As someone else said below, treating STEM as one category is absurb and lumps together way too many different majors and careers (that have drastically varying levels of attractiveness and compensation growth).
Majors like biology and chemistry have fairly terrible prospects with just a BS degree, but CS and the engineering majors are still quite good. Physics and math are more iffy, but if you know what you're doing and pick up some employable skills on the side, then those majors will at least get you into interviews for good jobs.
There's also the question of what "not enough jobs" means. There are definitely struggling CS majors, but I think that a statement about there not being enough jobs needs to be looked at in a relative way - that is, one needs to consider what the alternative options are and whether those alternatives have better prospects. Many careers have been on the decline, and it's difficult to really identify career paths that are significantly better than computer science / software engineering (at least, at the undergraduate level). Even if we compared careers that required graduate school, the only paths that one could plausibly argue are significantly better than tech are medicine, law, and business (in my opinion). Those three careers all come with their own serious tradeoffs and downsides.
If anyone has information on what career paths are significantly better than CS / engineering, I'd be interested to hear your opinion. Right now, I'm unfortunately not seeing significantly better alternatives.
I think the hype is really, really dangerous. I work as an external examiner for CS students at an academy and bachelor level. 10 years ago, maybe 20 students would finish from a single school, in 2019 that number is in the several hundreds some places thousands. If I look at my average grading over the years, there is a clear trend too. People are either really good or really bad, where 10 years ago it was far more spread out, and a lot more people were “average”. It’s anecdotal but I think it’s because hype has pushed too many people into CS.
There will always be a need for excellent CS students, preferable with candidate or masters, just like there will always be a need for excellent biologists or great escimologists. I don’t think there will always be a need for below average CS students, especially not at the rate of which we’re producing them right now, again thanks to the hype.
One of the reasons I say this is because of automation. If you look at operations, the cloud has really killed a lot of jobs in enterprise IT departments, because it’s so much easier to operate your stuff in AWS or Azure than when you had to have your own infrastructure. Sure there are still operations people around, but notice how they are the best operations guys not the averages, because the people who were average 10 years ago are unemployed today.
It’ll be the same for development. We already see bits of it, at least if you’ve been around for a while. 19 years ago we build our first web based enterprise tool to handle employee vacation, sick leave and tax-refund on corporate related driving. It was a massive JSP undertaking that took 20 guys and 6 months. In 2017 it was replaced by a modern web tool build in .NET framework web-app and Angular, it took an intern three weeks to do it.
If you look at what areas are becoming useful, it’s not really CS. Sure you’ll be able to use some CS students for ML, but you’d rather have a mathematician or a statistician who can code. Sure you can use some CS students for robotics, but you’d rather have an electrical engineer.
I’m Danish, our jobmarket is different, but we too hype STEM and especially CS, but the truth is, that what we’re really going to need is electricians, pumblers and other craftsme because every young person wants to learn to code.
Careers that have higher status and entry requirements have the advantage that they don't cannabalize their middle-age job prospects like CS does.
CS is great for many years, until you discover it's a year too late, with only a limited number of things to show for it, along with largely useless random domain knowledge; and your peers who didn't major in CS are gaining more leverage relative to you, due to compounding nature of advancement in those other professions compared to constant skill (re) acquisition in tech
It's from 2013, but Peter Turchin talks about law degrees in the U.S., where job prospects had become bimodal. Note that this would not show up in unemployment stats necessarily, but the salary prospects of the lower mode clearly did not justify the time and expense of the law degree: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/bimodal-lawyers-how-ext...
Working as staff at a major university, I get to interact with a lot of students in biology and often hear back from them once they graduate. At least for biology, the job prospects are not great. With luck, you may make a living wage and have a full time job with job security by the time you reach middle age, but there are so many students that graduate and end up working at Whole Foods, or waitressing at the Cheesecake Factory, or being a personal fitness instructor at a private club. Those are all jobs recent MS degree graduates from my institution are currently working while they wait for something better to come along. Sometimes something better doesn't come along.
Of course, the situation isn't always that bad -- students graduate and can do quite well for themselves, but there is no guarantee of a good job if you graduate with a BS or MS in biology, and that is a little different from graduating with a degree in math or CS. At least, that's what it looks like from my vantage point.
At least at my university (major well-known one), many if not most biology majors were intending to go on to medical school, rather than try to get a job after graduation.
Bio was just a pragmatic and convenient choice as the course requirements for the bio major itself pretty much also fulfills all pre-med course requirements (bio, organic chemistry, etc...)
Instead of grouping people together with stem we could have a categorization that species people who can reasonably get a job as software engineers and then all other stem. Because isn't that really it? Bio seems much harder to do dev work, but it's common for mech engr, ee, some physics and math.
Wow, whole foods jobs require an M.S. degree that's rough! I have heard you need 2 postdocs in biology before you are qualified for industrial research ...
You can be a "STEM graduate" but if you insist on trying to get a job doing basic scientific research, you're probably not going to find interesting well paid work. If you do an engineering degree and get a job building mining equipment, you're going to do fine. The job market doesn't care about your aspirations, it cares about how useful your skills are in solving a company's problems.
If you want a job doing basic scientific research the entry level qualification is a doctorate. That’s certainly true in universities and it’s equally true in biology and chemistry though that’s probably not enough. You almost certainly need a post doc or two. Physicists have enough outside options that if they want to get out the post doc is unnecessary but getting a doctorate is a terrible financial decision. That’s what happens when the government does a careful study of how to reduce the prices of highly skilled scientific labour and then follows the recommendations.
> Government and Universities Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists
> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.
* "X, 23, from Sydney's inner west graduated with a bachelor of creative arts in film and television production from a private college in 2016. She wants to be a film director and actor."
* "Y, 23, studied journalism at the University of Wollongong and was warned it would be tough to get a job."
* "Z graduated with a degree in social research and policy from the University of NSW in last year said it took her a year to find a project management job."
This is the real reason why women are graduating in computer science in much smaller numbers than when I was in school, when the number was 30%. Programming, like engineering and science, has turned out to be just not a good long-term career prospect for most people.
Whenever demand softens, which it does every few years, women and minorities take the brunt. Once you have been out for even three years it is very hard to break in again.
Part of the problem is that when employers don't feel like paying a living wage, they easily persuade government to import foreign help, in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. The companies pretend that this doesn't depress salaries, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Furthermore, they have arranged not to be obliged to pay overtime, and then they demand overtime work on a routine basis. I have never seen such an employer pay engineers overtime, under any circumstance. Sometimes there are "bonuses" that are a tiny fraction of what overtime would cost them.
The only plausible solution to this problem will be for engineers and programmers to unionize, and start cultivating representation in legislatures. We are handicapped by myths about self-reliant cowboy engineers who don't need to join together.
Where I live in Austin, Texas, USA, programming is one of the better job markets, and has been for decades with the exceptions of 2001 and 2008. Even in those years, it was better than most other fields.
recent STEM hype aside, it has historically been very challenging to find work as a "straight" biologist, especially with only a BS, and if you can it's probably going to be scut-level underpaid lab or field work.
Part of the reason I think STEM is horseshit is that it is so broadly defined as to be without meaning. You just can't reasonably talk about something as one labor market if it includes zookeepers, pharmaceutical chemists, medical doctors, facebook engineers, economists, and advertiser...er, data scientists.
> Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. ... Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. ... The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. ... No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher
The difference between science and engineering (education-wise) is that an engineering degree is strictly defined with regards to subjects learned, with little choice of electives by the student: everybody is learning the same thing.
With science (and most other degrees) the student can pick and choose their topics.
This is just basic systems thinking (I am re-reading "the Goal" sorry ...)
We know overall we need more STEM based jobs because that drives innovation and invention and wealth.
So we educate people in STEM.
But when they arrive, we have failed to arrange incentives to grow new industries or expand use of STEM in current ones.
It's a bit like taking 100 newly graduated astronomers to the observatory, and when they say sorry our last telescope is broke, just telling the 100 go plough fields, we are pretty sure the sun just goes round the earth once a year. We'll be fine.
I think its been this way for a while? At least since the Great Recession imo. I have friends who have amazing credentials (talking like compsci and physics phds from places like caltech and cmu) and very few of them are employed in their field. Some of them didn’t even do anything and are basically NEETs who play video games all day.
It’s pretty clear the actual value and potential of these degrees aren’t being honestly advertised. The “STEM” hype as mentioned here certainly doesn’t help the situation. It is a lot of time and money and effort thrown away for a lot of people and it’s heartbreaking.
If they want jobs as a developer there are plenty. If they see NEETs that just play video games all day it's probably their own lifestyle choices that are at fault
Step 1 currently does pretty much nothing to help you transition to step 2. Sure, there are career networking events for juniors and seniors in college, but they are very superficial. It seems like colleges are producing unfinished products -- students who know a lot about theoretical concepts and not that much about applications. Maybe more colleges should try and obtain a better product-market fit by requiring vocational training for at least a semester.
I dunno, on the other hand, I got a B.S. in Ecology and have about 5 years of experience doing field work, long term monitoring, and data analysis and report writing on said research. Ostensibly that should be plenty of experience to prove I know my field and can learn new methods and skills related to it. Despite that I can't seem to find anything that isn't more seasonal work below my worth now or wanting a Masters degree even though I have plenty of real-world experience.
I agree that there's some serious gap between steps 1 and 2, but I did alright in finding internships and experience and still can't find squat.I admit I knew going into my undergrad that a Masters would be needed to find a /good/ job, but I didn't think I'd need one to find any job at all. I'm sure there are a multitude of reasons to explain it, but this job market blows. I never want to hear someone tell me they can't find good employees or fill positions fast enough when I apply to five or six jobs at a time every week and don't even get a rejection email from half of them, let alone an interview.
The same thing happened with lawyers around 5-10 years ago. It's almost like having everyone jump into the same market at the same time causes the market to change...
This is the age-old academic scam by greedy professors who want more graduate students! manufacture a fake scientific staffing crisis to pump up the funding for stem research grants and teaching and faculty and screw a whole generation of young people with fake vaporware jobs! NSF promoted the same bullshit lies in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond!
This is about Australia, which is not like our average developed country with no primary ressources.
When you have one sector in your economy producing most of the export, you have a lot of trouble to have a high level of good job in another sector to export. Your currency exchange rate and cost of life is being driven by your main exportation.
Countries rich in oil or other primary resources are like that.
As a developer in Australia, this is true... there are literally no jobs for people doing a science degree. Even doing a CS degree can be pretty shaky - most businesses/companies here are just looking to get a basic app out, and something like Machine Learning / AI is just not required as of yet. That's why I'm looking to move to the US for better opportunities...
As I approach my 30's, I'm seriously considering a roadmap to getting out. This, along with recent legislation makes me very concerned about my future prospects.
This article is confusing overall - it talks about STEM in the headline, then cites a general chart by Grattan Institute (a policy think tank) similar to another recent piece by Grattan's Andrew Norton (quoted in the SMH piece): https://grattan.edu.au/news/graduate-employment-is-up-but-fi... .
The article starts with a discussion about science graduates, but it’s primarily about the weak job market for college graduates in general.
Unfortunately, college degrees are not a sure fire way to get hired in today’s economy, but they are essentially needed, unless you plan on going into some trade.
Kind of. College degrees replaced high school degrees as a baseline for general knowledge. It used to be the case that a high school degree meant you had some general knowledge of math, history, geography etc., with an above average level of literacy and a reasonable level of intelligence. High school degrees do not mean any of those things anymore. Many kids who graduate with a high school degree are functionally illiterate (1 in 5 graduates).
Shouldn't STEM (and to a greater extent STEAM) refer to degrees that combine the component areas into a program and not a degree that is solely a single component?
Yes, I understand you do very little Chemistry or Physics in a Comp Sci program, but your fundamental building blocks are almost entirely pure Chem and Physics, even more so in engineering.
I mean, ultimately the response really should be:
1. The overall macro measures still support success rates of STEM trumping other areas of study,
2. All hype is not created equal; even within Comp Sci or Engineering there are winners and losers.
3. Use general trends and measures to guide your overall strategy, not set specific tactics
The title is a bit confusing as the article is about a glut in supply of science graduates and a dearth in job opportunities (in Australia at least), also the anecdote about the journalism student was not germane at all.
I tried finding info on job opportunities but came up short - could only find data on worldwide STEM graduates https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-co...
and STEM job info about the USA:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-job...
TLDR - vast majority of STEM jobs in USA are computer related and India/China/USA far outstrip other countries in producing STEM graduates. Whoever advised those Australian students to get non computer related degrees did them a disservice, if they did not forewarn them of the job market.
[+] [-] davidxc|7 years ago|reply
Majors like biology and chemistry have fairly terrible prospects with just a BS degree, but CS and the engineering majors are still quite good. Physics and math are more iffy, but if you know what you're doing and pick up some employable skills on the side, then those majors will at least get you into interviews for good jobs.
There's also the question of what "not enough jobs" means. There are definitely struggling CS majors, but I think that a statement about there not being enough jobs needs to be looked at in a relative way - that is, one needs to consider what the alternative options are and whether those alternatives have better prospects. Many careers have been on the decline, and it's difficult to really identify career paths that are significantly better than computer science / software engineering (at least, at the undergraduate level). Even if we compared careers that required graduate school, the only paths that one could plausibly argue are significantly better than tech are medicine, law, and business (in my opinion). Those three careers all come with their own serious tradeoffs and downsides.
If anyone has information on what career paths are significantly better than CS / engineering, I'd be interested to hear your opinion. Right now, I'm unfortunately not seeing significantly better alternatives.
[+] [-] jaabe|7 years ago|reply
There will always be a need for excellent CS students, preferable with candidate or masters, just like there will always be a need for excellent biologists or great escimologists. I don’t think there will always be a need for below average CS students, especially not at the rate of which we’re producing them right now, again thanks to the hype.
One of the reasons I say this is because of automation. If you look at operations, the cloud has really killed a lot of jobs in enterprise IT departments, because it’s so much easier to operate your stuff in AWS or Azure than when you had to have your own infrastructure. Sure there are still operations people around, but notice how they are the best operations guys not the averages, because the people who were average 10 years ago are unemployed today.
It’ll be the same for development. We already see bits of it, at least if you’ve been around for a while. 19 years ago we build our first web based enterprise tool to handle employee vacation, sick leave and tax-refund on corporate related driving. It was a massive JSP undertaking that took 20 guys and 6 months. In 2017 it was replaced by a modern web tool build in .NET framework web-app and Angular, it took an intern three weeks to do it.
If you look at what areas are becoming useful, it’s not really CS. Sure you’ll be able to use some CS students for ML, but you’d rather have a mathematician or a statistician who can code. Sure you can use some CS students for robotics, but you’d rather have an electrical engineer.
I’m Danish, our jobmarket is different, but we too hype STEM and especially CS, but the truth is, that what we’re really going to need is electricians, pumblers and other craftsme because every young person wants to learn to code.
[+] [-] platz|7 years ago|reply
CS is great for many years, until you discover it's a year too late, with only a limited number of things to show for it, along with largely useless random domain knowledge; and your peers who didn't major in CS are gaining more leverage relative to you, due to compounding nature of advancement in those other professions compared to constant skill (re) acquisition in tech
[+] [-] rossdavidh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didibus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] whyenot|7 years ago|reply
Of course, the situation isn't always that bad -- students graduate and can do quite well for themselves, but there is no guarantee of a good job if you graduate with a BS or MS in biology, and that is a little different from graduating with a degree in math or CS. At least, that's what it looks like from my vantage point.
[+] [-] United857|7 years ago|reply
Bio was just a pragmatic and convenient choice as the course requirements for the bio major itself pretty much also fulfills all pre-med course requirements (bio, organic chemistry, etc...)
[+] [-] NotSammyHagar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemBuilder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isoskeles|7 years ago|reply
Things in life don’t just “come along.” Maybe this is their perspective, but they probably didn’t try hard enough.
[+] [-] taneq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|7 years ago|reply
> Government and Universities Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists
> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
[+] [-] jefftk|7 years ago|reply
* "X, 23, from Sydney's inner west graduated with a bachelor of creative arts in film and television production from a private college in 2016. She wants to be a film director and actor."
* "Y, 23, studied journalism at the University of Wollongong and was warned it would be tough to get a job."
* "Z graduated with a degree in social research and policy from the University of NSW in last year said it took her a year to find a project management job."
None of these sound like STEM to me?
[+] [-] stonogo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|7 years ago|reply
Whenever demand softens, which it does every few years, women and minorities take the brunt. Once you have been out for even three years it is very hard to break in again.
Part of the problem is that when employers don't feel like paying a living wage, they easily persuade government to import foreign help, in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. The companies pretend that this doesn't depress salaries, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Furthermore, they have arranged not to be obliged to pay overtime, and then they demand overtime work on a routine basis. I have never seen such an employer pay engineers overtime, under any circumstance. Sometimes there are "bonuses" that are a tiny fraction of what overtime would cost them.
The only plausible solution to this problem will be for engineers and programmers to unionize, and start cultivating representation in legislatures. We are handicapped by myths about self-reliant cowboy engineers who don't need to join together.
[+] [-] isoskeles|7 years ago|reply
Can you prove this?
[+] [-] anonytrary|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taysic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hprotagonist|7 years ago|reply
Part of the reason I think STEM is horseshit is that it is so broadly defined as to be without meaning. You just can't reasonably talk about something as one labor market if it includes zookeepers, pharmaceutical chemists, medical doctors, facebook engineers, economists, and advertiser...er, data scientists.
[+] [-] eesmith|7 years ago|reply
> Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. ... Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. ... The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. ... No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher
122 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7451835 .
[+] [-] o10449366|7 years ago|reply
1. "How do I become a data scientist?" (AKA, what the hell do they do?)
2. "Why can't I find a job?" (Because no one is qualified for a role with no defined qualifications.)
[+] [-] taneq|7 years ago|reply
And then we add in the Arts for "STEAM" and the cycle is complete.
[+] [-] foobar1962|7 years ago|reply
With science (and most other degrees) the student can pick and choose their topics.
[+] [-] m3nu|7 years ago|reply
The real bottleneck are problems that can be solved in a profitable manner. And those are almost endless.
So instead of waiting for someone to match your skills to a problem, just go and find a problem yourself :-)
[+] [-] sudden|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|7 years ago|reply
We know overall we need more STEM based jobs because that drives innovation and invention and wealth.
So we educate people in STEM.
But when they arrive, we have failed to arrange incentives to grow new industries or expand use of STEM in current ones.
It's a bit like taking 100 newly graduated astronomers to the observatory, and when they say sorry our last telescope is broke, just telling the 100 go plough fields, we are pretty sure the sun just goes round the earth once a year. We'll be fine.
[+] [-] pram|7 years ago|reply
It’s pretty clear the actual value and potential of these degrees aren’t being honestly advertised. The “STEM” hype as mentioned here certainly doesn’t help the situation. It is a lot of time and money and effort thrown away for a lot of people and it’s heartbreaking.
[+] [-] maccio92|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonytrary|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plytheman|7 years ago|reply
I agree that there's some serious gap between steps 1 and 2, but I did alright in finding internships and experience and still can't find squat.I admit I knew going into my undergrad that a Masters would be needed to find a /good/ job, but I didn't think I'd need one to find any job at all. I'm sure there are a multitude of reasons to explain it, but this job market blows. I never want to hear someone tell me they can't find good employees or fill positions fast enough when I apply to five or six jobs at a time every week and don't even get a rejection email from half of them, let alone an interview.
[+] [-] _bxg1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemBuilder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|7 years ago|reply
Corporations are driving, for obvious reasons. More supply, cheaper wages, more profits.
[+] [-] etaty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christopher8827|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arbalest|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seltzered_|7 years ago|reply
Not familiar with Australia, but there's also recent articles of it being in per-capita recession. (see https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/australia-falls-... )
[+] [-] gbear605|7 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, college degrees are not a sure fire way to get hired in today’s economy, but they are essentially needed, unless you plan on going into some trade.
[+] [-] macspoofing|7 years ago|reply
Kind of. College degrees replaced high school degrees as a baseline for general knowledge. It used to be the case that a high school degree meant you had some general knowledge of math, history, geography etc., with an above average level of literacy and a reasonable level of intelligence. High school degrees do not mean any of those things anymore. Many kids who graduate with a high school degree are functionally illiterate (1 in 5 graduates).
[+] [-] ui-explorer12|7 years ago|reply
Yes, I understand you do very little Chemistry or Physics in a Comp Sci program, but your fundamental building blocks are almost entirely pure Chem and Physics, even more so in engineering.
I mean, ultimately the response really should be:
1. The overall macro measures still support success rates of STEM trumping other areas of study,
2. All hype is not created equal; even within Comp Sci or Engineering there are winners and losers.
3. Use general trends and measures to guide your overall strategy, not set specific tactics
[+] [-] stevenwoo|7 years ago|reply
I tried finding info on job opportunities but came up short - could only find data on worldwide STEM graduates https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-co... and STEM job info about the USA: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-job... TLDR - vast majority of STEM jobs in USA are computer related and India/China/USA far outstrip other countries in producing STEM graduates. Whoever advised those Australian students to get non computer related degrees did them a disservice, if they did not forewarn them of the job market.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]