indentured servitude for holders of temporary work visas.”
Part 4
Benderly reports that an engineering professor at Rochester Institute of Technology told a Congressional committee last summer this:
“Contrary to some of the discussion here this morning, the STEM job market is mired in a jobs recession…with unemployment rates…two to three times what we would expect at full employment….Loopholes have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers with ordinary skills…to directly substitute for, rather than complement, American workers. The programs are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to American workers.”
You have to wonder. When will those who continually scapegoat public education (and teachers) in the United States, and who push the fake STEM “crisis,” get exposed for their lies and for the ulterior motives behind them?
And when will those who say the are against corporate-style “reform” disassociate themselves from their pet corporate “reforms,” including emphasis on the ACT and SAT, and AP courses and tests, and STEM?
My father–in-law was laid off by NASA in 2011 when the shuttle program was ended, as were 8,000 other workers in Florida and Texas, and it took him 2 years to find employment in a STEM field. Ultimately he moved to South Carolina to work for Boeing but there were 82 applicants for his position. We are friends with several other laid off engineers who are not as lucky and have been unable to find positions in any engineering or science field that would hire a person with 20-25 years of experience and advanced degrees. There is a glut of STEM qualified applicants for every job. It makes me sick every time I hear a CEO talk about a skills shortage. Our neighbor’s son is an unemployed engineer and he was recently offered a job at a tech company that pays $45,000 a year. He can’t pay back the loans for his undergraduate and advanced degrees with that salary, but he wants employment so he is moving back in with his mom and dad. The panic about and push toward STEM doesn’t make sense.
“The panic about and push toward STEM doesn’t make sense.”
Oh, yes it does if you’re one of the avaricious bastards, like a B. Gates, at the top trying to steal as much as you can in your lifetime.
Also, the “imports” are coming from countries where higher education is free. Our graduates are competing with those who may be able to comfortably live on lower salaries because they’re not up to their ears paying off student loan debt. Yes, we’re screwed twice. Go U.S.A.
That is true. California thrived when education was free. They started charging, Smaller private colleges spung up to compete and education has sky rocketed since. and the standard of living has gone way down.
The lack of “skills” of the US workforce are an obvious and easy scapegoat for some very powerful people.
Agree.
An oversupply of STEM graduates will drive down compensation for highly qualified workers. The US Department of Labor never projects labor markets beyond ten years and it does corrections every three years. All of our pre-school and kindergarten students who are being launched on a college and career trajectory for readiness in 2027, and all those who are supporting this truncated version of education are promoting a fraud, a fiction.
Also, lets be clear what a STEM education is. Advanced Chemistry and Physics are great. So is Java programming. But the blended learning in schools is not STEM. Its a shallow approach to education and cannot compare to direct instruction. It also should not be emphasized over the humanities, foreign language, etc.
Not overemphasized but Math, Science and yes, computer science, should get equal billing to the humanities because at the core, they’re all about looking at the world and thinking in a particular way.
I don’t know where you are, but STEM is all the rage around here, and the humanities get shortchanged. I teach geography and history in Utah, and geography was cut to half a year in order to make room for another computer class. STEM gets all of the funding. Math and science teachers are the only ones eligible for bonuses.
@ Threatened:
Yes, STEM is all the rage, and it’s not just out west. It’s all over.
As I noted in my comments above, STEM is now tied tightly to the Common Core and to “reform.”
And many educators eagerly lap it up.
This from Politico suggests that the gurus of “globalization” are collaborating to make sure schools become the training arms for STEM jobs and that the compensation from these jobs is unlikely to go up because the labor pool will be even more international than it already is.
The New York Academy of Sciences is announcing a new multimillion-dollar initiative today to address what it calls the “STEM paradox.”
Plenty of students are graduating from science, technology, math and engineering programs, the academy will say in an accompanying white paper. But the ability of employers to fill jobs in the fields is undermined by low numbers of work-ready graduates, brain drain from developing countries and the lack of women in STEM.
Through public-private partnerships between governments, companies, nonprofits and schools, the new Global STEM Alliance launching today at a United Nations event will mentor a million aspiring STEM leaders in more than 100 countries by 2020.
Notice that the time horizon for this initiative is about six years. Notice also the odd mix of reasons for this initiative…lack of women? brain drain from developing countries? need for schools to produce “work-ready” graduates?
Give me a break.
Reblogged this on The Soulful Veteran's Blog and commented:
Make no mistake, this is the home-front war: American corporations against the U.S. middle class.
Discover how profit hungry corporations and billionaires are going to destroy the middle class in the United States by firing U.S. citizens and replacing them with lower wage immigrants on work visas. Instead of jobs going to other countries, U.S. corporations are working to bring these lower wage workers to the United States to replace more expensive citizen labor. Bill Gates and Microsoft are part of this plan.
We Americans tend to think we can’t be preyed upon by other Americans –we’re on the same team. We fought WWII together. But the rich are preying upon us –or cutting us out of the game –as heartlessly as the whites dispossessed the Indians. The poor and the middle class are the new Indians, a connection Gary Shteyngart makes in his novel “A Super-Sad True Love Story”. The label “American” clouds our thinking.
This was written about in September 2013 by Robert Charrette in Spectrum, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) over a year ago. Here’s the “money” quote from the lengthy article:
Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.
Thank you so much for this “money” quote; it really does hit the Bulls Eye!
I think it’s quite clear what is going on here. Anyone who has taken Economics 101 or the equivalent should be able to see that this is all about INCREASING the supply of tech workers which will then DECREASE their value in the marketplace.
If I was running one of these companies, I’d be doing the same thing. It’s only “logical”. And if I didn’t do it, there would be some ambitious person down the hall from me who WOULD do it, and I’d soon be out of a job.
Capitalism is efficient. Non sentimental. No one really cares about you, or your family depending on your wages or salary. “Grow up and face reality. It’s a cruel and harsh world kids, get used to it.”
What I’m stunned by is the very broad spectrum of support for this notion of “We Can Educate Our Way Out Of Income Inequality If All Of Our Kids Just Become Better At Science And Math”. No, we can’t.
If EVERY kid did what we’re currently telling them to do, learn to program, emphasize STEM, get into a good college and ONLY take STEM courses, the end result is those jobs would soon gravitate down to minimum wage.
There’s no “magic formula” to these STEM jobs. The only reason they pay better than most is that most people don’t have those skills; so of course they want to flood the market with more and more STEM capable, people, whether here on visas from overseas or through the youngsters coming up through the system.
Yet, almost everyone I know, from rigid conservatives who despise public education, to people like myself who are big fans and followers of Diane Ravitch and want to see this so-called Education Reform exposed for the fraud it is, seem to almost all agree that STEM will save our kids and that all we need to do is to make them better at math and science.
We can’t educate our way out of the growing gap between America’s ruling elite and everyone else. It won’t work and if the average person took 5 minutes to think it out clearly you can see why it wouldn’t work.
But we need to keep talking about this and get the attention of most of our fellow citizens who naively think, “Get good at algebra and chemistry, kids, and the world will be your oyster!” No, it won’t. But see what happens when you try to tell that to your average parent today; you’ll get met with a lot of hostility. And why wouldn’t you? What you’re saying they hear as “That plan to save your child from an uncertain, financially precarious future is not going to work, and you should abandon all hope of him or her escaping a very grim adulthood.”
We have to do this as a society and think about ALL of our children and ALL of their futures, not just obsessing over “MY Kid!”. Thinking “Every child for themselves!” to get ahead in this pointless rat race is self defeating.
Americans are going to be forced to do jobs they wouldn’t dream of doing as a successful career in the future. It’s going to get more difficult in the future for average people to shine and be considered successful.
“STEM” careers…… we are talking about a wide range of careers. Here is the problem, as highlighted on code.org’s website. 71% of all new STEM jobs are in computing. 8% of STEM graduates are in Computer Science. We need to dissect the data a bit.