[HN Gopher] Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs
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Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-01-17 20:25 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| frantic2821 wrote:
| They tend to all become BDRs or Consultants from my circles.
| Academia-Research trauma is tough too
| jprete wrote:
| BDR?
| makk wrote:
| Exactly.
| ianbutler wrote:
| SDR == sales development rep: inbound sales
|
| BDR == business development rep: outbound sales
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| The jobs that AI will automate away?
| panzagl wrote:
| Will AI take an oil company exec to a strip club?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _BDR_
|
| Business development...representative? Role?
| archero wrote:
| I wonder if some just realize that they don't like STEM. Maybe
| they only studied it for family or social pressures, or they
| heard that engineers can get paid a lot.
|
| Anecdotally, I feel like some of my classmates had no interest
| in engineering. They seemed to stick around for the money or
| the benefits or the clout. But if landing a job in the industry
| became more trouble than it's worth, I don't see why they
| wouldn't turn elsewhere.
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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 otherwise successfully people are or will be
| homeless and written off. The haves vs the have nots.
| lumost wrote:
| aye - we've made the sciences into a bit of a hobby career, or
| a short career for those who want to pursue passion project for
| a few years.
|
| Of my physics undergrad, around 1/10th were independently
| wealthy - guess who is still working in physics. The rest
| either did it for a few years, or got the picture over the
| course of the undergrad.
|
| A 40k/year job is great if you are getting an additional ~120k
| in cash from existing investments at 22.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Is Microsoft not considered STEM? They have always had a lot of
| interns, and the interships are paid lavishly.
| devwastaken wrote:
| The num of interns hired is very small, same as how tech has
| almost no scholarships.
| reaperman wrote:
| 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.
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| 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 with all that, our
| biggest issue was them deciding to stop showing up after a
| while. It blew my mind how many of them just stopped coming to
| work.
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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.
| whispersnow wrote:
| Define "STEM" jobs
| jansan wrote:
| Wearing a lab coat and writing very difficult math equations
| and complicated lewis structures on a huge piece of acrylic
| glass. Everything else does not count.
|
| Joking aside, every job that requires knowledge from a STEM
| field that goes beyond standard high school education.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Type "STEM career poster" into Amazon. You'll get a taste of
| the kinds of jobs that are being promised to kids who go into
| STEM.
| wharvle wrote:
| > 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 to attach prestige-by-association to computer
| nerdery that's mostly employed to sell ads better, then use that
| to improve their hiring pipeline.
|
| STEM promise: progress! Science! Engineering marvels! A new age
| of exploration and advancement on all fronts!
|
| STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result
| 0.5% more often.
|
| [EDIT] Since I seem not to have communicated it well, judging
| from the responses, I mean those two examples at the end as 1)
| What the "more STEM education!" movement was selling, by choosing
| to frame it that way, if not explicitly, (though, often,
| explicitly) and 2) What _I suspect_ was the kind of work that the
| folks funding & lobbying for that movement actually had in mind.
|
| I don't mean that everyone working in tech is working on ads, as
| some have taken it--rather, easier hiring for that kind of work
| was the point of the STEM push, to the organizations largely
| driving it. (I strongly suspect, to be extra-clear). I think it
| was sold as 1 because selling 2 would have been a whole lot
| harder, and more-closely associating programming with those other
| things isn't bad PR for the industry as a whole, besides ("STEM"
| as a buzzword has been _incredibly_ successful in education--a
| whole generation now lumps all those things together, and they
| 're working on a second, so, mission accomplished)
| CydeWeys wrote:
| CS grads are the most likely to work in their field post-
| graduation. It's the other majors bringing STEM down, like
| biology.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _CS grads are the most likely to work in their field post-
| graduation. It 's the other majors bringing STEM down, like
| biology._
|
| Source? (Not challenging you. Curious to see how wide the
| range is across majors.)
| jdietrich wrote:
| https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-2
| 3...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Thank you. For the curious: 49% of "computers,
| mathematics, and statistics" majors in STEM jobs (51%
| including STEM-related) versus 15% (46%) for "biological,
| agricultural, and environmental sciences" [1].
|
| (Engineering is 49% (51%) while social sciences is 7%
| (11%).)
|
| [1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs
| /acs-23... _Table 10_
| rjsw wrote:
| My biology teachers in high school had all studied their
| subject to much higher levels than those of other subjects
| including doing research, they became teachers because
| there were no other jobs available.
| TimPC wrote:
| It seems kind of obvious that if you explicitly exclude
| medicine jobs from STEM you end up with a low % of biology
| grads in STEM. My experience at University was that 80% of
| Biology as a program was doing it as pre-med.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The vast majority of biology majors do not end up
| becoming doctors. If you include all of healthcare then
| you're getting closer, but still not a majority.
| bavent wrote:
| Big surprise, the jobs that pay more attract more people than
| the jobs that pay less. My partner has a bio undergrad
| degree, she works in a field having nothing to do with it
| because she didn't want to pursue masters/phd.
| al_borland wrote:
| I worked with a guy in a data center who had a degree in
| geology. Computers paid better I guess, so he transitioned
| over.
| eastbound wrote:
| Makes me question our decentralized assignation of
| studies. With communist centralized planning, the country
| makes a 5-year plan and students are assigned to the
| fields in demand, with the (high) risk that the central
| planner was wrong (because his pay doesn't align with
| accurate planning). With decentralized capitalism,
| students decide for themselves, agree to be in debt for
| life if they're wrong, attempt to collect information
| among a jungle of commercial bullshit from for-profit
| universities and marketing, so that they're very often
| wrong as well, and choose a field of study at the
| junction between interesting, in demand (as perceived),
| and nice pictures on the uni brochure (principal criteria
| in my opinion).
|
| Then they convert to IT anyway. I wonder whether our
| acceptance for this system isn't just that we blame the
| student for having chosen wrong, relieving us from
| feeling that we're responsible for their debt and
| horrific life conditions.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| With communist central planning the world lost about as
| many people to starvation and murder by their own
| governments as were killed in WW2 in an actual enormous
| war. It might be worth letting people make their own
| decisions rather than forcing them to be what you want
| them to be.
| pohuing wrote:
| Programming and related careers have to have the lowest
| entry as well. I know a lot more people who made the switch
| from other tertiary educated disciplines to IT than the
| other way around.
|
| And there's no way the state will employ me to model and
| plan their dikes with my Cs degree.
| wharvle wrote:
| That's my point, and why I quoted that part. The only bit of
| this that _needed_ some kind of big training push was
| computer nerdery, and that, mostly for selling ads better.
| Putting that under the "STEM" umbrella gave that crap an
| association with, you know, things that actually matter,
| which made selling it easier and generally raised CS'
| prestige (in a PR-campaign sort of way).
| eastbound wrote:
| I'm sorry but B2C startups are an anomaly in the overall
| history of IT. I agree it's a sad turn of events but IT is
| way bigger. Banks, accounting, industry, military, maps,
| GPS, health, and infinite ways it helps humans. Selling ads
| was only a way to monetize, and Google is tanking like the
| Titanic since ChatGPT arrived (at least its 7 tanks are
| pierced, but the captain said to not evacuate), and most
| platforms even have a non-ads way to monetize, although the
| real price is high (Facebook $16, Netflix, Twitter, etc.).
|
| It is very possible, with the post-covid changes, that
| platforms become paid-for and that there is much less of a
| focus on dark patterns in the future.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search
| result 0.5% more often._
|
| That couldn't be more false. The vast majority of STEM jobs do
| not pushing ads to people., only FAANGS and such which are a
| minority of the total STEM jobs.
| unsui wrote:
| source? (I _am_ challenging you :) ).
|
| The quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about
| how to make people click ads" is a fairly robust heuristic
| for determing what skillsets are valued today by Big Tech.
| I'm sure there are exceptions (there always are to every
| heuristic), but overall, probably a fair assumption.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> source? (I am challenging you :) ). _
|
| The entire jobs market. Look it up.
|
| STEM jobs doesn't mean BigTech. Mechanical engineering is
| also STEM. So is chemical engineering, architecture, etc.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| Most of them are driving and sustaining user engagement in
| online services of some kind. It's mostly a zero-sum game
| between many services competing for user time and attention.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Which mechanical engineers are doing that?
| bluetomcat wrote:
| In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, probably. Not
| predominantly in the US.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _vast majority of STEM jobs do not pushing ads to people.,
| only FAANGS and such which are a minority of the total STEM
| jobs_
|
| A majority of STEM jobs fall under a category with "computer"
| or "software" in it [1]. Unless a majority of those are in
| adtech, you are correct.
|
| [1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs
| -23... _Table 7_
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> t would appear a majority of STEM jobs fall under a
| category with "computer" or "software" in it_
|
| But not all STEM jobs. And not all software or IT jobs
| involve ad targeting for +400k/year.
| wharvle wrote:
| And how bad would the "STEM shortage" (... but mostly just
| computer folks) be if, say, we outlawed dragnet-spying in the
| name of advertising, and the air went out of that market?
|
| We might have more than enough "STEM" folks (but we actually
| mean programmers) to do everything except the stuff that we'd
| be better off _not doing_.
| aquova wrote:
| I had this experience. Got a degree in physics and heard
| throughout my time about how awful this STEM shortage was. Went
| to graduate and couldn't get a job in my field at all (granted,
| I don't think I knew how to market myself nor was I well
| educated on how to do so). Ended up working towards a CS degree
| instead and getting a job in that field. All of my friend group
| in high school ended up with a diverse range of STEM degrees,
| but every one of us ended up in some sort of software work in
| the end.
| prewett wrote:
| I read "STEM shortage" as "shortage of excellent software
| developers". The STEM shortage was after my time in uni, but
| what jobs actually need physics? I studied physics, too, and
| as far as I could tell my options were get a Ph.D. and then
| postdoc until a professor died, become a quant (might require
| a Ph.D., since it was the math that was attractive), teach
| high school physics, or do software.
|
| As it turned out, I ended up with a job doing high-level tech
| support at a company selling measurement equipment to
| engineers, so they wanted people with a science/engineering
| background. I think physics is great to study, but more like
| another poster said, like studying classics if you want to
| write literature.
| bhattid wrote:
| I had a similar experience when I was doing physics in
| undergraduate as well. I read online and was often told that
| a physics degree opened a lot of doors - academia,
| government/industry research, engineering, high school
| teacher, software development. But during my senior year when
| applying for jobs, I was hard-pressed finding any place that
| was interested in me. I was fortunate enough to find a job as
| a laser engineer immediately after graduating, but the
| specific role was leading to a deadend career.
|
| I self-studied from my alma mater's computer science program
| (fortunately, many of the resources were all online) and was
| able to pivot into a career in software development, but it
| was a colossal amount of work and energy. I may as well have
| just done the computer science degree originally. A lot of my
| peers who had studied physics/math also took the same route,
| transitioning into data science or software development.
| netbioserror wrote:
| I must be really lucky. I work at a smaller engineering
| company, working for engineering clients, making software that
| analyses engineering data, and I get to use the languages and
| tools I want. I must be a unicorn at this point given how
| miserable most programmers seem to be.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I don't think hacker news is the best way to see how
| miserable most folks are.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Nope, you're not alone. I've spent most of my 30-year career
| writing embedded software for generally pretty interesting
| systems.
|
| Miserable people love bitching about it.
| TillE wrote:
| A lot of (younger?) people in web development seem to forget
| that other software continues to be developed, much of it
| unglamorous and not consumer-oriented, but still interesting
| to work on.
| albrewer wrote:
| I have a mechanical engineering degree and work as a software
| developer. I tried for a long time to find a company like
| this but they all seem to only want people who very narrowly
| fit a senior engineer role in either specialization, never
| someone who can do both.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result
| 0.5% more often.
|
| It wasn't that bad when we ended up working for large banks,
| but a lot of we are asked to do these days is plain evil and a
| disservice to humanity.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I would go back from software to EE in a heartbeat if the
| compensation was even remotely comparable
| NotSuspicious wrote:
| This is a huge source of emotional pain for me to be
| completely honest.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Why? Genuine question, what is the exciting differences in
| the day to day work for you?
| icedchai wrote:
| I started EE, switched to CS because it was easier.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 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!
| torginus wrote:
| I kinda find this relatable - in HS, I did some summer work
| writing software (amateurishly doing what felt right
| instead of being taught how to do it properly - if only I'd
| have known), and went for EE, because I felt like "wait
| this cannot be it"
| lurking15 wrote:
| I chose EE cause it was harder (for me at least) and
| everyone would drop out into CS. Wound up doing software
| development, which I loved as a hobby and wanted to avoid
| ruining, so to speak.
|
| Fast forward to today, I've ended up coming to the
| conclusion that the whole university system (much like
| the tech, banking & finance industry) subsidizes foreign
| nationals to the detriment of anyone who's native & pays
| taxes to support these institutions of "learning".
|
| I didn't really see a straightforward way to do anything
| interesting with EE, which seems to entail going for a
| phd and navigating all the financial costs along with
| that.
| spacemadness wrote:
| This is why I switched out of firmware after years of
| twiddling bits and routing circuits. Imagine working on
| difficult threading issues one minute then needing to deeply
| understand a circuit layout the other and getting paid less
| than entry level bootcamp python programmers. Oh yes, with
| constant threat of being sent to country_of_manufacture to
| work out manufacturing issues on a moments notice. It's
| capitalisms way of saying "we don't really want or need this
| right now." I heard you loud and clear, American tech
| companies.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| By comparison, what % of humanities majors are working in
| humanities-related jobs? That would seem to be an important
| comparator that is excluded.
| yongjik wrote:
| Meh, you can make any industry look awful by picking the worst
| side effects.
|
| Rocketry: We can now incinerate civilians 0.5 seconds faster
| than before.
|
| Pharmaceutical: The stage-4 cancer patient will spend five more
| days in agony.
|
| Electronics: Your new smartwatch can now render ads at 60 fps.
|
| Chemistry: We added a dozen new forever chemicals to rainwater.
| wharvle wrote:
| My suspicion, and what I'm getting at, is that the people
| selling "STEM education is vital!" were likely on the payroll
| of places that mostly just wanted to have more workers to
| sell ads better. They had the money to make the push for
| that, and the incentive to try to fatten their hiring
| pipeline, and dragging the other three letters along was just
| a sales tactic.
|
| I don't mean that everyone working on computers works on ads,
| I mean that, for a lot of the people behind the STEM push in
| particular, my _suspicion_ is that their main concern was in
| fact to be able to more-easily hire folks to sell ads
| slightly better. I think the form of the campaign was to make
| it look more noble.
| fragmede wrote:
| Google and Facebook pay well and employ a good number of
| software developers, but there are more types of software out
| there by the many other companies out there that don't involve
| selling ads. Sure, if you want to be depressing and toxic to
| the people around you, be reductive about it and oversimplify
| things, and disqualify the positives - software has done good
| things for the world, I'm sure you can think of some.
| wharvle wrote:
| The top-comp tier skews toward harmful things, though, and if
| not for those bad things... would there be a shortage?
|
| It doesn't take a majority of the market--not even close--
| seeing such huge price- and demand-distortion to mess things
| up really bad for the whole thing.
| lolinder wrote:
| I hate this stereotype on HN that we're all working in or
| adjacent to adtech. It's simply not accurate.
|
| There were 4.4 million computer programmers in 2022.
|
| Taking some extremely rough numbers: Google employs ~190k
| people worldwide. Meta another 86k worldwide. Microsoft 120k
| (in the US). Amazon 950k (in the US).
|
| Even if we were to treat every single one of the employees I
| listed above as if they were a programmer living in the US
| (which is clearly ridiculous), we'd still only account for 1/3
| of US programmers. Once you factor in the number of those
| employees outside the US and the number who do things other
| than programming (and even more those who work on, say, AWS),
| the number would become even smaller.
|
| The vast majority of programmers do not and never have worked
| in ad tech. Working in ad tech is a choice that some people
| make, and yeah, it can pay even more money than a regular
| software job, but choosing one of the millions of other jobs
| available isn't exactly choosing poverty.
| wharvle wrote:
| Huge market distortions can come from a small absolute
| proportion of the market. Say, those with spying-advertising
| money-spigots. Nothing I wrote contradicts what you've
| written--rather, and the phenomenon paying incredible wages
| to capture the top talent--so, those with both a lot to gain
| from improving labor supply-- _and_ the coincidence of having
| a whole lot of money to fund PR and lobbying pushes to get
| more grads in the pipeline for computer-stuff hiring, is
| concentrated largely among ad companies.
|
| What I mean is the STEM push sold one thing, but it was
| largely about _another_ thing, which was more workers to help
| sell ads slightly better. It was about that _to the people
| pushing it_ , that is.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's a nice theory, but do you have any evidence for it at
| all? STEM is a new acronym, but the same line has been
| being pushed ever since Sputnik. What makes you think that
| this new version is suddenly ad tech and not just a
| continuation of the same old national security concerns
| that it's been about for generations?
| wharvle wrote:
| 1) The timing of when the term and the push for more
| "STEM" education got a huge boost and became far more
| prominent (again--you're right that there was another
| freak-out over science and math education during the
| space race, fizzling out a bit when it became tied to the
| disastrous "New Math" approach). Having some insight into
| the education side of things, the sudden renewed vigor in
| that movement always struck me as suspicious.
|
| 2) The actual outcomes for STEM grads, as covered in this
| article. Looks like only one of the letters reaped large
| benefits from the push more more grads in those areas.
| Surely anyone could have looked at science, engineering,
| and (non-actually-CS) math and noticed that wages weren't
| _acting like_ there was a major shortage, back in, say,
| the '00s and early '10s? But they were in programming.
| So now we've told a generation of kids there's a bright
| future in STEM (all four letters!) but it was kiiiinda a
| lie, and it kiiiinda wasn't hard to see it was a lie back
| when these kids were in grade school.
| mechhacker wrote:
| As a STEM working remotely in the area of this newspaper, I'd
| definitely consider a non-stem job that paid more than what I
| make working remotely...but I haven't seen an obvious opportunity
| like that.
| majormajor wrote:
| Some of the way this is being presented makes it seem like "bad
| for the workers" findings, "don't study STEM after all" but this
| is more about "is this the best way to employ people with STEM
| degrees", with a central complaint being something along the
| lines of "innovative IC STEM work is underpaid compared to
| neighboring business/management-ish fields that capture a lot of
| graduates"
|
| > Many able STEM grads bolt for better-paying careers, especially
| in business, finance, management and medicine (government
| programs focused on STEM exclude medical practitioners and are
| not designed to increase those numbers). Some do find high
| salaries in STEM jobs, many right out of college, especially in
| hot fields such as AI. But STEM grads even in the most dynamic
| sectors, including computer science and engineering, see their
| salary advantage fade over time, increasing the odds that they'll
| leave for greener pastures.
|
| > Employers also incentivize moves from technical work to
| management with higher salaries at their own firms, yet many
| bemoan a shortage of technical STEM workers, not managers.
|
| This article is not so much anti-education as anti-
| management/investor-class-incentivization.
| smarx007 wrote:
| I fail to see how being a software developer in a financial
| sector or in healthcare is not a STEM career?
|
| Equally, having many STEM professionals move to management
| doesn't mean that a STEM degree is oversold. There are a lot of
| STEM management positions where a STEM education and industrial
| experience are a mandatory job requirement.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Also "Why is the best path to a lot of non-STEM jobs to get an
| unrelated STEM degree, why don't jobs the primary duties of
| which are well covered by liberal arts (reading, writing,
| interpersonal communication) hire for liberal arts degrees?"
| anon291 wrote:
| > Employers also incentivize moves from technical work to
| management with higher salaries at their own firms, yet many
| bemoan a shortage of technical STEM workers, not managers.
|
| Well... yeah if you have X engineers in the class of 1990, then
| in order to continue to be able to provide STEM services at the
| same rate a decade after that cohort retires in 2055, you'll
| need X graduates in 2000. Obviously, you can't just depend on
| aging workers, or you'll run into the retirement and death
| problem and be unable to continue the endeavor. This is not
| unique to STEM. All industries require new workers to be
| produced. Humans die, retire, and move on. Without a constant
| supply of new workers, industries fade, inventions never
| happen, progress ceases.
|
| Also, a STEM manager is very much a technical worker. You have
| to be delusional to think you can substitute an MBA for an
| Engineering Manager.
| mp05 wrote:
| 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 it was, 100%. "We only
| need you to pass the FE" is what they say. I'm getting a 3.7 GPA
| by just showing up to class and doing the homework they assign.
| It wasn't like that ~20 years ago.
|
| Makes me wonder about the quality of the graduates we're cranking
| out even at ABET-accredited schools.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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...
| lainga wrote:
| Arts
| lebean wrote:
| An asinine addition to an already asinine acronym.
| mp05 wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _classical education as debate /rhetoric, philosophy, and
| Greek/Latin_
|
| It should also include music and art, both creating and
| appreciating.
| mp05 wrote:
| Okay I went to a really great public school, so that's
| just standard education from my perspective. _Everyone_
| took fine arts and music. The classes I listed were the
| things that only the real enthusiasts trying for Ivy
| league schools got into. I was aiming for engineering
| school and kind of a philistine at that age, so I took
| auto body in my free time.
|
| I realize many schools cut the arts classes first and I
| bemoan that as much as anyone now at my advanced age, but
| that's a different conversation.
| nothercastle wrote:
| I thought it was something useful like accounting.
|
| Should be more like FTEAM.
|
| Finance Tech Engineering Accounting Medicine
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Man, I did _not_ think you were serious. I love how the
| liberal arts grads are trying to sneak in through the back
| door! That 's hilarious. STEM is a hard nosed group of
| disciplines that _build_ things. You 'd have an easier time
| convincing me that CS doesn't belong in STEM than convincing
| me liberal arts does.
| troupe wrote:
| So you think the classes are much easier? Might it be related
| to your life experience and focus you have now? Or are there
| things that simply aren't are rigorous as it used to be?
| mp05 wrote:
| It's hard to say, it may be both! But we get a page of notes
| for every exam in all of my classes pretty much without
| exception. I don't recall that ever being a thing.
| ordinarypuddle wrote:
| Obv this is anecdotal, but I graduated in 2023 from a T10 CS
| school and it was not very challenging. Most of my friends in
| college agreed that besides 1 or 2 classes, we never had to
| work late nights or seriously stress about passing a class. I
| wasn't a 4.0 student, but I got a 3.7 with very little
| studying. University is getting a lot easier, and I genuinely
| think that as long as you are trying to ask the professor
| questions and for help, you cannot fail a class.
|
| https://gradeinflation.com/
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| My old school electronics company has gone through some recent
| EE grads.
|
| One of them is very sharp and definitely could have done the
| grind even 20 years ago.
|
| The other three I have absolutely no idea how they passed those
| classes. They aren't engineers either, they are technicians
| doing low level work. All three also completely whiffed to a
| worrying degree when given a basic assignment to see how well
| they knew electronics (the one who is an engineer smashed his
| assignment no problem.)
| majormajor wrote:
| You may have changed more than you give yourself credit for, my
| experience at a highly-regarded place 20 years ago was that
| homework and showing up and passing the final went a similarly
| LONG way. But it was easy to _not_ do those things.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| _I thought this was STEAM now?_
|
| The "STEAM" thing was invented by a guy at the Rhode Island
| School of Design.[1] It hasn't had much effect on education or
| hiring, but it transformed the maker movement into a branch of
| arts and crafts. Newer "maker spaces" tend to be heavy on
| construction paper and hot glue, light on milling machines and
| drill presses.
|
| [1] https://www.risd.edu/steam
| albrewer wrote:
| > It wasn't like that ~20 years ago.
|
| I've found that learning entirely new fields of study to be
| easier as I get older (although I'm "only" 33); I think going
| to college straight after high school is a disservice to those
| of us whose brains developed more slowly than others. Long-term
| thinking and impulse control are some of the last things to
| develop.
| LASR wrote:
| There is a huge difference between software and non-software STEM
| jobs. The required education/qualifications are different. The
| job market is different.
|
| I graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics (non-sofware). I
| loved writing software as a hobby, but I wanted to "change the
| world" working at NASA or CERN or something.
|
| In my 3rd year a FAANG offered an internship that paid better
| than what I would hope to make at NASA. I took it. Been in
| software ever since, bouncing between FAANGs and startups. I
| don't think I'll ever change the world. But hey, I have a family
| I can support.
|
| Big tech steals you away with offers you can't refuse.
|
| Basically my expected, actual diverged in this manner:
|
| Path1: Not software - Complete undergrad -
| Join an engineering firm - Definitely make <6-figures
| - Wait years before you become a professional engineer -
| Maybe make 6-figures
|
| Path2: Software - Maybe complete undergrad
| - Join a FAANG - Make 6-figures as a new grad
| torginus wrote:
| It's kinda weird that your 1%er flex of owning a home would've
| been absolutely unremarkable for your typical working class Joe
| a couple of decades ago - sign of the times I guess.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| You don't even have to finish school to out earn non-tech STEM
| workers.
| drngdds wrote:
| I don't know how accurate/inaccurate the overall argument here
| is, but they're saying "STEM" a whole lot when their criticisms
| are pretty specifically about tech, and mostly software
| companies.
| tekla wrote:
| Programming is easy money, very little effort, much larger
| salaries.
| fhub wrote:
| Census.gov has a less opinionated article which appears to be the
| source. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-
| majoring...
| adverbly wrote:
| I can't speak to the international community at large, but at
| least in Canada, post-secondary education is not a stream for
| prospective employees to undergo training. It is a product which
| is marketed and sold for profit.
|
| They will enroll as many people as they can convince to
| apply(rate limited by how quickly they can expand infrastructure
| and enrollment).
|
| I remember 10 or so years ago when I was in school, if I wanted
| to get a real challenge when preparing for a test, I could just
| go back to look at exams from 10 years prior and things would be
| noticeably more difficult. I can't imagine things have improved
| significantly since then, and more likely they've gotten worse.
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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'.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| 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.
| jiggybling wrote:
| What's your company and how can you get experience in this kind
| of engineering?
| linuxftw wrote:
| 1000 open positions? They should hire people for work/study
| programs, train them, pay for their education, and then they'll
| have a pipeline of engineers they so desire.
|
| Unfortunately, companies think they can skip investing in their
| people and expect people to spend $100k+ just for the privilege
| of applying to some company that doesn't respect their
| work/life balance and wants to pay them $50k/yr to start. Hard
| pass.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| They should hire people for work/study programs, WE DO
|
| train them, WE DO I started over a decade ago as a technical
| writer and am now a senior principal engineer.
|
| pay for their education, WE DO I had to get a degree and the
| company paid for almost all of it. They flexed my schedule
| and looked the other way when I slacked off due to fatigue
| because I was a single parent of three daughters at the time.
| Any cert I want, any conference I want, any class I want-
| gets paid for. Gratis (except owing them time).
|
| and then they'll have a pipeline of engineers they so desire.
| WE DON'T
|
| Highschool work study participants are paid $34.62/hr which
| is $72k full time, which is just below what techs earn.
| College engineering interns are paid more. New hires even
| more.
|
| Also highschool work study participants are given full
| benefits. Have you ever tried to explain health insurance and
| 401k to a 17-year-old?
|
| Like I said, I feel like I'm living in a parallel dimension.
|
| I do not know where people work.
|
| I do know that if you're a god damned receptionist at my
| company or any of our competi-mates and you say "hmmm.. can I
| take some classes to try to get more technical" they will
| throw wheelbarrows full of cash at you. They will give you
| WAAAAAY past the non-taxable benefit for education and then
| give you a raise or bonus to cover the taxes.
| NanoYohaneTSU wrote:
| Extremely poor journalism.
|
| Very misleading and a misunderstanding of what's actually going
| on.
|
| Example: "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."
|
| It's not 28% of all STEM grads, it's 28% of physical science STEM
| grads.
|
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...
|
| I'm going to do a better job than some shmuck journo.
|
| "37% reported a bachelor's degree in science or engineering but
| only 14% worked in a STEM occupation" & "About half of workers
| who majored in engineering (52%) or computer, mathematics, and
| statistics majors (51%) worked in STEM."
|
| This makes a lot of sense, about half of all STEM grads are going
| into STEM jobs. It's in tandem with the famous 50% of lawyers are
| not practicing law.
|
| I'm certain that if you started doing breakdowns of demographics
| you would result in it making even more sense and easily
| explainable.
| albrewer wrote:
| I exited a traditional mechanical engineering role because 90%
| of my job was not engineering. I loved what I covered in
| undergrad, but most "engineering" jobs were 80% project
| management / paper shuffling / oversight, with a bit of
| engineering tacked on.
|
| My last job was BA/QA work at an engineering software company,
| and it was by far the most "engineering" I'd done at any job.
| Even there, though, it was only about 1/3 of my
| responsibilities. I got good enough at the software stuff that
| I qualified for a 25% pay bump by moving industries. Year for
| year, my software experience pays more than my engineering
| experience.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I was a mechanical design engineer for a decade before
| switching to a software based role. The biggest thing to keep
| in mind is MechE is the paintbrush with the broadest stroke
| in engineering. You can work in a lot of different roles or
| industries. But I experience a lot of what you said but not
| to that extreme. I would say I did 50/50 fun stuff
| (engineering) vs boring stuff (project management and
| documentation).
| legerdemain wrote:
| > Extremely poor journalism... some shmuck journo...
|
| This is a guest opinion column by a book author to promote a
| book. All of these facts are very visibly stated on the page,
| including the word OPINION (in all caps at the top of the
| page), the author's professional bio, and the title of the book
| being promoted.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| It being an opinion doesn't excuse it for being half formed
| from half digested information.
| 0763e39aa wrote:
| Anyone can get into a college program (and anyone does); one has
| to self-select into the "rigorous" fields of study to attempt to
| signal intelligence. What used to require a HS diploma now
| requires a college degree and so forth.
|
| Humanities are now just a dumping ground for morons when they
| used to be the smartest people on the campus.
| Animats wrote:
| > Humanities are now just a dumping ground for morons when they
| used to be the smartest people on the campus.
|
| It's hard. An old friend of mine was a music major. Masters in
| music from Harvard, majoring in early music. Read and wrote
| Latin and Greek. Read and wrote early music notations. Could
| play a wide range early instruments. Never got a job that used
| those skills. Died recently, forgotten, in a Maryland suburb,
| her most visible lifetime accomplishment a book on needlework.
|
| Another, younger friend also got a music degree from an Ivy
| League school. But she went to work for an app toolkit startup
| which was acquired by Microsoft. She's done very well.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| All of us will be forgotten sooner or later, and sooner for
| the vast majority. While it wouldn't be for me, I can see a
| lifetime spent studying music would be more meaningful to
| some than building an app toolkit. I'm not naive enough to
| say that money isn't important, but it's not everything
| either.
| swader999 wrote:
| I wish more STEM grads would work in journalism.
| albrewer wrote:
| The reason they're not working in STEM jobs is due to pay,
| usually. Journalism famously pays poverty wages.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Wait till they notice what's happening with History majors
| tzs wrote:
| > Their goals include reducing perceived shortages of STEM
| workers, boosting American innovation and competitiveness and
| diversifying this highly paid workforce. The message of lucrative
| STEM careers appears to have reached students and tuition-paying
| parents -- the number of STEM majors has surged in recent years.
|
| > But there is a problem with these massive investments: Most
| STEM graduates don't work in STEM occupations. 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.
|
| Isn't that at least partly to be expected? When you have a
| shortage of workers in a field where it takes a fair bit of
| talent and years of training to do the job well and we don't have
| any good way to identify up front which people will be good at it
| the you are going to have to put more people through training
| that you actually need in order to get the number you need.
|
| If we decided for example that the US does not produce enough
| chess grandmasters probably the most effective way to increase
| grandmaster production would be to make chess a competitive
| school sport starting in elementary school and continuing through
| college, much like we do with football, with funding for coaches,
| scholarships, and all that. 99.99% of the kids who go through
| that would not become grandmasters, but it would greatly increase
| the chances that kids with the talent to become grandmasters get
| discovered and get the resources they need to do so.
|
| Maybe having 72% of STEM graduates (just using the article's
| numbers, but note that other comments have disputed those
| numbers) end up not going into STEM is just a reflection of how
| many you have to train to find the 28% that are suited for the
| available STEM jobs?
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