The Pronk Pops Show 248, April 22, 2014, Story 1: Shortage of Jobs Not Americans To Fill Jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics — Large US Multinational Corporations Want Cheap Complaint Labor Force of Illegal Aliens Given Pathway To Citizenship — Solution Raise Salaries and Enforce Immigration Laws — Videos
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The Pronk Pops Show Podcasts
Pronk Pops Show 248: April 22, 2014
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Pronk Pops Show 194: January 17, 2014
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Pronk Pops Show 192: January 14, 2014
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Pronk Pops Show 190: January 10, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 189: January 9, 2014
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Story 1: Shortage of Jobs Not Americans To Fill Jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics — Large US Multinational Corporations Want Cheap Complaint Labor Force of Illegal Aliens Given Pathway To Citizenship — Solution Raise Salaries and Enforce Immigration Laws — Videos
Milton Friedman – Illegal Immigration – PT 1
Milton Friedman – Illegal Immigration – PT 2
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS DESTROYING AMERICA
Sen. Sessions: ‘Deliberate Plan by President’ to Collapse U.S. Law Enforcement System
ITIF Debate: Is There a STEM Worker Shortage?
The issue of high skill immigration is receiving increased attention as Congress considers comprehensive immigration legislation. Underlying this issue is an ongoing debate surrounding the U.S. labor market for high-skill workers, including those in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. The key policy questions being discussed include: is there a shortage of STEM workers in the U.S. economy; is the U.S. education system producing enough STEM graduates with requisite STEM education; and does high-skill immigration negatively affect the domestic supply of STEM talent?
ITIF will host a lively debate on this critical policy issue. Robert Atkinson, President of ITIF, and Jonathan Rothwell, an Associate Fellow at the Brookings Institution, will argue that the United States does face a STEM worker shortage, which is hampering the development of the innovation economy, and high-skill immigration should be used as a tool to address the skills gap. Hal Salzman, Professor of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University and Ron Hira, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Rochester Institute of Technology, will counter that the country is not experiencing a STEM shortage, and increased immigration will simply exacerbate unemployment and hurt U.S. workers. The debate will be moderated by Kevin Finneran, editor of the National Academies’ Issues in Science and Technology.
The event is free, open to the public and complies with ethics rules. This event will not be live streamed but a video recording will be available the day after the event.
Seeking STEM Solutions: The Debate Over Jobs, Education & Talent
4.25.13 Help Wanted: The Small Business STEM Workforce Shortage and Immigration Reform
Sessions: Gang Of Eight Bill Would Surge Low-Skill Immigration, Hurt Working Americans
Lou Dobbs Destroys Illegal Alien with inconvenient facts about LEGAL IMMIGRATION
H-1B increase could discourage American college graduates
Bill Gates and the H-1B Visa, Chapter 3
Bill Gates Asks Senate For Infinite Number Of H 1B Visas
Sanders Introduces Bill Cracking Down on H-1B Visa Abuse
Krauthammer If Enforcement only a Goal, Oppose the Senate Immigration Bill
REPORT: NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT CLAIMS OF SHORTAGE OF HIGH-TECH WORKERS
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The notion that there is a shortage of American high-tech workers has been parroted as if it were an indisputable fact by members of congress Congress, academia, and the mainstream press. It has been the impetus behind the relentless campaign for amnesty legislation and a dramatic increase in the number of high-tech visas to allow Silicon Valley to import more foreign workers.
Except there is a problem with those claims. They are not true, and there is empirical evidence to prove it, says Michael Teitelbaum in a piece in, of all places, The Atlantic, a publication that is often cozy with the captains of the high-tech world. He writes that “such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom” and “there is almost no debate in the mainstream.”
Take an article in the Financial Times this week in which the publication repeated the claim that in “booming” Silicon Valley, “engineers are in high demand but short supply,” and companies “are facing the most competitive rush ever to secure US work visas for their foreign hires.”
“They echo from corporate CEO to corporate CEO, from lobbyist to lobbyist, from editorial writer to editorial writer,” Teitelbaum writes. “But what if what everyone knows is wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is just the same claims ricocheting in an echo chamber?”
Claims of a so-called tech-shortage are nothing new, and there have been five phases in history when similar calls have been trumpeted by industry elites. The truth, he says, “is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce” and that conventional wisdom is vastly different from the empirical evidence.
As Teitelbaum notes, there has been even more research on the subject from “leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute.” But no one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher, although some are forecasting high growth in occupations that require post-high school training but not a bachelors degree:
All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more. Were there to be a genuine shortage at present, there would be evidence of employers raising wage offers to attract the scientists and engineers they want. But the evidence points in the other direction: Most studies report that real wages in many—but not all—science and engineering occupations have been flat or slow-growing, and unemployment as high or higher than in many comparably-skilled occupations.
He mentions that is is “easy to cherry-pick specific specialties that really are in short supply, at least in specific years and locations” and concedes that it is “true that high-skilled professional occupations almost always experience unemployment rates far lower than those for the rest of the U.S. workforce.” Yet, unemployment “among scientists and engineers is higher than in other professions such as physicians, dentists, lawyers, and registered nurses, and surprisingly high unemployment rates prevail for recent graduates even in fields with alleged serious ‘shortages’ such as engineering (7.0 percent), computer science (7.8 percent) and information systems (11.7 percent).”
Teitelbaum also notes that in the current state of play, “far from offering expanding attractive career opportunities, it seems that many, but not all, science and engineering careers are headed in the opposite direction: unstable careers, slow-growing wages, and high risk of jobs moving offshore or being filled by temporary workers from abroad.”
Already, for instance, “among college-educated information technology workers under age 30, temporary workers from abroad constitute a large majority.” He notes that “even in electrical and electronic engineering—an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad—U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002.” And the unemployment rate in that industry is on the rise.
But that has not stopped Silicon Valley from going all-in for amnesty legislation in Congress. Silicon Valley companies are getting more creative in their efforts to import more foreign workers. They want to double and perhaps even triple the number of H-1B visas that are annually awarded to 180,000.The SKILLS Act, supported by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Darrell Issa (R-CA), passed out of committee in the House and would double the number of H-1B visas that are awarded immediately.
Lobbying groups like FWD.US, which was started by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and an array of other high-tech interests have spent millions to push for amnesty legislation in Congress. Just this week, Silicon Valley executives held a big-money fundraiser with Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee.
In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Anft wrote researchers who have not received money from “technology companies or their private foundations–say the notion that there is a STEM-worker shortage is ‘a myth.'” He said that though Silicon Valley groups have spent at least $130 million on lobbying efforts, the increase in the unemployment rate suggests there are a shortage of jobs–not workers.
Anft noted, as did Teitelbaum, that if there really were a shortage, then there would be a corresponding “rise in wages in technology and science fields. And that isn’t happening.”
“If you’re a biologist, chemist, electrical engineer, manufacturing worker, mechanical engineer, or physicist, you’ve most likely seen your paycheck remain flat at best. If you’re a recent grad in those fields looking for a job, good luck,” Anft wrote.
Silicon Valley wants an endless supply of cheaper labor, though. As Breitbart News noted, if they don’t get amnesty legislation and a dramatic increase in the number of high-tech visas, companies are reportedly working on contingency plans. One report noted that some are even looking to open new offices “abroad in order to hire people and then bring them into the US on a type of visa allocated to existing employees for internal transfers.”
Is There a STEM Worker Shortage? Rutgers Professor Debates Issue at National Academies
There is a widely held perception that the U.S. faces a significant shortage of STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – graduates, and that this shortfall is bound to hold dire consequences for America in the global economy. Professor Hal Salzman of Rutgers’ Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy disagrees.
Salzman, also a senior fellow at the Bloustein School’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, finds supply appears to be far greater than demand. Many representatives of STEM-related industries allege that American students lack the training, experience or motivation to fill thousands of positions they claim are available – both assertions are not supported by the evidence, Salzman finds.
Salzman presented his views on March 12 in Washington, D.C., during a public debate co-hosted by the National Academies’ Issues in Science and Technology,the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, the Economic Policy Institute and the Heldrich Center. He recently spoke to Rutgers Today about the debate sparked by his recent article on this topic in Issues in Science and Technology and a report for the Economic Policy Institute.
Rutgers Today: Is there a shortage of STEM workers in the U.S. economy?
Hal Salzman: We can find no evidence of any shortages in most STEM fields. Typically when employers have a hard time finding workers, they increase wages. In the one area where there truly were not enough graduates to meet hiring demands, in petroleum engineering, wages have risen dramatically and the number of graduates more than doubled in just a few years. In other areas, such as IT, average wage levels today are the same as they were when Bill Clinton was president. If employers truly need more workers in these fields, we find it puzzling that they don’t use the market and raise wages; all available evidence suggests that students do respond to market signals. It may be that it is more an issue of cost rather than supply, and Congress has been providing a lower-cost pool of tech guest workers; it is understandable that expanding the pool of lower-cost guest workers would be preferable to paying more for workers already in the U.S., if given the option.
Rutgers Today: Is the U.S. education system producing an adequate supply of STEM graduates with the requisite STEM education?
Hal Salzman: When we consider the supply for the science and engineering workforce, which is about 5 to 8 percent of the overall workforce, we find that the colleges graduate about twice the number of science and engineering students each year as hired into those job. Even in fields such as engineering and computer science, the number of graduates is 50 percent greater than the number hired. At the secondary school level, there are certainly significant educational problems for certain areas and students, but overall, U.S. students are completing more math and science than ever before – over the past 20 years, about 50 percent more complete subjects such as chemistry, algebra II/trigonometry, biology and physics – and test score performance shows steady increases for all students. In terms of actual supply of high performing students in science and math, the U.S. produces the lion’s share of these students in the world.
Rutgers Today: How does high-skill immigration affect the STEM labor market and the domestic supply of STEM talent?
Hal Salzman: Unfortunately the issue of immigration has been confused with guest worker programs. While a broad immigration policy is at the heart of this nation’s success – socially, economically – it is quite different from the current guest worker programs that bring in young workers targeted to a few industries, mostly IT, on a temporary basis and at lower wages. Naturally, employers tend to prefer the lower cost option for many of the more routine work positions, and even some of the more specialized areas. Our estimate is that currently guest workers are hired for about two-thirds of all entry-level positions in IT. Although a balanced immigration policy can strengthen the nation, a targeted guest worker program can undermine the STEM workforce by making it harder for graduates of U.S. colleges (both native and immigrant) to find jobs at good wages and to have stable careers.
Rutgers Today: How can the U.S. compete globally, when other nations are rapidly improving their STEM industries?
Hal Salzman: There is an unfortunate premise in science and technology policy that the world is zero-sum – that China or India’s achievements in these areas are a threat to the U.S. Moreover, it’s a case of generals fighting the last war – and the cold war in particular when we thought that the Soviet Union’s scientific advancement would imperil the security of the U.S. Well, the Soviet Union, and later the Japanese, did produce large numbers of engineers and scientists but we know that did little to help their long-term economic performance. The supply of scientists and engineers does not assure high economic performance, nor does another nation’s improvements threaten the U.S. China, for example, is graduating many more engineers because they need them to build roads, buildings, and infrastructure. The U.S. does not have nearly the scale of building that requires large numbers of engineers. In addition, science is increasingly global and having a greater pool of scientists around the world can only help everyone. Although it would be great to have U.S. scientists be the ones to discover the cure for cancer, this country, and the world, will benefit much more if, by having more scientists in China or India, the discovery is made sooner rather than later.
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth: Ongoing Discussion
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The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
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Is a Career in STEM Really for Me?
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Is There a U.S. IT Worker Shortage?
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An Engineering Career: Only a Young Person’s Game?
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What Ever Happened to STEM Job Security?
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Are STEM Workers Overpaid?
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Would You Encourage a Student to Pursue a Career in STEM?
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Is There a Shortage of STEM Students and STEM professionals?
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Corporate Recruiters Insist There Really Is a STEM Worker Shortage
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Is It Fair to Steer Students into STEM Disciplines Facing a Glut of Workers?
View all STEM coverage, references, and reactions..
You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can’t find enough workers in those fields, and the country’s competitive edge is threatened.
It pretty much doesn’t matter what country you’re talking about—the United States is facing this crisis, as is Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, China,Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, India…the list goes on. In many of these countries, the predicted shortfall of STEM (short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers is supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. A 2012 report by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for instance, stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed. In the U.K., the Royal Academy of Engineering reported last year that the nation will have to graduate 100 000 STEM majors every year until 2020 just to stay even with demand.Germany, meanwhile, is said to have a shortage of about 210 000 workers in what’s known there as the MINT disciplines—mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology.
The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.
And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.
To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we’ll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.
In preparing this article, I went through hundreds of reports, articles, and white papers from the past six decades. There were plenty of data, but there was also an extraordinary amount of inconsistency. Who exactly is a STEM worker: somebody with a bachelor’s degree or higher in a STEM discipline? Somebody whose job requires use of a STEM subject? What about someone who manages STEM workers? And which disciplines and industries fall under the STEM umbrella?
Such definitions obviously affect the counts. For example, in the United States, both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Commerce track the number of STEM jobs, but using different metrics. According to Commerce, 7.6 million individuals worked in STEM jobs in 2010, or about 5.5 percent of the U.S. workforce. That number includes professional and technical support occupations in the fields of computer science and mathematics, engineering, and life and physical sciences as well as management. The NSF, by contrast, counts 12.4 million science and engineering jobs in the United States, including a number of areas that the Commerce Department excludes, such as health-care workers (4.3 million) and psychologists and social scientists (518 000).
Such inconsistencies don’t just create confusion for numbers junkies like me; they also make rational policy discussions difficult. Depending on your point of view, you can easily cherry-pick data to bolster your argument.
Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM.
The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields. And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field, according to a 2011 study from Georgetown University.
The takeaway? At least in the United States, you don’t need a STEM degree to get a STEM job, and if you do get a degree, you won’t necessarily work in that field after you graduate. If there is in fact a STEM worker shortage, wouldn’t you expect more people with STEM degrees to be filling those jobs? And if many STEM jobs can be filled by people who don’t have STEM degrees, then why the big push to get more students to pursue STEM?
Now consider the projections that suggest a STEM worker shortfall. One of the most cited in recent U.S. debates comes from the 2011 Georgetown University report mentioned above, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton of the Center on Education and the Workforce. It estimated there will be slightly more than 2.4 million STEM job openings in the United States between 2008 and 2018, with 1.1 million newly created jobs and the rest to replace workers who retire or move to non-STEM fields; they conclude that there will be roughly 277 000 STEM vacancies per year.
But the Georgetown study did not fully account for the Great Recession. It projected a downturn in 2009 but then a steady increase in jobs beginning in 2010 and a return to normal by the year 2018. In fact, though, more than 370 000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I don’t mean to single out this study for criticism; it just illustrates the difficulty of accurately predicting STEM demand and supply even a year or two out, let alone over a prolonged period. Highly competitive science- and technology-driven industries are volatile, where radical restructurings and boom-and-bust cycles have been the norm for decades. Many STEM jobs today are alsotargets for outsourcing or replacement by automation.
The nature of STEM work has also changed dramatically in the past several decades. In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past,employers seldom offer generous education and trainingbenefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete.
Any of these factors can affect both short-term and longer-term demand for STEM workers, as well as for the particular skills those workers will need. The agencies that track science and engineering employment know this to be true. Buried in Chapter 3 of a 2012 NSF workforce study, for instance, you’ll find this caveat: “Projections of employment growth are plagued by uncertain assumptions and are notoriously difficult to make.”
So is there a shortfall of STEM workers or isn’t there?
The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field.
Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master’s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there’s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades.
Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.
Spot shortages for certain STEM specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked demand for data scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in can’t assume such shortages will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline.
What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there was no evidence “that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.”
That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”
Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.”
“None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”
So why the persistent anxiety that a STEM crisis exists? Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.” In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57 000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India.
You’ll hear similar arguments made elsewhere. In India, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Vijay Kumar Saraswat, recently noted that in his country, “a meagre four persons out of every 1000 are choosing S&T or research, as compared to 110 in Japan, 76 in Germany and Israel, 55 in USA, 46 in Korea and 8 in China.” Leaders in South Africa and Brazil cite similar statistics to show how they are likewise falling behind in the STEM race.
“The government responds either with money [for research] or, more recently, with visas to increase the number of STEM workers,” Teitelbaum says. “This continues for a number of years until the claims of a shortage turn out not to be true and a bust ensues.” Students who graduate during the bust, he says, are shocked to discover that “they can’t find jobs, or they find jobs but not stable ones.”
At the moment, we’re in the alarm-heading-toward-boom part of the cycle. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government spends more than US $3 billion each year on 209 STEM-related initiatives overseen by 13 federal agencies. That’s about $100 for every U.S. student beyond primary school. In addition, major corporations are collectively spending millions to support STEM educational programs. And every U.S. state, along with a host of public and private universities, high schools, middle schools, and even primary schools, has its own STEM initiatives. The result is that many people’s fortunes are now tied to the STEM crisis, real or manufactured.
Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. 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.
Governments also push the STEM myth because an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense. And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as “taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities” by allowing them to expand their enrollments.
An oversupply of STEM workers may also have a beneficial effect on the economy, says Georgetown’s Nicole Smith, one of the coauthors of the 2011 STEM study. If STEM graduates can’t find traditional STEM jobs, she says, “they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive.”
The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn’t exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their “bust” phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.
Emphasizing STEM at the expense of other disciplines carries other risks. Without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow their worldview—and their career options. In a 2011 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, argued that point. “In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80 000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers,” he wrote. “But the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.”
A broader view, I and many others would argue, is that everyone needs a solid grounding in science, engineering, and math. In that sense, there is indeed a shortage—a STEM knowledge shortage. To fill that shortage, you don’t necessarily need a college or university degree in a STEM discipline, but you do need to learn those subjects, and learn them well, from childhood until you head off to college or get a job. Improving everyone’s STEM skills would clearly be good for the workforce and for people’s employment prospects, for public policy debates, and for everyday tasks like balancing checkbooks and calculating risks. And, of course, when science, math, and engineering are taught well, they engage students’ intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works.
Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.
About the Author
An IEEE Spectrum contributing editor, Charette is a self-described “risk ecologist” who investigates the impact of risk on technology and society. His interest is both professional and personal: He’s a 33-year member of the IEEE Computer Society and has two daughters who are contemplating STEM careers. “Now I can give better career advice to my daughters,” he says.
To Probe Further
Science and Engineering Careers in the United States: An Analysis of Markets and Employment (University of Chicago Press, 2009), edited by Richard B. Freeman and Daniel L. Goroff, provides a highly useful introduction to the forces in the early to mid-2000s that shaped current STEM shortage arguments in the United States.
Chapter 13 of Benoît Godin’s Measurement and Statistics on Science and Technology: 1920 to the Present (Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2012) shows how the claims of scientist and engineer shortages in the United States and United Kingdom after the Second World War were based on dubious statistics, and notes that the success rate of U.S. government predictions on the supply and demand for scientists and engineers has been about zero.
The National Research Council’s Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future(The National Academies Press, 2007) and Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5(The National Academies Press, 2010)are must reads. The first report triggered the current STEM shortage debate in the United States, and the second one fanned the flames. Written by a select committee of business and academic leaders, the first report concluded that the United States appeared to be “on a losing path” in its ability to innovate and globally compete, because the U.S. school system was failing to prepare the nation’s future STEM workers. The second report concluded that because the first report’s recommendations had not been funded, the situation was now reaching catastrophic proportions. If these reports were the only ones you read on the subject, you too would believe there is a national STEM crisis.
One of the key conclusions of Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell’s “Guestworkers in the High-Skill U.S. Labor Market” (Briefing Paper #359, Economic Policy Institute, 24 April 2013) is that while there is an adequate supply of U.S. STEM workers and potential STEM graduates, this may not be the case in the IT sector, given that guest workers are willing to work “at wages that are too low to induce a significantly increased supply from the domestic workforce.”
In “The Hidden STEM Economy” (Brookings Institution, 2013), Jonathan Rothwell argues that STEM workers include not just those with bachelor’s or higher degrees, but anyone who uses “specialized knowledge” in any STEM discipline, such as plumbers and auto mechanics. Counted this way, there are 26 million STEM jobs in the United States, or about 20 percent of the workforce, as opposed to the 5 million to 6 million jobs counted the traditional way. Many of Rothwell’s arguments echoed those made in a 1964 report from the American Council on Education entitled “Man, Education, and Work: Post Secondary Vocational and Technical Education.”
One oft-cited argument for boosting the number of U.S. STEM graduates is that China and India are each graduating hundreds of thousands of engineers per year. But in their 2007 article “Where the Engineers Are” (Issues in Science and Technology), Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University and his colleagues revealed that the graduation numbers from China and India have been exaggerated; for example, in China, they write, “a motor mechanic or a technician could be considered an engineer.” The authors argued that the United States should still increase its investment in R&D and STEM education, as both India and China would no doubt work to improve the quality of their own STEM graduates.
Ron Hira, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote a series of reports as part of the STEM Workforce Data Project. In “U.S. Policy and the STEM Workforce System” (Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, 2007), he analyzes why, given STEM’s supposed importance to the nation’s standard of living and national defense, there is so little objective information for making informed policy decisions.
“The Current Model of STEM Graduate Education and Postdocs” [PDF] is a presentation given in November 2007 by Michael S. Teitelbaum, senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A world-respected demographer, he looks at the claims of STEM shortages and shortfalls at the graduate level and calls them a “long, embarrassing history.”
“Will the Scientific and Technology Workforce Meet the Requirements of the Federal Government?,” a 2004 report by William Butz and colleagues at the Rand Corp., found no evidence, regardless of what measure was used, “that [STEM] shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.”
Does the U.S. Department of Defense face a STEM worker shortage? No, concludes “Assuring the U.S. Department of Defense a Strong Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Workforce” (National Research Council, 2012), a report from the National Academies. What’s more, the report finds, “DOD representatives state virtually unanimously that they foresee no shortage of STEM workers in the years ahead except in a few specialty fields.” Those specialties include cybersecurity, as well as anthropology, linguistics, and sociology.
Heather B. Gonzalez and Jeffrey J. Kuenzi’s “ Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education: A Primer” [PDF] (Congressional Research Service, 1 August 2012) clearly and succinctly lays out the major issues involved in the STEM debate.
In 2013 the Australian Industry Group, a nonprofit group representing some 60 000 businesses in Australia, published “Lifting Our Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) Skills.” [PDF] It called for “a major re-think by Australian education at all levels and in all sectors” to increase both the number and quality of Australian STEM graduates. In its tone and recommendations, it’s very similar to the U.S. “Gathering Storm” reports.
The U.K. equivalent to the “Gathering Storm” reports is “Jobs and Growth: the Importance of Engineering Skills to the Economy,” [PDF] published in 2012 by the Royal Academy of Engineering. It concluded that the United Kingdom needs an annual minimum of 100 000 STEM graduates, along with another 60 000 technically trained individuals, over the next decade just to maintain the status quo. Unlike in the United States, where engineering salaries have stagnated, the report found “a persistent, sizeable wage premium for people holding engineering degrees” in the past 20 years.
The German equivalent to STEM is MINT—mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology. Written in German, “MINT-Frühjahrsreport 2013” (MINT Spring Report 2013), published by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research, analyzes German employment data for MINT workers, from academics to technicians. One useful metric is the comparison of job openings with unemployed workers in different MINT categories and occupations, although there are limits to this approach.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
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Sony Responds To President Obama’s Criticism: “We Had No Choice,” Still Hope To Release ‘The Interview’
by Jen Yamato
Following a public rebuke from President Obama for caving to terrorist demands, Sony Pictures restated their commitment to getting The Interviewseen by audiences. Here’s the studio’s official statement, on the heels of CEO Michael Lynton’s defensive appearance on CNN:
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PREVIOUS, 12:44 PM: “We have notcaved,” Sony CEO Michael Lynton said today, defending his company from President Obama’s comment that the studio had “made a mistake” in bowing to terrorist demands over the North Korea-skewering The Interview. “We have not caved. We have not given in. We have persevered, and we have not backed down. We have always had every desire to have the American public see this movie.”
Lynton today explained that when theaters started dropping out, “we had no alternative but to not proceed with the theatrical release on the 25th of December. And that’s all we did.” After the top five exhibitor chains bowed out this week, the studio said on Wednesday they would not be releasing the film.
“The unfortunate part is… The President, the press, and the public are mistaken as to what actually happened. We do not own movie theaters. We cannot decide what will be played in movie theaters,” Lynton told CNN.
“I think (Sony) made a mistake,” President Obama said earlier on Friday in a press conference addressing the Sony hacking attack, which the FBI said the North Korean government was responsible for. “That’s not what America is about… I wish they’d spoken to me first. I would have told them, ‘Do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks’.”
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In his CNN interview set to air in full on Anderson Cooper’s AC360 at 5PM PT/8PM ET, Lynton made a point of contradicting Obama’s statement that Sony had not asked for his help.
“I did reach out,” said Lynton, who said Sony indeed sought assistance from the President. “We definitely spoke to a senior advisor in the White House to talk about the situation. The White House was certainly aware of the situation.”
In less than four weeks the Sony hacking has devastated the studio, exposing embarrassing and damaging emails, trade secrets, and the personal information of thousands of current and former employees – all supposedly over the political comedy, in which two bumbling journalists are asked to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Would Lynton make the movie again if he had the chance to do this all over?
“Yeah, I would make the movie again,” he said. “I think, you know, for the same reasons we made it in the first place – it was a funny comedy, it served as political satire. I think we would have made the movie again. Knowing what I know now, we might have, uh, done some things slightly differently, but I think a lot of events have overtaken us in a way that we had no control over the facts.”
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Lynton says Sony still wants The Interview to be seen and is considering their options. Those include DVD and Blu-ray home video, YouTube, VOD, and other digital platforms but “there has not been one major VOD distributor, one major e-commerce site that has stepped forward and said they are willing to distribute this movie for us,” he said.
“We would still like the public to see this movie, absolutely.”
http://deadline.com/2014/12/sony-president-obama-the-interview-response-1201330799/
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