IEEE Spectrum commentary: “The STEM crisis is a myth”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8008
The subhead for Robert Charette’s STEM-crisis-debunking article in IEEE Spectrum magazine recommends, “Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians.” The “real STEM crisis,” Charette argues, “is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.”
Charette is a contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum, which calls itself “the flagship publication” of the “the world’s largest professional technology association.” The name “eye-triple-E” originally stood for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, but the four capital letters IEEE now constitute the association’s full legal name.
He begins by establishing the prevalence, in the US and other countries, of the conventional wisdom that “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.”
Charette bases his findings on hundreds of documents going back six decades and revealing large inconsistencies in definitions: “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?”
He found that large numbers of STEM-trained workers leave STEM fields. He continues:
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?
He also found the following:
* Economic boom-and-bust volatility imposes large fluctuations in STEM hiring and employment.
* In general, there’s no STEM worker shortage.
*There’s no general rise in STEM salaries, as would be expected during a shortage.
“What’s perhaps most perplexing” about the shortage claim, Charette writes, “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.’”
Charette cites a government report saying that the US spends more than $3 billion annually on 209 STEM-related initiatives—about $100 for each student above primary school. Corporations, states, and educational institutions also conduct STEM initiatives. “The result,” he concludes, “is that many people’s fortunes are now tied to the STEM crisis, real or manufactured.”
Charette suggests possible explanations for the situation. Companies benefit from a labor oversupply. Government perceives a need to ensure that innovation takes place and that the country is technologically well defended. Universities benefit from demand—and subsidies—for STEM education.
He revisits the main conclusion that he stated early on:
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.
IEEE Spectrum posted the commentary on 30 August. Only a few other publications have responded—for example, in opinion columns at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot .
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.