Since arguing against the notion of a STEM shortage is apparently something I’ll be doing either until there really is a shortage or until I’m dead, I’ll recommend this brief blog post by Beryl Lieff Benderly at ScienceCareers.
…a drop in the average starting salaries of new college graduates with computer science, engineering, and chemistry degrees, according to the latest annual survey, which was published on 8 January by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The changes—0.2%, 0.1% and 0.4%, respectively, for the three fields—are “miniscule” and “subject to sampling variation,” notes computer science professor, technical labor force expert, and statistician Norman Matloff, but they “certainly doesn’t jibe with the industry lobbyists’ claims of a desperate labor shortage.” Nor does the rise of just 1.1% in the starting salaries of new math and science grads, a categorythat, in the survey data, includes chemistry but not engineering or computer science. This performance seems especially dismal when you consider that overall starting salaries rose by 2.6%. In the humanities and social sciences, starting salaries increased by 2.9%.
I wonder what it will take to change the narrative?
I know a very smart blogger who once wrote: “You don’t get credit for merely expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo if you have no theory of politics for how you will get past it.”
Snark aside…part of the reason this (false) meme persists is that scientists and scientific societies push it relentlessly, and they have a lot of unquestioned influence. I suspect that any attempts to change will have to start with this power disparity.
I don’t think you appreciate how many scientists take “more STEM = good” as a religious proposition. The jobs market is irrelevant. On more than one occasion I’ve heard a scientist articulate that “you can never have enough scientists and engineers.” The fact that many STEM workers don’t get good jobs, that many leave the field, that wages are stagnating don’t matter. We (yes I’m one of those STEM workers) provide so much intrinsic good to the world, it’s all worth it because we are so amazing and awesome. And so the best thing for the world is to just have more and more STEM workers everywhere. Everyone will benefit and there are no costs! (Sorry, the snark returned.)
In all seriousness, I think religious fervor is the best way to describe this attitude, and I see it all the time.
Given we need a theory of politics…do you have any ideas on the starting point?
Totalllllllly.
As far as a theory of how to change it goes: the best I have is to point out that the reason people advocate for STEM ways of knowledge is because those ways are so evidence-based, and so we have to respond to that by insisting on responsibly-generated evidence for these claims. Not that this will do much in the face of religious fervor, I’m afraid.
Every time I hear about a shortage of X type of worker, I wonder if what the speaker really means is “I would like to be able to hire X on the cheap.”