I completely agree!!!!

[petmoosie]

And it frustrates me.

America is not experiencing a shortage of scientists or engineers, yet we hear calls to educate more people in science and engineering. We don't have jobs for all the scientists and engineers that we do educate, and we aren't willing to retrain them in general. So the mismatch between trained scientists and engineers and the job market in their logical fields is huge, even in the boom times. In the bust times, the mismatch is just ridiculous.

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Educating more people in science doesn't mean "make more scientists." To me, it means "let fewer people succumb to pseudoscience and poorly formed conclusions."

There would be a whole lot less ridiculousness in public discourse if a majority of our children left school with a clear idea of what science is and is not.

[petmoosie.livejournal.com]

This article (and my rant) aren't about scientific literacy. They are about scientific and technical employment. These are only connected if you believe that the only way to motivate children to become scientifically literate is to mislead them into believing that there are employment opportunities in those fields.

If so, and it's quite possible, then God help us all.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Sorry; I thought your rant was a stand-alone, so did not read the article, which I should have.

I don't believe one has to motivate kids that way, especially since kids are not motivated by employment. However, in order for kids to understand and like science, you need teachers that understand and like science, so it's a bit of a vicious downward spiral these days.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I have now read the article.

The meat of it seems to hinge on the unemployment stats: "The rate for all engineers climbed to 5.5%, up from 3.9% in the first quarter. Those are still better than the nation's overall unemployment rate of 9.7%, but the world is also still minting thousands of new graduates."

What I gather from this is that STEM unemployment is in a better position than the overall unemployment situation. Also that more STEM graduates are being created -- but of course other- sector people are still entering the workforce, too. Until the unemployment for STEM graduates is on a par with the national average, it doesn't look like one could conclude that there are "too many" STEM people.

Maybe there are other figures out there, but the ones in the article doesn't support the conclusion. And there are always going to be people in any field who can't find work, either because of personnel reasons (the worker or idiot management) or because of jobs being cut due to the economy.

I have lots of thoughts, not all of which have to do with my rant.

[petmoosie.livejournal.com]

We should compare to the unemployment rate among college graduates (which is usually, but not always, lower than the total unemployment rate), because you can't call someone an engineer or a scientist until they have a BA or BS. I don't know how it compares in this particular recession.

I know that chemistry employment is directly proportional to manufacturing activity. And manufacturing activity in the US has been declining for quite some time.

I don't think that students are motivated by jobs in the field until high school, but then there is some motivation. The sidebar on that article addresses that in the last paragraph. It approaches the idea from the goal of increasing people in STEM career, but it is valid. And the lack of attractive STEM careers has an (downward) effect on the motivation of the high school teachers.

And I am a little reluctant to count all employment as equal. A PhD in ultra-cold physics is not using his full skill set restarting computers and resetting people's passwords and hooking up printers. Web page design with a PhD in physical chemistry provides another example from my personal experience. Basically the PhD in those particular situations was a long personal growth experience with no relationship to the eventual field of employment. Those people would be counted among the employed... and even in a STEM field, but the training is still a mismatch.

The article mentions how many physicists and mathematicians were employed by Wall Street firms to do stock market modeling. That was definitely a compromise option that my fellow students discussed (and not as a good goal, except for the money).

I've been and when I try to go back, will still be one of those people that can't find work in a STEM field. That's why the chip on my shoulder is so huge (perhaps larger than it needs to be). If I am going to compromise by teaching STEM, I HAVE to fix that chip, but that might take a while...