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Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

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Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#71

Post by devwastaken »

al_borland wrote: post #58
devwastaken wrote: post #4

STEM students can't apply for internships because they are on site and will not pay for relocation, will not pay for housing, and rent leases rarely will do short durations. Most grads get those because their family+friends had the resources to help them be successfull. Living in a large city with stem jobs and having an extra room. As housing capital is squeezed so is the nation. The trend is not improving, many oth…

I worked a STEM job near a campus we got interns from. It was $26/hr, which at the time was more than we paid contractors for the same work, and possibly more than some entry level direct hires. They could work around school as much as they wanted, we had people there 24x7, so they could set their own hours… as little or as much as they wanted. It was just a few miles from campus, so they already had housing. And wit…

That's a positive effect of having education close to industry. Unfortunately the costs and requirements to get into those schools is now so significant that few can do it. High cost of living = parents have to pay. There isn't the "self funded" student in those circumstances.

Responsible and reasonable individuals are not interested in giving up 5 years of their life and accruing high interest debt for the chance at a job. This may explain why many higher education students stopped going to work.

The people you actually want to hire likely are working other jobs to afford to stay in school.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#72

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mp05 wrote: post #67
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thought this was STEAM now? What's the A? EDIT: It's the arts [1]. It looks like a classical education. [1] https://theconversation.com/explainer-whats-the-difference-b...

> It looks like a classical education. "[...]humanities, language arts, dance, drama, music, visual arts, design and new media." I think of a classical education as debate/rhetoric, philosophy, and Greek/Latin but I went to public school so I'm just going off of hearsay.

> classical education as debate/rhetoric, philosophy, and Greek/Latin

It should also include music and art, both creating and appreciating.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#73

Post by gnicholas »

This may be true, but does that mean they didn't benefit from a STEM education, either because of the skills they learned, or the signaling value? I used to be a lawyer, and it was generally accepted that a student who had a STEM major would be given more leniency on GPA than other students. This was because of the perceived rigor of STEM disciplines. Applicants who were looking to work in patent law would get a boost since they would presumably know some things relevant patent cases they would be assigned to, and I don't know if this article would consider 'patent litigator' to be a STEM job.

I do think that the STEM push has been a bit overdone at times, but we should still consider that people who majored in STEM may still have benefited from their degrees because it allowed them to stand out, and to learn things that are useful in some jobs that may not be considered 'STEM jobs'.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#74

Post by FirmwareBurner »

bluetomcat wrote: post #70
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which mechanical engineers are doing that?

In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, probably. Not predominantly in the US.

No, I meant which mechanical engineers are, to quote you, "driving and sustaining user engagement in online services of some kind"? Those guys are also STEM grads/workers.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#75

Post by bmmayer1 »

wharvle wrote: post #7

> The Census Bureau reported in 2021 that a paltry 28% of STEM grads are working in these supposedly in-demand, highly paid and important STEM jobs. These include diverse sectors such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and energy, but about half of STEM jobs are in computers, and tech firms typically complain the loudest of STEM shortages. I’ve long suspected that the whole “STEM” education movement is a way for big tech…

By comparison, what % of humanities majors are working in humanities-related jobs? That would seem to be an important comparator that is excluded.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#76

Post by snakeyjake »

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.

My company has approximately 1,000 open positions for engineers. Not "build a website" or "use AI to sell ads" engineer but "build a TX tuner for spaceborne synthetic aperture radar from scratch" engineer.

We don't grant massive quantities of stock as part of a get rich quick lottery scheme, but I make over 3x the current US annual household income in an area where a 4 bedroom house on an acre and a half is $400k and that's enough. Anyone who thinks that isn't enough is crazy-- sociopathic, even.

Maybe there's not a shortage of biology and IT skills and coding bootcamp grads but there is a shortage of people who took, and paid attention in, a linear algebra class.

There is 100%, irrefutably, undoubtedly, unquestionably, a shortage of engineers. Actual engineers not "use AI to sell crypto ads" engineers.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#77

Post by icedchai »

torginus wrote: post #43
wharvle wrote: post #7

> The Census Bureau reported in 2021 that a paltry 28% of STEM grads are working in these supposedly in-demand, highly paid and important STEM jobs. These include diverse sectors such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and energy, but about half of STEM jobs are in computers, and tech firms typically complain the loudest of STEM shortages. I’ve long suspected that the whole “STEM” education movement is a way for big tech…

The thing is even though I went to school for EE, I found it weird that EE jobs demanded an incredibly wide and difficult to obtain skillset, including rudimentary CS knowledge, yet paid less than what I could sell said CS knowledge for. We live in a society.

I started EE, switched to CS because it was easier.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#78

Post by RoyalHenOil »

mp05 wrote: post #22

I say this with 90% sincerity: I thought this was STEAM now? But with all seriousness... I went to university out of high school in 2005 to get a mech engineering degree but never finished because I liked to party too hard and web dev was easy and paid better than most people I knew with entry-level engineering jobs. Flash forward to now as a non-trad student and I'm in my 400-level coursework. It's all easier than i…

I started university in 2004, and I did not party. My university coursework was no harder than my high school coursework, outside of a couple of weed-out classes (like organic chemistry) -- but those were graded on a curve, so they FELT difficult, but in practice weren't hard to pass at all because we were being graded against the students who were there to party and missed the fundamentals that everything else was built on.

I suspect that your partying made the coursework seem a lot more difficult that it really was.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#79

Post by devwastaken »

reaperman wrote: post #25
devwastaken wrote: post #4

STEM students can't apply for internships because they are on site and will not pay for relocation, will not pay for housing, and rent leases rarely will do short durations. Most grads get those because their family+friends had the resources to help them be successfull. Living in a large city with stem jobs and having an extra room. As housing capital is squeezed so is the nation. The trend is not improving, many oth…

For chemical engineering internships it was customary and expected for the employer to provide housing as well as some relocation money, in addition to wages. I think lack of housing assistance is generally true of the sciences (biology, chemistry, etc) but less true for engineering. Computer science internships seem to be highly variable and not have any established industry-wide norms for internships.

Trends from 2010 are no longer applicable. Market has shifted significantly. When there is too many applicants it's easier to limit to local area.

Re: Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

#80

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

torginus wrote: post #43
wharvle wrote: post #7

> The Census Bureau reported in 2021 that a paltry 28% of STEM grads are working in these supposedly in-demand, highly paid and important STEM jobs. These include diverse sectors such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and energy, but about half of STEM jobs are in computers, and tech firms typically complain the loudest of STEM shortages. I’ve long suspected that the whole “STEM” education movement is a way for big tech…

The thing is even though I went to school for EE, I found it weird that EE jobs demanded an incredibly wide and difficult to obtain skillset, including rudimentary CS knowledge, yet paid less than what I could sell said CS knowledge for. We live in a society.

I saw getting my bachelor's in electrical engineering as similar to when an aspiring writer gets a degree in classics instead of English lit. I always knew I'd end up a software engineer, I just also knew I really wanted to know how things worked on the physical level and wouldn't be able to muster up the energy to touch enough differential equations and vector calculus to actually grok it for myself ever again after college.

Walking in with that mindset made the whole thing really enjoyable, actually. Recommended!

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