Journalists begin asking whether the US has enough STEM workers after all
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2449
In a report that’s beginning to gain media attention, the Economic Policy Institute uses italics to emphasize the finding that ‘the United States has more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations.’ The study examined the information-technology labor market, ‘guestworker flows,’ and ‘the STEM education pipeline.’
The reporting institute calls itself ‘a non-profit, non-partisan think tank’ created ‘to broaden discussions about economic policy to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers.’ Its board of directors , chaired by labor leader Richard Trumka, includes former secretary of labor Robert Reich. The Washington Post calls the institute ‘left-leaning.’
The Post‘s news story , headlined ‘There may not be a shortage of American STEM graduates after all,’ begins by wryly stating the conventional wisdom: ‘If there’s one thing that everyone can agree on in Washington, it’s that the country has a woeful shortage of workers trained in science, technology, engineering and math.’ Then it asserts that the new study ‘reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth.’
The Post‘s story continues by explaining the study’s reasoning:
Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they’ve been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry.
The Post concludes by noting that ‘some worry that the more’ H-1B visas ‘allowed into the system, the more domestic workers get crowded out, resulting in what no one appears to want: fewer American students seeing much promise in entering STEM fields.’
At Science magazine, an online posting reports not only about the study, but about its legislative and political context. Here’s a key passage:
The new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington, D.C., think tank with close ties to labor unions, comes as the [immigration] debate enters a particularly fierce new phase. On 17 April, a bipartisan group of eight U.S. senators unveiled a sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies. Its proposals to create a path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the United States and to boost border security have gotten the most attention. But firefights are also breaking out over provisions that would boost the number of temporary workers that high-tech companies can hire and make it easier for foreign students who earn advanced STEM degrees from U.S. universities to permanently remain in the country.
In particular, the proposal calls for increasing the number of temporary H1-B visas for skilled workers—which last up to 6 years—from 65,000 to 110,000; the cap could ultimately rise to 180,000 depending on economic conditions. The legislation also boosts from 20,000 to 25,000 the number of additional H1-Bs available to foreign students who earn advanced degrees in STEM fields from U.S. schools colleges and universities (but not including in the life sciences, which are considered to have an oversupply of workers).
At Slate.com, Matthew Yglesias briefly reports about the STEM study, seeing in it evidence that ‘advocacy groups'—meaning STEM proponents—'do themselves a disservice by adopting BS rhetoric that simply sounds good, because they leave themselves excessively vulnerable to attack.’
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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.