Re: Opinion: Why pushing STEM majors is turning out to be a terrible investment

Jan 10, 2024 Last reply: 2 years ago 5 Replies


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>> Better than an opinion, studied assessment by professor of sociology at UCSD... >
> I expect that a sociology degree is an equally bad investment.

John Larkin skipped most of his chemistry lectures at Tulane because he thought that that was a bad investment of his time. He might even had been right - making sense of chemistry needs more intelligence that he has shown here. I may be biased


> '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. 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.'
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>> That's ridiculous! This always happens when politics is involved: vast amounts of waste, lost opportunities, cesspool products and workplaces...
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What the article actually says is that the people who want STEM workers don't pay them all that well, and are happy to fire them at the drop of a hat.


If the STEM employers actually wanted more employees, they would treat them better. What is actually happening is that they are leaning on politicians to get the universities to churn out more potential employees so that they can hired gullible newbies, exploit them for a couple of years and replace them with new suckers when the previous generation move on to better employers.


Pushing STEM majors works fine for everybody involved, except the STEM majors. It should be backed up by pressure on the STEM employers to treat them employees better. Encouraging STEM workers to join trade unions who could put pressure on the employers to treat their employees better would make sense, but that isn't going to happen in the US.


STEM workers aren't a particularly homogenous group so conventional trade unions don't work that well for them, but as the screen actors guild make clear, they can still be useful.

US employees in e.g. fleet maintenance and railroad work have similar complaints, they say "There are few industries whose managements will promise you so much of the world in exchange for signing on, and then dedicate their existence to finding a reason to fire you once you do"

If you don't like your job, find a better one.

This was also true pre-WW2. The skills that let you do well in secondary school don't guarantee good performance at university, Putting 40% 0f the population through university is an expensive way if finding who does have those skills, but we don't have a better one, and finding as many people as possible who do have those skills is vital if we are going to keep on making society and our economy more productive.

All true. If you are selling a valuable service you can make money out of it. Ethical institutions would identify the students who weren't doing well and chuck them out before they'd invested too much, but that doesn't go down well with the students involved.

But what proportion of the incoming students end up graduating? When I was an undergraduate 30% of the students graduated in minimum time, and 30% never graduated. I did get my first and second degrees in minimum time, but the fact that I've ended up as an electronic engineer rather that a physical chemist illustrates one of the problems. Win Hill followed a similar trajectory, even if he bailed out of his chemical physics Ph.D. program before he got the Ph.D.

John Larkin's take on university education may reflect the fact that the university he was trained at - Tulane - isn't highly regarded.

Fred shares Darius's enthusiasm for unjustified and unjustifiable assertions.

When all the employers in a particular industry conspire to keep wages low, you may have to immigrate to do that.

US employers outside the US are notorious for being implacably anti-union.

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