The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage
theatlantic.com

"Roughly twice as many American undergraduates earn degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines than go on to work in those fields."

Maybe if my kids grade school gets their way, we can boost that to four times, or even more. Those numbers are almost as bad as recent law school grad stats.

Needless to say as a life long STEM guy I'm strongly encouraging my kids to avoid the STEM field at all costs. I'm not annoyed at my kids school for focusing on STEM; its a very good educational technique and not any worse than other educational fads. As a vocation choice STEM is as likely to be as unrewarding as trying to become a rock star, a pro NBA player, or a fine arts painter, but those classes are great in K-12 schools. Those examples, and STEM, make truly excellent hobbies, but awful jobs, at least for most of the participants. I may not know the right answer, but I know STEM is the wrong answer. I'll still love my kids anyway, no matter if they become unemployed programmers or unemployed musicians, but I hope they can do better financially with their lives both for themselves and the grandkids, by being quided out of "hobby" jobs like STEM and music and art and into something with a profitable future.

In one of the recent reforms, it started to favor those who can fit into the country better -- those who have spent several years studying or working here can get immigration visa much easier and faster, without needing any sponsors.

This ensures a few things:

1, it reduces the chance of some highly educated immigrants failed to adapt to local job market and ended up doing manual labors, or consuming social assistance.

2, it gives the market more power to influence who should get in the country.

3, companies cannot hold foreign workers hostage, because after a couple years, the workers can fast-track through immigration visa without them.

Like, for example: the assumption that every STEM graduate wants to work in STEM fields, and that the failure of a STEM grad to find work in a STEM field is a failure of the STEM field instead of a personal decision of the STEM grad to pursue whatever career they want.

You could always point your kids towards economics - they'd spot the flaw in the above pretty quickly: a lot of STEM stuff is not zero-sum. If more people work on building more stuff, it's probably a net gain for the world. The NBA, on the other hand, by definition, can only have one champion per year, and only have N teams per year.