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Quote:
Originally Posted by EDS_
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As for STEM grads bailing on STEM jobs ...
Further, the competition in STEM never stops. A percentage of STEM grads never earn a job in STEM I don't know what that number is but I've read best guesses are around 25-30% another several precent washout quickly etc. etc.
I also read somewhere that among those who stay in STEM work directly over the long haul around 50% have a masters, Ph.D or professional degree.
I hired (7) new (ME) engineers 6 years ago for a Fortune 50, very techy, very great and sustained employer (90+ yrs inventing). All new hires are now GONE.
The best / most engaged was from Penn State, he has now 'found himself' happily working on a vegatable farm commune in VT
(3) pursued other high tech engineering positions (Amazon, MSFT, Goog) more pay, more freedom to travel / WFH
(1) gal, pursued Development Manager position in a start-up and is well on her way to Directorship.
(1) gal, was totally uninterested and not engaged with engineering and is working at a cat shelter
(1) has started a Technology advising business to network high end 3D printing resources Worldwide to design and invention companies. (miltary, automakers, aerospace...)
The most usual path for STEM exodus is to technical marketing / factory technical rep. Lots more money and freedom.
I stayed technical contributor STEM for over 40 yrs, but it wasn't for the money!
I like to invent, enjoy that career, and was good at it, and I took a lot of international based and impossible to design duties. (I'm not afraid of or deterred by failure, I fail everyday) As did Edison.
What I am talking about is that the emphases on these subjects leaves out and discourages kids who can be quite smart, even brilliant, in non-STEM fields. Everybody does not have the ability or the desire to be a pharmaceutical researcher or software engineer or nuclear physicist. My worry is that our education system seems to be ignoring these kids now to a degree that is unhealthy.
If someone actually has the level of genius to become the next Shakespeare, da Vinci or Mozart, then there is nothing that will stop them from reaching that goal. But that is going to be rare and exceptional.
We have to be realistic about opportunities that are available for the vast majority of kids that go into arts and humanities. It is not easy to make a living with those degrees alone. People have to live in the real world.
If someone actually has the level of genius to become the next Shakespeare, da Vinci or Mozart, then there is nothing that will stop them from reaching that goal. But that is going to be rare and exceptional.
We have to be realistic about opportunities that are available for the vast majority of kids that go into arts and humanities. It is not easy to make a living with those degrees alone. People have to live in the real world.
An advisor, of a friend, at ASU Cronkite School had a sign warning journalism majors.. 12 years ago. She started at 20 hours at 8 per hour.
Interesting comments, in that a lot of people think that originally I was attacking the study of STEM subjects. I am not doing that. Not at all. We do need more scientists, technicians, engineers, etc.
What I am talking about is that the emphases on these subjects leaves out and discourages kids who can be quite smart, even brilliant, in non-STEM fields. Everybody does not have the ability or the desire to be a pharmaceutical researcher or software engineer or nuclear physicist. My worry is that our education system seems to be ignoring these kids now to a degree that is unhealthy.
A healthy economy and a healthy nation can't exist without scientists. But it also can't stay healthy without thinkers with a broad range of knowledge. And those types are generally not scientists.
It's interesting that you would say that since to me it seems like our education system is actually catering toward those students. Considering that even those students who are focused on a STEM degree will spend half their college education time in various non STEM related classes. They will take more non STEM courses than the students you are speaking of will take in STEM related courses.
Trace back through high school, middle school, and elementary and I think the same thing; more time in the various arts & humanities than in math and science.
It's interesting that you would say that since to me it seems like our education system is actually catering toward those students. Considering that even those students who are focused on a STEM degree will spend half their college education time in various non STEM related classes. They will take more non STEM courses than the students you are speaking of will take in STEM related courses.
Trace back through high school, middle school, and elementary and I think the same thing; more time in the various arts & humanities than in math and science.
Typical High School, 9-12:
4 English
3-4 Math
3-4 Science
3 Social Studies
2 Fine Art (can include Music)
1 Health/PE
2 Practical Arts/Computer Application (some of these may bleed over, Computer Graphics is a Fine Art credit)
1 Financial Literacy
3-5 Free Electives
The underlying cause is that we as humans have a pretty sophisticated language instinct. Feral children develop their own languages. Humans are born able to speak and comprehend language after some years of development.
Our spatial instincts are pretty good too. This squares with our need to survive in a spatial world, hunt game, etc.
However numeracy is not so instinctual. We have some rough abilities, like supatizing. However even counting must be taught. Numeracy is a comparatively artificial, learned skill which we have a lesser genetic predilection for.
The USA imports STEM people because we have money and we can. But globally there is a shortage of STEM skills. If everywhere were as wealthy as the USA, we would be unable to service our infrastructure because it's overbuilt relative to the abilities in our population.
Since STEM is a learned skill set that will always be in greater demand than language skills, it makes sense to emphasize teaching it. Creativity is another very important skill that is in short supply, but no one knows how to teach that and many think it can't be taught.
To me the STEAM gag is silly. Why not STHEAMEE (scientific, technology, humanities, engineering, arts, math and everything else......to put it bluntly society does not need more artists.
Doesn't it?
Art is basically business. You either create a successful business selling your art and/or your artistic talent. Or you don't.
My issue is, none of these subjects or skills are mutually exclusive.
The whole, "girls can't do math and science" theme needs to die.
My daughter was born in 1999, at a time when you would think the "girls can do anything" mantra would have been widespread. She discovered in high school that she loved math and science, and told us she wanted to go pre-med. Of course, we supported that.
Except then we found out that she really wasn't very interested in medicine; she had somehow internalized the idea that working in a medical field was more appropriate for a girl than hard science. I still don't know where this came from. Her friends? Teachers? Society at large?
She's graduating with a BS in engineering this spring and has been accepted to an PhD program at Georgia Tech, including a special President's Fellowship, though she hasn't made up her mind whether she'll go on to grad school or not. I'm so glad she ended up following her heart and not whatever weird ideas she picked up about what girls should or should not do.
Art is basically business. You either create a successful business selling your art and/or your artistic talent. Or you don't.
My issue is, none of these subjects or skills are mutually exclusive.
In that case drug dealing, strong-arm robbery, up-skirt videography and boosting cars are all examples of applied art. I don't buy that.
My point about all this may be condensed to this......a friend's daughter is a very well trained and very fine dancer (top performing arts high school, dance related degree yada, yada, yada). I don't want to narrow it down too much but she lives in either NYC, London or Paris and according to her dad she worked 6 paying gigs last year and made less than $5,000 dancing.
I'm not anti-art or anti-Humanities, heck I'm listening to Stan Getz right now, but someone has to pay the bills. In the above case my friend pays his daughter's bills.
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Now being the contrarian thinker that am an excellent combo for business and the world would be say something like a philosophy BS and an MBA. Or X, Y, Z literature and a finance masters. But this kind of thing would only work for top students.
ETA - I forgot one of my golf buddies is a surgeon who earned a history degree first. He doesn't advise that type of track but he made it work.
Speaking from the inside of an academic institution -
1. We are constantly in a process of evaluating what majors students want. At the end of the day, we are in the business of selling them knowledge services & we cater to what they want. If they want ethnic studies, we are going to offer them ethnic studies. That is not the most in-demand major FYI. The biggest growth in demand over the last 20 years has been in health care fields. The largest overall demand remains Business. The most popular liberal art subject is Psychology, has been for a while.
1a) The corresponding largest drops in demand over 20 years are basically every traditional academic subject. The most severe is foreign languages, especially French. But pretty much every traditional liberal art, to include the straight sciences like physics etc... has declined. The exception here is biology and its variants - those are health care related.
2. Not every STEM is useful. E.g. Astronomy is math-intensive one of those "nice to know" things. You aren't going to go to the stars.
3. The quote from Margin call is pretty good - at a certain point EVERYTHING is some combination of math and reading.
E.g.: Computer science is math + language.
E.g.g: I majored in history. At the undergraduate level that is basically just advanced reading. At the graduate level I had to level-up my math skills A LOT. Or did you think an historian never has to calculate anything? For example, using a recent topic of interest since we talk about race questions these days a lot - "What was the 10-year return on investment of a single slave in, say, Georgia, between 1850-60?" This might be important if someone is telling you that people descendants deserve reparations for slavery. Okay, what was it really worth? If you don't know, neither party can meaningfully answer the reparations question. Basically I need the same skills to determine that as a Finance major, but I also need the History skills to know how to find the information to get the answer and the pre-existing knowledge of the field to situate the information. Then I need the Literature skills to communicate that in a way so somebody gives a damn about reading it.
At the graduate level they didn't tell me the math classes I had to take... I just had to do it or wash out of the program. In an irony some people coming in with BAs in history washed out because they had to idea how to even start to attack that kind of problem. But also people with things like engineering backgrounds gave up in frustration when they found out they needed to learn a foreign language to even get started reading the sources. At some point people "think" the humanities are worthless just because But they're not. They have always been worth something, but simultaneously they have never had direct applications because that is not the point of them. Just like not every biochemistry major is going to invent the Covid vaccine. But a thousand different pieces of information DID lead up to that.
However, too many undergraduate degrees are basically high school redux. At the undergraduate level I never even came close to doing something like the above vignette. In undergrad they asked me to do things like read 3 books about the French Revolution and be able to explain it back to the teacher with some level of accuracy and professionalism. That is not a useless skill however, and far beyond the capability of most HS graduates.
It's like that for pretty much every class at the undergrad level at most colleges & universities. Certainly I feel that I am repeating high school so much that I wonder what it is they even do for 4 years? But having spent time in high schools, I have some sympathy that they are asked to pretty much solve the world's problems and they don't have unlimited time or resources with the students. Every time I visit a HS I am reminded that teenage stupidity is universal across all times and places, and no matter what you change in their education program, the stupidity and angst of teenage life is going to supersede whatever program change you try to make.
What a lot of you, and certainly students, seem to want colleges to do is produce some kind of magic ticket that quickly results in a job paying a lot of money. The only way we could do that is through corruption. We can't guarantee you a job with a degree anymore than the Catholic Church could guarantee you a ticket into heaven by selling you an indulgence. If we did that we'd be corrupt. I'm sorry, your career outcome is not guaranteed no matter what major you choose. We can guarantee that we will teach you the subject you choose to major in to the best of our abilities. But we can't guarantee any future outcome that is based on 100 factors of the students' choice. At best, we can give examples of what prior graduates have done, and tell you the self-reported survey data of people with X degrees. But times change, and you could follow what they did to the letter and not succeed the way they did.
Last edited by redguard57; 01-27-2023 at 03:25 PM..
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