IS THERE REALLY a crying need for graduates with STEM degrees? Absolutely NOT.
The article below appears in PARENTING------and it is written by GREAT SCHOOLS. We discuss often that GREAT SCHOOLS is a global banking STOCK MARKET rating agency geared to CORPORATE EDUCATION promoting those global education corporations to boost profit-margins. When PARENTING prints an article on education written by global banking 1%---it is not providing REAL INFORMATION for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE.
'Students who manage their time well may succeed in STEM programs that are self-paced and have kids working on independent projects'.
The statement above should be a warning to a super-majority of our US parents. Our US public education plummeted from BEST IN WORLD to worst in developed nations because of CLINTON ERA 1990s EDUCATION REFORMS that removed all classroom RIGOR----that removed all individual responsibility for learning when it installed the classroom format of GROUP LEARNING. Our US student results led to large numbers of students not able to read or write because they were allowed to be LOST inside GROUP LEARNING. We KNOW only 10-20% of our students respond well to GROUP LEARNING FORMATS. Even those percentage of students often do not perform well without guided learning.
As this article states---the format inside these STEM schools besides having GROUP LEARNING is computer oriented lesson programs where all the basics of creating graphs, creative thought on how data should be represented are provided in online lessons. Remember, our US students lost the ability to do BASIC MATH-----because they were allowed to use CALCULATORS.
The lowdown on STEM schools
Given the crying need for graduates with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees, is a STEM school right for your child?
by: Crystal Yednak | September 21, 2015 PARENTING
A high school student tosses a ball into the air and watches it fall. Then he films the falling ball and graphs the movement on his computer. Nearby, a sophomore scrawls out equations with a blue marker, while a classmate looks over his shoulder and shakes her head. “I think that number should be negative.” They come to an agreement before the teacher stops by, nudging them to explain how they got it. This action-packed hour is a science class — “Scientific Inquiry — Physics,” to be exact.
This type of noisy, exuberant classroom exemplifies what Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) schools are about. Learning is collaborative and project-based; kids work closely together in a hands-on way to solve real-world problems. Learning problem-solving skills — and helping students develop into creative, critical thinkers — is at the core of any true STEM school. “Teachers are not just telling us,” says Jennifer Bailey, 17, a senior at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. “We use our own data and discovery to realize a concept.” While all schools teach math and science, good STEM schools focus deeply on these subjects in hopes of better preparing students for the high-demand tech jobs of the future.
Is a STEM school right for my child?
If your child has an innate interest in science or building things, a STEM school may be a natural choice. But administrators say these schools cater to all kinds of learners and that most students appreciate the hands-on nature of the curricula. Students who manage their time well may succeed in STEM programs that are self-paced and have kids working on independent projects.
Why you might consider a STEM high school
Over the past 10 years, jobs in STEM fields have grown three times as fast as jobs in non-STEM fields, according to the Department of Commerce, and STEM fields are expected to grow by 17 percent between 2008 and 2018, compared to just 9.8 percent growth for non-STEM fields in the same time frame. But without an influx of graduates in these areas, the U.S. will not have enough workers to fill those jobs. STEM schools can help young people gain the skills necessary to succeed in these fields. Over the next decade alone, the U.S. must produce approximately 1 million more STEM-degree graduates than currently projected to meet the demands of the economy, according to a 2012 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Recognizing this gap, educators have focused on getting more students hooked on math and science earlier in their school careers, which is why more STEM programs are being launched nationwide.
You’ll mainly find STEM high schools, but there are some middle schools with a STEM emphasis, too. Some STEM schools are open to all students, meaning there are no tests required; others are selective and consider a student’s academic record in admission decisions.
There are three primary types of STEM programs:
What you might find in a STEM classroom
Questions to ask when considering a STEM school
If we want to have the scientists and engineers to solve future problems, STEM schools are important to the country’s future: finding sustainable energy sources, keeping water supplies clean, and discovering new technologies that help us compete in a global economy. Supporters say there is an urgent need to attract and educate more students in these fields and keep them engrossed throughout their elementary, high school, and college years. And from the student’s perspective, if they have the skills employers need, they will have an easier time finding a job upon graduation.
What critics sayBy increasing the emphasis on science, math, technology, and engineering, some worry that students may lose out on other key skills. Electives like foreign languages and the arts help foster creativity and broaden students’ world view. Some STEM programs try to make up for this by offering arts programs after school; others say they recognize the need and incorporate as much arts education as they can into the school day.
Because girls historically have not shown the same interest in STEM fields as boys, critics say the schools need to do more to reach out to girls and get them excited about science by providing role models in female scientists or crushing traditional gender stereotypes in the classroom.
A final word of advice
Make sure you understand how fully the school has embraced a STEM curriculum. If you are expecting your child to be taking advanced physics courses and the school only offers one introductory course, both you and your child could be disappointed. Ask the school to see sample schedules. As always: visit any school you’re considering. Talk to teachers about the ways students use technology in class. Poke your head in the labs. Ask what professional development opportunities exist for teachers to stay on top of their game and whether the school has networked with local companies and research institutions.
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Here we have an article written with REAL data on education and job stats. The US has all last century been the world leader in STEM education and graduates----our US students are not DUMBER incapable.
When we think about the article shared this week telling us CHINA is already retooling those global factories to robotics and AI to a point of needing a few dozen human workers----we know there are hundreds of millions of Chinese 99% perfectly capable of being STEM GRADS who will not be getting those jobs either. So, there is a GLUT of student grads around the world wanting those STEM jobs.
WHEN OUR US k-12 AND UNIVERSITIES DELIBERATELY STAGE CAREER CURRICULA KNOWING OUR US COLLEGE GRADS WILL NOT FIND JOBS----THEY ARE NOT WORKING IN PUBLIC INTEREST.
The problem is NOT that US 99% WE THE PEOPLE are being made to compete with global labor pool for increasingly fewer jobs especially in STEM----the problem is US students are losing the best in world history BROAD CATEGORIES of vocational pathways having the PARENTS AND STUDENTS deciding and choosing what fits best for our children.
11 million US STEM grads working outside their degree category-----you better believe this is a conservative figure.
30 Aug 2013 | 14:00 GMT
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians
By Robert N. Charettet
You must have seen the warning a thousand times: 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.
It pretty much doesn’t matter what country you’re talking about—the United States is facing this crisis, as is Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, India…the list goes on. In many of these countries, the predicted shortfall of STEM (short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers is supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. A 2012 report by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for instance, stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed. In the U.K., the Royal Academy of Engineering reported last year that the nation will have to graduate 100 000 STEM majors every year until 2020 just to stay even with demand. Germany, meanwhile, is sa to have a shortage of about 210 000 workers in what’s known there as the MINT disciplines—mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology.
The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas--temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.
And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite--that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.
A Matter of Supply vs. Demand: Every year U.S. schools grant more STEM degrees than there are available jobs. When you factor in H-1B visa holders, existing STEM degree holders, and the like, it’s hard to make a case that there’s a STEM labor shortage.
To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we’ll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.
In preparing this article, I went through hundreds of reports, articles, and white papers from the past six decades. There were plenty of data, but there was also an extraordinary amount of inconsistency. 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?
Such definitions obviously affect the counts. For example, in the United States, both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Commerce track the number of STEM jobs, but using different metrics. According to Commerce, 7.6 million individuals worked in STEM jobs in 2010, or about 5.5 percent of the U.S. workforce. That number includes professional and technical support occupations in the fields of computer science and mathematics, engineering, and life and physical sciences as well as management. The NSF, by contrast, counts 12.4 million science and engineering jobs in the United States, including a number of areas that the Commerce Department excludes, such as health-care workers (4.3 million) and psychologists and social scientists (518 000).
The STEM Crisis Through the Decades
Predictions of an impending shortage of scientists and engineers are nothing new
“Right now…there is a sufficiency of engineers, but one of our greatest industrial organizations, after careful study, predicts the entire absorption of this group by the end of 1936, with a probable shortage of available engineers at that time.”
—Collins P. Bliss,dean of New York University’s College of Engineering, 1934
“With mounting demands for scientists both for teaching and for research, we will enter the postwar period with a serious deficit in our trained scientific personnel.”
—Vannevar Bush,director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1945
“Our national welfare, our defense, our standard of living could all be jeopardized by the mismanagement of this supply and demand problem in the field of trained creative intelligence.”
—James Killian,president of MIT, 1954
“From 1972 through 1975, the expected demand for engineers will exceed not only the supply coming from American engineering schools, but also the combined supply from the United States and foreign countries, according to the [Engineering Manpower Commission] estimates.”
—John W. Graham Jr.,president of Clarkson College of Technology, 1970
“The electronics and information technology industries will be short more than 100 000 electrical and computer science engineers over the next five years.”
—American Electronics Association,1983
“Already spot shortages exist in some science fields in the United States, and unless dramatic changes are made in the way we educate all of our students, including our most talented, the shortages will increase.”
—U.S. Office of Educational Research and Improvement,1993
“U.S. companies face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs.”
—Bill Gates,chairman of Microsoft, 2008
“There is a skills gap in this country—for every unemployed person in the United States, there are two STEM job postings. The gap will only widen if we don’t engage now to address STEM education at the elementary and high school levels.”
—Richard K. Templeton,chairman, president, and CEO of Texas Instruments, 2013
Such inconsistencies don’t just create confusion for numbers junkies like me; they also make rational policy discussions difficult. Depending on your point of view, you can easily cherry-pick data to bolster your argument.
Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM.
The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields. And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field, according to a 2011 study from Georgetown University.
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?
Now consider the projections that suggest a STEM worker shortfall. One of the most cited in recent U.S. debates comes from the 2011 Georgetown University report mentioned above, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton of the Center on Education and the Workforce. It estimated there will be slightly more than 2.4 million STEM job openings in the United States between 2008 and 2018, with 1.1 million newly created jobs and the rest to replace workers who retire or move to non-STEM fields; they conclude that there will be roughly 277 000 STEM vacancies per year.
But the Georgetown study did not fully account for the Great Recession. It projected a downturn in 2009 but then a steady increase in jobs beginning in 2010 and a return to normal by the year 2018. In fact, though, more than 370 000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I don’t mean to single out this study for criticism; it just illustrates the difficulty of accurately predicting STEM demand and supply even a year or two out, let alone over a prolonged period. Highly competitive science- and technology-driven industries are volatile, where radical restructurings and boom-and-bust cycles have been the norm for decades. Many STEM jobs today are also targets for outsourcing or replacement by automation.
The nature of STEM work has also changed dramatically in the past several decades. In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past, employers seldom offer generous education and training benefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete.
Any of these factors can affect both short-term and longer-term demand for STEM workers, as well as for the particular skills those workers will need. The agencies that track science and engineering employment know this to be true. Buried in Chapter 3 of a 2012 NSF workforce study, for instance, you’ll find this caveat: “Projections of employment growth are plagued by uncertain assumptions and are notoriously difficult to make.”
So is there a shortfall of STEM workers or isn’t there?
The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field.
Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master’s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there’s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades.
Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.
Spot shortages for certain STEM specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked demand for data scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in can’t assume such shortages will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline.
What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage 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.”
That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”
Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.”
“None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”
So why the persistent anxiety that a STEM crisis exists?
Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.” In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57 000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India.
You’ll hear similar arguments made elsewhere. In India, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Vijay Kumar Saraswat, recently noted that in his country, “a meagre four persons out of every 1000 are choosing S&T or research, as compared to 110 in Japan, 76 in Germany and Israel, 55 in USA, 46 in Korea and 8 in China.” Leaders in South Africa and Brazil cite similar statistics to show how they are likewise falling behind in the STEM race.
“The government responds either with money [for research] or, more recently, with visas to increase the number of STEM workers,” Teitelbaum says. “This continues for a number of years until the claims of a shortage turn out not to be true and a bust ensues.” Students who graduate during the bust, he says, are shocked to discover that “they can’t find jobs, or they find jobs but not stable ones.”
At the moment, we’re in the alarm-heading-toward-boom part of the cycle. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government spends more than US $3 billion each year on 209 STEM-related initiatives overseen by 13 federal agencies. That’s about $100 for every U.S. student beyond primary school. In addition, major corporations are collectively spending millions to support STEM educational programs. And every U.S. state, along with a host of public and private universities, high schools, middle schools, and even primary schools, has its own STEM initiatives. The result is that many people’s fortunes are now tied to the STEM crisis, real or manufactured.
Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.
Q. If a student came to you for advice, would you encourage him or her to pursue a career in STEM?IEEE Spectrum recently posed that question to a select group of IEEE members. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they would “strongly encourage” the student to take such a career path because it is “interesting and stimulating work” and one in which a person “can make a difference in the world.”
Governments also push the STEM myth because an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense. And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as “taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities” by allowing them to expand their enrollments.
An oversupply of STEM workers may also have a beneficial effect on the economy, says Georgetown’s Nicole Smith, one of the coauthors of the 2011 STEM study. If STEM graduates can’t find traditional STEM jobs, she says, “they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive.”
The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn’t exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their “bust” phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.
Emphasizing STEM at the expense of other disciplines carries other risks. Without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow their worldview—and their career options. In a 2011 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, argued that point. “In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80 000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers,” he wrote. “But the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.”
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.
Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.
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The article we posted earlier about the agenda of ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE installed in US around the time US FED and UNITED NATIONS were created came with the global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS unleashing the LONG GAME of killing all our US national, state, and local governance structures by allowing them to be made so corrupt, criminal, dysfunctional that our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE would hate our own government even though the US founding fathers built the best in world history I AM MAN AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT PEOPLE'S government.
CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA global banking pols super-sized all this dysfunction with ROBBER BARON few decades and our US PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY was top priority in being made a FAILED STATE. So, we had Bush era telling our US college students they needed graduate degrees since BS/BAs were not going to be good enough----creating massive student loan debt at the same time BUSH/OBAMA were outsourcing more and more high-skilled jobs. CREATE MASSIVE DEBT WITH NO JOBS------people hate COLLEGE.
'How the Radical Right Played the Long Game and Won
The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
By Nancy MacLean
334 pp. Viking. $28.
Buchanan, however, also had what MacLean calls a “stealth” agenda. He knew that the majority would never agree to being constrained. He therefore helped lead a push to undermine their trust in public institutions'.
This is now MOVING FORWARD to our US public K-12 schools. We are shouting today that our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE will HATE what global banking 5% freemason/Greek players are installing with STEM K-12 for the same reasons.
So, global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA are MOVING FORWARD a saturation in STEM KNOWING the future will not employ all most ALL of our US grads in STEM------AND they are installing LEARNING FORMATS in K-12 we already KNOW a super-majority of students do not respond well to.
Education
The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage
American students need to improve in math and science—but not because there's a surplus of jobs in those fields.
Michael S. Teitelbaum
Mar 19, 2014
Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. Everyone knows that these workforce shortages are due mainly to the myriad weaknesses of American K-12 education in science and mathematics, which international comparisons of student performance rank as average at best.
Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. They echo from corporate CEO to corporate CEO, from lobbyist to lobbyist, from editorial writer to editorial writer. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is just the same claims ricocheting in an echo chamber?
The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. How can the conventional wisdom be so different from the empirical evidence? There are of course many complexities involved that cannot be addressed here.
The key points, though, are these:
Science and engineering occupations are at the leading edge of economic competitiveness in an increasingly globalized world, and science and engineering workforces of sufficient size and quality are essential for any 21st century economy to prosper. These professional workforces also are crucial for addressing challenges such as international security, global climate change, and domestic and global health. While they therefore are of great importance, college graduates employed in science and engineering occupations (as defined by the National Science Foundation) actually comprise only a small fraction of the workforce.
A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute. No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher, although some are forecasting high growth in occupations that require post-high school training but not a bachelors degree. All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings--the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more. Were there to be a genuine shortage at present, there would be evidence of employers raising wage offers to attract the scientists and engineers they want. But the evidence points in the other direction: Most studies report that real wages in many—but not all—science and engineering occupations have been flat or slow-growing, and unemployment as high or higher than in many comparably-skilled occupations.
Because labor markets in science and engineering differ greatly across fields, industries, and time periods, it is easy to cherry-pick specific specialties that really are in short supply, at least in specific years and locations. But generalizing from these cases to the whole of U.S. science and engineering is perilous. Employment in small but expanding areas of information technology such as social media may be booming, while other larger occupations languish or are increasingly moved offshore. It is true that high-skilled professional occupations almost always experience unemployment rates far lower than those for the rest of the U.S. workforce, but unemployment among scientists and engineers is higher than in other professions such as physicians, dentists, lawyers, and registered nurses, and surprisingly high unemployment rates prevail for recent graduates even in fields with alleged serious “shortages” such as engineering (7.0 percent), computer science (7.8 percent) and information systems (11.7 percent).
Over time, new technologies, price changes, or sharp shifts in the labor market can create rapid rises in demand in a particular occupation. When that happens, the evidence shows that the market seems to adjust reasonably well. Entire occupations that were previously unattractive and declining, such as petroleum engineering in the 1980s and 1990s, have rather suddenly become attractive and high-paid—due to increased energy prices and new technologies for domestic extraction of oil and gas. Others, such as those linked to manufacturing and construction—industries in which well over half of all engineers are employed--have declined over the same period. Surprisingly, some of the largest and most heavily financed scientific fields, such as biomedical research, are among those with the least attractive career prospects, as a recent blue-ribbon advisory committee reported to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Biomedical Ph.D.s are unusually lengthy and often require additional years of postdoctoral training, yet after completion those with such degrees experience labor market demand and remuneration that are relatively low.
Labor markets for scientists and engineers also differ geographically. Employer demand is far higher in a few hothouse metropolitan areas than in the rest of the country, especially during boom periods. Moreover recruitment of domestic professionals to these regions may be more difficult than in others when would-be hires discover that the remuneration employers are offering does not come close to compensating for far higher housing and other costs. According to the most recent data from the National Association of Realtors, Silicon Valley (metro San Jose) has the highest median house prices in the country, at $775,000—nearly four times higher than the national median.
Far from offering expanding attractive career opportunities, it seems that many, but not all, science and engineering careers are headed in the opposite direction: unstable careers, slow-growing wages, and high risk of jobs moving offshore or being filled by temporary workers from abroad. Recent science Ph.D.s often need to undertake three or more additional years in low-paid and temporary “postdoctoral” positions, but even then only a minority have realistic prospects of landing a coveted tenure-track academic position.
Among college-educated information technology workers under age 30, temporary workers from abroad constitute a large majority. Even in electrical and electronic engineering—an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad--U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002. Unemployment rates for electrical engineers rose to a surprisingly high 4.8 percent in 2013.
Claims of workforce shortages in science and engineering are hardly new. Indeed there have been no fewer than five “rounds” of “alarm/boom/bust” cycles since World War II. Each lasted about 10 to 15 years, and was initiated by alarms of “shortages,” followed by policies to increase the supply of scientists and engineers. Unfortunately most were followed by painful busts—mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and funding cuts that inflicted severe damage to careers of both mature professionals and the booming numbers of emerging graduates, while also discouraging new entrants to these fields.
One thing we might reasonably conclude is that over the past six decades there has been no shortage of shortage claims. But what about the present and foreseeable future?
Since 2005 a series of influential reports have been produced by respected organizations and individuals, once again pointing to alarming current (or more commonly “looming”) shortages due to failing K-12 education. Three such reports were published in 2005 alone, by the Council on Competitiveness, by a special committee appointed by the National Research Council, and by a group of 15 business and technology organizations. Were these the opening salvos of the “alarm” stage of another 10-15 year cycle of alarm/boom/bust, the sixth such cycle since World War II? A deep recession with high unemployment has intervened, and in any case we would not be able to know for sure until another 5 or more years have passed.
These publications report correctly that the average performance of American K-12 students is middling in international testing. These data also show that this average performance results from large numbers of both high-performing and low-performing US students. The average national scores reflect both ends of the scale, yet there continues to be a large pool of top science and math students in the U.S. OECD data on “high-performing” students suggests that the U.S. produces about 33 percent of the world total in this category in the sciences, though only about 14 percent in mathematics.
No one should conclude from this that American K-12 science and math education does not need major improvement. Emphatically to the contrary: Every high school graduate should be competent in science and mathematics—essential to success in almost any 21st century occupation and to informed citizenship as well. But there is a big disconnect between this broad educational imperative and the numerically limited scope of the science and engineering workforce.
Editorial writers in respected publications continue to assert that American student interest in these fields is low and declining. Yet according to a recent report from ACT, the college admissions testing service, “student interest in STEM [Science,Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] is high overall,” characteristic of some 48 percent of high school graduates tested in 2013. American high-school students are taking more math and science courses than ever before. Meanwhile UCLA’s respected annual surveys of entering college freshmen show that over the past several years nearly 40 percent have been reporting intentions to major in a STEM subject, not only a large fraction but also a substantial increase from past decades—this percentage was about 32 to 33 percent from 1995 to 2007.
Some of these students do change their minds and complete their degrees in different fields, but others shift into science and engineering majors. As noted earlier, the outcome is that the numbers of science and engineering graduates is at least double those being hired into such occupations each year.
The evidence all points to high levels of student interest, high-performance levels among the students most likely to pursue majors and careers in science and engineering, and large numbers of graduates in these fields.
Ironically the vigorous claims of shortages concern occupations in science and engineering, yet manage to ignore or reject most of the science-based evidence on the subject. The repeated past cycles of “alarm/boom/bust” have misallocated public and private resources by periodically expanding higher education in science and engineering beyond levels for which there were attractive career opportunities. In so doing they produced large unintended costs for those talented students who devoted many years of advanced education to prepare for careers that turned out to be unattractive by the time they graduated, or who later experienced massive layoffs in mid-career with few prospects to be rehired.
Recent forecasts of looming shortages of scientists and engineers may prove to be self-fulfilling prophecies if they result in further declines in the attractiveness of science and engineering careers for talented American students.
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Who is MOVING FORWARD all this worst in world history education format in US? It is enfolded in RACE TO TOP----COMMONER CORE-----installed during OBAMA era with CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS partnered with BUSH neo-cons----not able to do all this without our state GOVERNORS and state assemblies passing these education policies AND without our city/county councils and SCHOOL BOARDS pushing these education reform policies under the guise of needing all that global corporate funding simply to rebuild community public schools.
We have always had plenty of FEDERAL funding to build and maintain our public schools----we especially have those education funds NOW after these few decades of ROBBER BARON fraud of trillions of dollars needing to come back to our US cities and counties.
Here in Baltimore those frauds were driven by global banking BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION-----GREATER BALTIMORE COMMITTEE----GLOBAL HEDGE FUND CORPORATION JOHNS HOPKINS. Lots of overseas global corporate campuses built with our US Federal public school funding these few decades.
Placing an emphasis for our US 99% of female students on STEM when we KNOW MOVING FORWARD has goals of taking women out of workforce competition for the most part-----is CYNICAL.
BUT GLOBAL BANKING 5% FREEMASON/GREEK CLINTON/OBAMA ARE BEING SO ----'LEFT' SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE FOR WOMEN----OH, REALLY????
2 major investments support STEM education
By Laura Ascione, Managing Editor, Content Services, @eSN_Laura
August 9th, 2018
Most future jobs will involve STEM, and efforts at the K-12 level can help fill the future STEM pipeline
Schools may be out for summer, but STEM education efforts and investments are going strong.
STEM investments are critical for a number of reasons. First, many of the jobs today’s K-12 students will hold in the future don’t exist yet, and nearly all of them are predicted to require solid STEM skills. Second, there are large gender and racial gaps in the STEM workplace. These gaps start as early as middle school, when girls and minorities stop engaging with STEM lessons and extra-curricular activities.
Some educators seem to have it figured out, and they’re doing their part to fill the STEM pipeline with engaging lessons that grab students’ attention with real-world relevance. But in order to do this consistently, broad-scale investments, including funding, time, and advocacy, are needed.
Here’s the latest:
Carnegie Science Center educators have developed a STEM curriculum with Girl Up designed to inspire participants in Girl Up’s 2,200 clubs in 103 countries to consider careers in STEM fields.
The curriculum is part of a program supported by BNY Mellon to encourage Girl Up participants to consider STEM careers, introduce them to female STEM role models, and educate them on applying STEM solutions to real-world problems. It is the first large-scale project Girl Up has undertaken to involve its young leaders in STEM, and the goal of the program is to educate, inspire, and engage girls in STEM for social good. The curriculum developed by the Science Center will introduce girls to design thinking, the scientific method, and problem-solving skills fundamental to STEM and other fields. Girl Up leaders seek to reduce the gender gap in STEM fields, where men are more likely to pursue careers.
“The gender gap in STEM starts early, with many girls not being encouraged to pursue STEM careers. Girl Up’s partnership with BNY Mellon and Carnegie Science Center helps bridge that gap with an innovative approach that focuses on human-centered design thinking, while connecting girls to how STEM can be used to make a difference in the world,” says Anna Blue, Girl Up executive director.
The Girl Up STEM curriculum includes 10 activities that girls will be able to participate in with their Clubs. Once they complete the activities, they can participate in a STEM challenge for social good. Also, STEM boot camps that will take place this fall around the nation will include talks by local female STEM leaders who will encourage the girls to get involved in STEM in their communities. Girls will participate in hands-on skills-based training that provides STEM solutions for issues taking place in their communities.
Ann Metzger, the Henry Buhl, Jr., co-director of Carnegie Science Center, says developing this curriculum fits in with the Science Center’s efforts to increase the number of women pursuing STEM jobs. “We are gratified and honored that Girl Up chose us to participate in this important project,” Metzger says. “Girl Up has a proven record in providing leadership training for girls, and we are excited that its future programming will strengthen girls’ STEM skills. This will give girls more tools they can use to improve their futures and the futures of their communities.”
In other news, Microsoft Philanthropies announced a new partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in which Microsoft will provide $2 million over three years to help CSTA build a stronger community to better serve computer science teachers.
“We’re thrilled that students of all ages are discovering the exciting–and critical–field of computer science. From the Hour of Code, to Minecraft Education, and even Advanced Placement Computer Sciences courses, participation rates are expanding,” says Mary Snapp, corporate vice president and lead for Microsoft Philanthropies, in a LinkedIn post. “This surge of student interest, combined with the premium our economy places on technology skill of all kinds, requires us to do all we can to ensure every student has access to computer science courses. And it all starts with our teachers.”
Microsoft Philanthropies also focuses on computer science education through its Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS) program, which pairs technology-industry volunteers with classroom teachers to team-teach computer science in 350 U.S. high schools.
“While technology can be a powerful learning tool, nothing can replace the expertise, guidance, and encouragement that teachers provide to students each day of the school year,” Snapp writes. “I remember my own favorite teachers who helped me see a world beyond the rural town in which I grew up. I would guess that nearly everyone has a similar story. We thank our teachers and we hope that this investment in computer science teachers, through CSTA, empowers more educators to do what they do best: make a positive difference in the lives of students.”
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NO ONE is a bigger raging global banking 5% freemason/Greek player MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD COMMONER CORE RACE TO TOP knowing the goal will kill 99% of US and global citizens' ability to have that strong, first world, developed nation PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY that made Americans BEST IN WORLD in education attainment-----then these two FAKE 'LEFT' POPULIST players. Sanders is simply a Clinton neo-liberal morphing into far-right wing LIBERTARIAN MARXISM pretending OUR REVOLUTION is populist for our US 99% when it is for global 1% only-----and AFT WEINGARTEN has been raging NEO-LIBERAL EDUCATION partnered with Bill and Hillary---Bill Gates MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD.
We discuss often why these education policies are FAKE NEWS.
'• Maintaining federal support for afterschool programs provided through the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program.
• The inclusion of wrap-around support services like health, mental health, nutrition and family supports'.
So, our choices in US politics are BAD whether voting right wing REPUBLICAN----our left wing DEMOCRAT and even our third and fourth parties are stacked with global banking 5% farm team players.
TO STOP MOVING FORWARD OUR US 99% BLACK, WHITE, AND BROWN MUST COME TOGETHER VS GLOBAL 1% WITH ROLLING PEACEFUL PROTESTS IN ALL US CITIES DEEMED US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES-----LET'S GET RID OF THESE GLOBAL BANKING PLAYER POLS BY DANCING IN THE STREET IN PROTEST.
Sanders making WEINGARTNEN a champion for our US 99% in education ---THAT IS AN INSULT to both teachers and students.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: Teachers Are Part of the 'Political Revolution'
By Madeline Will on July 15, 2018 1:07 PM
Pittsburgh, Penn.
Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke to a receptive crowd here at the American Federation of Teachers' biennial convention, saying there was a political revolution "sweeping across this country."
Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, condemned many of the president's actions and praised recent activism among workers, including the teacher strikes and protests in about six states this spring. He spoke of a changing tide among public opinion for "radical" ideas, such as tuition-free college education. That policy proposal was part of his campaign for president in 2016.
"The American people are going to make Donald Trump a one-term president," he said to huge applause. "We intend in the 2018 midterm elections to ... take back the House and the Senate."
Sanders, who ran against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary presidential election, is widely expected to run for president in 2020, though he has not announced his candidacy. A New York Times article published today looked at how both Warren and Sanders were preparing for a 2020 campaign, along with a slew of other hopefuls. (Warren addressed delegates at the AFT convention yesterday, and Clinton spoke on the opening day of the conference.)
In his speech, Sanders criticized wealth inequality, saying that the "top 25 hedge-fund managers of Wall Street make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in this country combined."
He also slammed Trump for his social policies, including the child-separation policy at the U.S.-Mexican border.
"I know every day, you tell your students, you say to your kids: Tell the truth," Sanders said. "You say to your kids: Don't be bullies. And what kind of terrible example is he setting to the children of this country?"
Sanders, who pledged to fight against Trump's nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, also criticized many of the Supreme Court's decisions, including the recent decision that prohibited "agency" or "fair share" fees that unions in 22 states had been charging to nonmembers to cover the cost of collective bargaining.
"They have recently given us the disastrous Janus decision," Sanders said to boos. "Well, you know, sometimes decisions and actions have unintended consequences, and I have a feeling that those who thought that the Janus decision would hurt the trade unions in this country may be in for a big surprise. It may end up being one of those decisions that helps us rebuild the trade union movement in America."
That line generated a standing ovation among the crowd, as did several other lines throughout his speech. Delegates chanted, "Bernie, Bernie," at the end of his speech. In 2016, the AFT and the other major national teacher's union, the National Education Association, both endorsed Clinton over Sanders—a controversial decision among the delegates, many of whom favored Sanders. Today, AFT President Randi Weingarten said Sanders has "inspired an entire generation" and added that many people have "felt the Bern more and more over those past two years ... including myself."
Sanders concluded his speech by saying, "We are not going back, we are going forward."
INDEED, BERNIE----YOUR REVOLUTION IS MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD FOR ONLY THE GLOBAL 1%.
"As part of this political revolution, teachers are standing up and leading the fight for education reform," he said. "Who would have thought that in West Virginia or Kentucky, in Oklahoma, teachers are demanding decent education for our kids and are taking on right-wing political establishments? Thank you, teachers."
Sanders also praised a wave of progressive candidates who are running in the 2018 midterm elections, including Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City. (Sanders will soon head to Kansas with Ocasio-Cortez to campaign for other Democratic congressional candidates, according to the Washington Post.)
In fact, after Sanders' speech, two campaigning Democrats delivered remarks, as well: Rep. Conor Lamb, from Pennsylvania, and Randy Bryce, who is running for retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan's seat in Wisconsin. Both candidates, but particularly Bryce, a former union activist, were warmly received by the crowd.
"Our job now as is never before is to stand up, fight back, and create the nation we can become," Sanders concluded to the cheering educators.
The article below appears in PARENTING------and it is written by GREAT SCHOOLS. We discuss often that GREAT SCHOOLS is a global banking STOCK MARKET rating agency geared to CORPORATE EDUCATION promoting those global education corporations to boost profit-margins. When PARENTING prints an article on education written by global banking 1%---it is not providing REAL INFORMATION for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE.
'Students who manage their time well may succeed in STEM programs that are self-paced and have kids working on independent projects'.
The statement above should be a warning to a super-majority of our US parents. Our US public education plummeted from BEST IN WORLD to worst in developed nations because of CLINTON ERA 1990s EDUCATION REFORMS that removed all classroom RIGOR----that removed all individual responsibility for learning when it installed the classroom format of GROUP LEARNING. Our US student results led to large numbers of students not able to read or write because they were allowed to be LOST inside GROUP LEARNING. We KNOW only 10-20% of our students respond well to GROUP LEARNING FORMATS. Even those percentage of students often do not perform well without guided learning.
As this article states---the format inside these STEM schools besides having GROUP LEARNING is computer oriented lesson programs where all the basics of creating graphs, creative thought on how data should be represented are provided in online lessons. Remember, our US students lost the ability to do BASIC MATH-----because they were allowed to use CALCULATORS.
The lowdown on STEM schools
Given the crying need for graduates with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees, is a STEM school right for your child?
by: Crystal Yednak | September 21, 2015 PARENTING
A high school student tosses a ball into the air and watches it fall. Then he films the falling ball and graphs the movement on his computer. Nearby, a sophomore scrawls out equations with a blue marker, while a classmate looks over his shoulder and shakes her head. “I think that number should be negative.” They come to an agreement before the teacher stops by, nudging them to explain how they got it. This action-packed hour is a science class — “Scientific Inquiry — Physics,” to be exact.
This type of noisy, exuberant classroom exemplifies what Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) schools are about. Learning is collaborative and project-based; kids work closely together in a hands-on way to solve real-world problems. Learning problem-solving skills — and helping students develop into creative, critical thinkers — is at the core of any true STEM school. “Teachers are not just telling us,” says Jennifer Bailey, 17, a senior at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. “We use our own data and discovery to realize a concept.” While all schools teach math and science, good STEM schools focus deeply on these subjects in hopes of better preparing students for the high-demand tech jobs of the future.
Is a STEM school right for my child?
If your child has an innate interest in science or building things, a STEM school may be a natural choice. But administrators say these schools cater to all kinds of learners and that most students appreciate the hands-on nature of the curricula. Students who manage their time well may succeed in STEM programs that are self-paced and have kids working on independent projects.
Why you might consider a STEM high school
Over the past 10 years, jobs in STEM fields have grown three times as fast as jobs in non-STEM fields, according to the Department of Commerce, and STEM fields are expected to grow by 17 percent between 2008 and 2018, compared to just 9.8 percent growth for non-STEM fields in the same time frame. But without an influx of graduates in these areas, the U.S. will not have enough workers to fill those jobs. STEM schools can help young people gain the skills necessary to succeed in these fields. Over the next decade alone, the U.S. must produce approximately 1 million more STEM-degree graduates than currently projected to meet the demands of the economy, according to a 2012 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Recognizing this gap, educators have focused on getting more students hooked on math and science earlier in their school careers, which is why more STEM programs are being launched nationwide.
You’ll mainly find STEM high schools, but there are some middle schools with a STEM emphasis, too. Some STEM schools are open to all students, meaning there are no tests required; others are selective and consider a student’s academic record in admission decisions.
There are three primary types of STEM programs:
- A STEM specialty school: The entire school’s focus is on STEM and every student participates in a curriculum of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
- A STEM program within a larger school: Some schools create STEM academies within their schools that allow interested students to study STEM in more depth.
- Residential STEM programs: For these intensive programs, students live on campus and attend a STEM school.
What you might find in a STEM classroom
- Students behaving as scientists: On a typical day, they may be recording observations, carrying out experiments, or conducting their own research. Learning is project-based and sometimes messy, but students learn by doing, not by rote memorization.
- Connecting STEM learning to a career: To help students understand what kind of STEM jobs are available, schools may bring in tutors from local technology companies or organize internships at hospitals or research institutions.
- Integrating with other subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math subjects are woven into other areas of the curriculum, with courses such as the “History of Science” or “Environmental History.”
- Making use of technology: By taking quizzes on their laptops, entering data into spreadsheets, and creating graphs to illustrate the results of their experiments, students are using technology in their daily studies. STEM programs such as L&N STEM Academy in Knoxville, TN, participate in one-to-one programs through which students are given their own individual computer (or iPad, in this case) for their work. Teachers may have web pages featuring necessary classroom materials, which may also allow students to work ahead if they want to or review a lesson if need be.
- Noise: Classrooms are not quiet and are often arranged so that students can sit and work in groups. This encourages collaboration as students discuss their work and challenge each other’s ideas.
Questions to ask when considering a STEM school
- Is this really a STEM school? With the recent national focus on creating more STEM graduates, “You see lots of places springing up calling themselves STEM schools, but they don’t necessarily have a clearly articulated explanation of what makes them STEM,” said Christopher Kolar, founding co-chair of the Committee for the Advancement of STEM Specialty Schools. Does the school offer a full STEM program beyond the science and mathematics offered in typical schools? A look at the course schedule may indicate whether the coursework is there to challenge students and prep them for higher-level college STEM courses. For instance, are pre-calculus, calculus, and AP calculus offered? Can students take a second year of physics or engineering? Consider the breadth and depth of the school’s STEM offerings.
- Does it help prepare students for a STEM career? To be sure the school is properly preparing students for the jobs of the future, ask school administrators if they communicate with students’ potential employers. Businesses should be partners, bringing in resources, providing role models for students, and keeping staff up-to-date on new developments so the curriculum stays relevant.
- Are students working with computers and other technology? Or are the new iPads sitting in a box in the corner because teachers have not been trained on how to incorporate them into lesson plans? Ask for examples of how laptops (or tablets) help with instruction and if the administration provides ongoing technology training for teachers. Likewise, does the school have the lab equipment necessary for students to do a broad range of experiments?
- Do teachers have backgrounds in the subjects they are teaching? Science should be taught by teachers who are excited about and understand science. Also, do mentoring programs exist to encourage teachers to improve their STEM skills and knowledge?
If we want to have the scientists and engineers to solve future problems, STEM schools are important to the country’s future: finding sustainable energy sources, keeping water supplies clean, and discovering new technologies that help us compete in a global economy. Supporters say there is an urgent need to attract and educate more students in these fields and keep them engrossed throughout their elementary, high school, and college years. And from the student’s perspective, if they have the skills employers need, they will have an easier time finding a job upon graduation.
What critics sayBy increasing the emphasis on science, math, technology, and engineering, some worry that students may lose out on other key skills. Electives like foreign languages and the arts help foster creativity and broaden students’ world view. Some STEM programs try to make up for this by offering arts programs after school; others say they recognize the need and incorporate as much arts education as they can into the school day.
Because girls historically have not shown the same interest in STEM fields as boys, critics say the schools need to do more to reach out to girls and get them excited about science by providing role models in female scientists or crushing traditional gender stereotypes in the classroom.
A final word of advice
Make sure you understand how fully the school has embraced a STEM curriculum. If you are expecting your child to be taking advanced physics courses and the school only offers one introductory course, both you and your child could be disappointed. Ask the school to see sample schedules. As always: visit any school you’re considering. Talk to teachers about the ways students use technology in class. Poke your head in the labs. Ask what professional development opportunities exist for teachers to stay on top of their game and whether the school has networked with local companies and research institutions.
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Here we have an article written with REAL data on education and job stats. The US has all last century been the world leader in STEM education and graduates----our US students are not DUMBER incapable.
When we think about the article shared this week telling us CHINA is already retooling those global factories to robotics and AI to a point of needing a few dozen human workers----we know there are hundreds of millions of Chinese 99% perfectly capable of being STEM GRADS who will not be getting those jobs either. So, there is a GLUT of student grads around the world wanting those STEM jobs.
WHEN OUR US k-12 AND UNIVERSITIES DELIBERATELY STAGE CAREER CURRICULA KNOWING OUR US COLLEGE GRADS WILL NOT FIND JOBS----THEY ARE NOT WORKING IN PUBLIC INTEREST.
The problem is NOT that US 99% WE THE PEOPLE are being made to compete with global labor pool for increasingly fewer jobs especially in STEM----the problem is US students are losing the best in world history BROAD CATEGORIES of vocational pathways having the PARENTS AND STUDENTS deciding and choosing what fits best for our children.
11 million US STEM grads working outside their degree category-----you better believe this is a conservative figure.
30 Aug 2013 | 14:00 GMT
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians
By Robert N. Charettet
You must have seen the warning a thousand times: 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.
It pretty much doesn’t matter what country you’re talking about—the United States is facing this crisis, as is Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, India…the list goes on. In many of these countries, the predicted shortfall of STEM (short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers is supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. A 2012 report by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for instance, stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed. In the U.K., the Royal Academy of Engineering reported last year that the nation will have to graduate 100 000 STEM majors every year until 2020 just to stay even with demand. Germany, meanwhile, is sa to have a shortage of about 210 000 workers in what’s known there as the MINT disciplines—mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology.
The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas--temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.
And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite--that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.
A Matter of Supply vs. Demand: Every year U.S. schools grant more STEM degrees than there are available jobs. When you factor in H-1B visa holders, existing STEM degree holders, and the like, it’s hard to make a case that there’s a STEM labor shortage.
To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we’ll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.
In preparing this article, I went through hundreds of reports, articles, and white papers from the past six decades. There were plenty of data, but there was also an extraordinary amount of inconsistency. 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?
Such definitions obviously affect the counts. For example, in the United States, both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Commerce track the number of STEM jobs, but using different metrics. According to Commerce, 7.6 million individuals worked in STEM jobs in 2010, or about 5.5 percent of the U.S. workforce. That number includes professional and technical support occupations in the fields of computer science and mathematics, engineering, and life and physical sciences as well as management. The NSF, by contrast, counts 12.4 million science and engineering jobs in the United States, including a number of areas that the Commerce Department excludes, such as health-care workers (4.3 million) and psychologists and social scientists (518 000).
The STEM Crisis Through the Decades
Predictions of an impending shortage of scientists and engineers are nothing new
“Right now…there is a sufficiency of engineers, but one of our greatest industrial organizations, after careful study, predicts the entire absorption of this group by the end of 1936, with a probable shortage of available engineers at that time.”
—Collins P. Bliss,dean of New York University’s College of Engineering, 1934
“With mounting demands for scientists both for teaching and for research, we will enter the postwar period with a serious deficit in our trained scientific personnel.”
—Vannevar Bush,director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1945
“Our national welfare, our defense, our standard of living could all be jeopardized by the mismanagement of this supply and demand problem in the field of trained creative intelligence.”
—James Killian,president of MIT, 1954
“From 1972 through 1975, the expected demand for engineers will exceed not only the supply coming from American engineering schools, but also the combined supply from the United States and foreign countries, according to the [Engineering Manpower Commission] estimates.”
—John W. Graham Jr.,president of Clarkson College of Technology, 1970
“The electronics and information technology industries will be short more than 100 000 electrical and computer science engineers over the next five years.”
—American Electronics Association,1983
“Already spot shortages exist in some science fields in the United States, and unless dramatic changes are made in the way we educate all of our students, including our most talented, the shortages will increase.”
—U.S. Office of Educational Research and Improvement,1993
“U.S. companies face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs.”
—Bill Gates,chairman of Microsoft, 2008
“There is a skills gap in this country—for every unemployed person in the United States, there are two STEM job postings. The gap will only widen if we don’t engage now to address STEM education at the elementary and high school levels.”
—Richard K. Templeton,chairman, president, and CEO of Texas Instruments, 2013
Such inconsistencies don’t just create confusion for numbers junkies like me; they also make rational policy discussions difficult. Depending on your point of view, you can easily cherry-pick data to bolster your argument.
Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM.
The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields. And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field, according to a 2011 study from Georgetown University.
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?
Now consider the projections that suggest a STEM worker shortfall. One of the most cited in recent U.S. debates comes from the 2011 Georgetown University report mentioned above, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton of the Center on Education and the Workforce. It estimated there will be slightly more than 2.4 million STEM job openings in the United States between 2008 and 2018, with 1.1 million newly created jobs and the rest to replace workers who retire or move to non-STEM fields; they conclude that there will be roughly 277 000 STEM vacancies per year.
But the Georgetown study did not fully account for the Great Recession. It projected a downturn in 2009 but then a steady increase in jobs beginning in 2010 and a return to normal by the year 2018. In fact, though, more than 370 000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I don’t mean to single out this study for criticism; it just illustrates the difficulty of accurately predicting STEM demand and supply even a year or two out, let alone over a prolonged period. Highly competitive science- and technology-driven industries are volatile, where radical restructurings and boom-and-bust cycles have been the norm for decades. Many STEM jobs today are also targets for outsourcing or replacement by automation.
The nature of STEM work has also changed dramatically in the past several decades. In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past, employers seldom offer generous education and training benefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete.
Any of these factors can affect both short-term and longer-term demand for STEM workers, as well as for the particular skills those workers will need. The agencies that track science and engineering employment know this to be true. Buried in Chapter 3 of a 2012 NSF workforce study, for instance, you’ll find this caveat: “Projections of employment growth are plagued by uncertain assumptions and are notoriously difficult to make.”
So is there a shortfall of STEM workers or isn’t there?
The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field.
Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master’s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there’s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades.
Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.
Spot shortages for certain STEM specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked demand for data scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in can’t assume such shortages will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline.
What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage 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.”
That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”
Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.”
“None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”
So why the persistent anxiety that a STEM crisis exists?
Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.” In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57 000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India.
You’ll hear similar arguments made elsewhere. In India, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Vijay Kumar Saraswat, recently noted that in his country, “a meagre four persons out of every 1000 are choosing S&T or research, as compared to 110 in Japan, 76 in Germany and Israel, 55 in USA, 46 in Korea and 8 in China.” Leaders in South Africa and Brazil cite similar statistics to show how they are likewise falling behind in the STEM race.
“The government responds either with money [for research] or, more recently, with visas to increase the number of STEM workers,” Teitelbaum says. “This continues for a number of years until the claims of a shortage turn out not to be true and a bust ensues.” Students who graduate during the bust, he says, are shocked to discover that “they can’t find jobs, or they find jobs but not stable ones.”
At the moment, we’re in the alarm-heading-toward-boom part of the cycle. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government spends more than US $3 billion each year on 209 STEM-related initiatives overseen by 13 federal agencies. That’s about $100 for every U.S. student beyond primary school. In addition, major corporations are collectively spending millions to support STEM educational programs. And every U.S. state, along with a host of public and private universities, high schools, middle schools, and even primary schools, has its own STEM initiatives. The result is that many people’s fortunes are now tied to the STEM crisis, real or manufactured.
Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.
Q. If a student came to you for advice, would you encourage him or her to pursue a career in STEM?IEEE Spectrum recently posed that question to a select group of IEEE members. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they would “strongly encourage” the student to take such a career path because it is “interesting and stimulating work” and one in which a person “can make a difference in the world.”
Governments also push the STEM myth because an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense. And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as “taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities” by allowing them to expand their enrollments.
An oversupply of STEM workers may also have a beneficial effect on the economy, says Georgetown’s Nicole Smith, one of the coauthors of the 2011 STEM study. If STEM graduates can’t find traditional STEM jobs, she says, “they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive.”
The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn’t exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their “bust” phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.
Emphasizing STEM at the expense of other disciplines carries other risks. Without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow their worldview—and their career options. In a 2011 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, argued that point. “In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80 000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers,” he wrote. “But the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.”
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.
Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.
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The article we posted earlier about the agenda of ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE installed in US around the time US FED and UNITED NATIONS were created came with the global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS unleashing the LONG GAME of killing all our US national, state, and local governance structures by allowing them to be made so corrupt, criminal, dysfunctional that our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE would hate our own government even though the US founding fathers built the best in world history I AM MAN AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT PEOPLE'S government.
CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA global banking pols super-sized all this dysfunction with ROBBER BARON few decades and our US PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY was top priority in being made a FAILED STATE. So, we had Bush era telling our US college students they needed graduate degrees since BS/BAs were not going to be good enough----creating massive student loan debt at the same time BUSH/OBAMA were outsourcing more and more high-skilled jobs. CREATE MASSIVE DEBT WITH NO JOBS------people hate COLLEGE.
'How the Radical Right Played the Long Game and Won
- Aug. 15, 2017
The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
By Nancy MacLean
334 pp. Viking. $28.
Buchanan, however, also had what MacLean calls a “stealth” agenda. He knew that the majority would never agree to being constrained. He therefore helped lead a push to undermine their trust in public institutions'.
This is now MOVING FORWARD to our US public K-12 schools. We are shouting today that our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE will HATE what global banking 5% freemason/Greek players are installing with STEM K-12 for the same reasons.
So, global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA are MOVING FORWARD a saturation in STEM KNOWING the future will not employ all most ALL of our US grads in STEM------AND they are installing LEARNING FORMATS in K-12 we already KNOW a super-majority of students do not respond well to.
Education
The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage
American students need to improve in math and science—but not because there's a surplus of jobs in those fields.
Michael S. Teitelbaum
Mar 19, 2014
Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. Everyone knows that these workforce shortages are due mainly to the myriad weaknesses of American K-12 education in science and mathematics, which international comparisons of student performance rank as average at best.
Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. They echo from corporate CEO to corporate CEO, from lobbyist to lobbyist, from editorial writer to editorial writer. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is just the same claims ricocheting in an echo chamber?
The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. How can the conventional wisdom be so different from the empirical evidence? There are of course many complexities involved that cannot be addressed here.
The key points, though, are these:
Science and engineering occupations are at the leading edge of economic competitiveness in an increasingly globalized world, and science and engineering workforces of sufficient size and quality are essential for any 21st century economy to prosper. These professional workforces also are crucial for addressing challenges such as international security, global climate change, and domestic and global health. While they therefore are of great importance, college graduates employed in science and engineering occupations (as defined by the National Science Foundation) actually comprise only a small fraction of the workforce.
A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute. No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher, although some are forecasting high growth in occupations that require post-high school training but not a bachelors degree. All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings--the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more. Were there to be a genuine shortage at present, there would be evidence of employers raising wage offers to attract the scientists and engineers they want. But the evidence points in the other direction: Most studies report that real wages in many—but not all—science and engineering occupations have been flat or slow-growing, and unemployment as high or higher than in many comparably-skilled occupations.
Because labor markets in science and engineering differ greatly across fields, industries, and time periods, it is easy to cherry-pick specific specialties that really are in short supply, at least in specific years and locations. But generalizing from these cases to the whole of U.S. science and engineering is perilous. Employment in small but expanding areas of information technology such as social media may be booming, while other larger occupations languish or are increasingly moved offshore. It is true that high-skilled professional occupations almost always experience unemployment rates far lower than those for the rest of the U.S. workforce, but unemployment among scientists and engineers is higher than in other professions such as physicians, dentists, lawyers, and registered nurses, and surprisingly high unemployment rates prevail for recent graduates even in fields with alleged serious “shortages” such as engineering (7.0 percent), computer science (7.8 percent) and information systems (11.7 percent).
Over time, new technologies, price changes, or sharp shifts in the labor market can create rapid rises in demand in a particular occupation. When that happens, the evidence shows that the market seems to adjust reasonably well. Entire occupations that were previously unattractive and declining, such as petroleum engineering in the 1980s and 1990s, have rather suddenly become attractive and high-paid—due to increased energy prices and new technologies for domestic extraction of oil and gas. Others, such as those linked to manufacturing and construction—industries in which well over half of all engineers are employed--have declined over the same period. Surprisingly, some of the largest and most heavily financed scientific fields, such as biomedical research, are among those with the least attractive career prospects, as a recent blue-ribbon advisory committee reported to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Biomedical Ph.D.s are unusually lengthy and often require additional years of postdoctoral training, yet after completion those with such degrees experience labor market demand and remuneration that are relatively low.
Labor markets for scientists and engineers also differ geographically. Employer demand is far higher in a few hothouse metropolitan areas than in the rest of the country, especially during boom periods. Moreover recruitment of domestic professionals to these regions may be more difficult than in others when would-be hires discover that the remuneration employers are offering does not come close to compensating for far higher housing and other costs. According to the most recent data from the National Association of Realtors, Silicon Valley (metro San Jose) has the highest median house prices in the country, at $775,000—nearly four times higher than the national median.
Far from offering expanding attractive career opportunities, it seems that many, but not all, science and engineering careers are headed in the opposite direction: unstable careers, slow-growing wages, and high risk of jobs moving offshore or being filled by temporary workers from abroad. Recent science Ph.D.s often need to undertake three or more additional years in low-paid and temporary “postdoctoral” positions, but even then only a minority have realistic prospects of landing a coveted tenure-track academic position.
Among college-educated information technology workers under age 30, temporary workers from abroad constitute a large majority. Even in electrical and electronic engineering—an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad--U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002. Unemployment rates for electrical engineers rose to a surprisingly high 4.8 percent in 2013.
Claims of workforce shortages in science and engineering are hardly new. Indeed there have been no fewer than five “rounds” of “alarm/boom/bust” cycles since World War II. Each lasted about 10 to 15 years, and was initiated by alarms of “shortages,” followed by policies to increase the supply of scientists and engineers. Unfortunately most were followed by painful busts—mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and funding cuts that inflicted severe damage to careers of both mature professionals and the booming numbers of emerging graduates, while also discouraging new entrants to these fields.
- Round one from the decade immediately following World War II, waning a decade later.
- Round two following the Sputnik launches in 1957 but waning sharply by the late 1960s, leading to a bust of serious magnitude in the 1970s.
- Round three from the 1980s Reagan defense buildup, alarming Federal reports such as “A Nation at Risk” (1983), and new Federal funding for the “war on cancer.” Most of these had waned by the late 1980s, contributing to an ensuing bust in the early 1990s.
- Round four from the mid-1990s, driven by concurrent booms in several high-tech industries (e.g. information technology, internet, telecommunications, biotech), followed by concurrent busts beginning around 2001.
- Round five from the rapid doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget between 1998 and 2003, followed by a bust when subsequent funding flattened.
One thing we might reasonably conclude is that over the past six decades there has been no shortage of shortage claims. But what about the present and foreseeable future?
Since 2005 a series of influential reports have been produced by respected organizations and individuals, once again pointing to alarming current (or more commonly “looming”) shortages due to failing K-12 education. Three such reports were published in 2005 alone, by the Council on Competitiveness, by a special committee appointed by the National Research Council, and by a group of 15 business and technology organizations. Were these the opening salvos of the “alarm” stage of another 10-15 year cycle of alarm/boom/bust, the sixth such cycle since World War II? A deep recession with high unemployment has intervened, and in any case we would not be able to know for sure until another 5 or more years have passed.
These publications report correctly that the average performance of American K-12 students is middling in international testing. These data also show that this average performance results from large numbers of both high-performing and low-performing US students. The average national scores reflect both ends of the scale, yet there continues to be a large pool of top science and math students in the U.S. OECD data on “high-performing” students suggests that the U.S. produces about 33 percent of the world total in this category in the sciences, though only about 14 percent in mathematics.
No one should conclude from this that American K-12 science and math education does not need major improvement. Emphatically to the contrary: Every high school graduate should be competent in science and mathematics—essential to success in almost any 21st century occupation and to informed citizenship as well. But there is a big disconnect between this broad educational imperative and the numerically limited scope of the science and engineering workforce.
Editorial writers in respected publications continue to assert that American student interest in these fields is low and declining. Yet according to a recent report from ACT, the college admissions testing service, “student interest in STEM [Science,Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] is high overall,” characteristic of some 48 percent of high school graduates tested in 2013. American high-school students are taking more math and science courses than ever before. Meanwhile UCLA’s respected annual surveys of entering college freshmen show that over the past several years nearly 40 percent have been reporting intentions to major in a STEM subject, not only a large fraction but also a substantial increase from past decades—this percentage was about 32 to 33 percent from 1995 to 2007.
Some of these students do change their minds and complete their degrees in different fields, but others shift into science and engineering majors. As noted earlier, the outcome is that the numbers of science and engineering graduates is at least double those being hired into such occupations each year.
The evidence all points to high levels of student interest, high-performance levels among the students most likely to pursue majors and careers in science and engineering, and large numbers of graduates in these fields.
Ironically the vigorous claims of shortages concern occupations in science and engineering, yet manage to ignore or reject most of the science-based evidence on the subject. The repeated past cycles of “alarm/boom/bust” have misallocated public and private resources by periodically expanding higher education in science and engineering beyond levels for which there were attractive career opportunities. In so doing they produced large unintended costs for those talented students who devoted many years of advanced education to prepare for careers that turned out to be unattractive by the time they graduated, or who later experienced massive layoffs in mid-career with few prospects to be rehired.
Recent forecasts of looming shortages of scientists and engineers may prove to be self-fulfilling prophecies if they result in further declines in the attractiveness of science and engineering careers for talented American students.
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Who is MOVING FORWARD all this worst in world history education format in US? It is enfolded in RACE TO TOP----COMMONER CORE-----installed during OBAMA era with CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS partnered with BUSH neo-cons----not able to do all this without our state GOVERNORS and state assemblies passing these education policies AND without our city/county councils and SCHOOL BOARDS pushing these education reform policies under the guise of needing all that global corporate funding simply to rebuild community public schools.
We have always had plenty of FEDERAL funding to build and maintain our public schools----we especially have those education funds NOW after these few decades of ROBBER BARON fraud of trillions of dollars needing to come back to our US cities and counties.
Here in Baltimore those frauds were driven by global banking BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION-----GREATER BALTIMORE COMMITTEE----GLOBAL HEDGE FUND CORPORATION JOHNS HOPKINS. Lots of overseas global corporate campuses built with our US Federal public school funding these few decades.
Placing an emphasis for our US 99% of female students on STEM when we KNOW MOVING FORWARD has goals of taking women out of workforce competition for the most part-----is CYNICAL.
BUT GLOBAL BANKING 5% FREEMASON/GREEK CLINTON/OBAMA ARE BEING SO ----'LEFT' SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE FOR WOMEN----OH, REALLY????
2 major investments support STEM education
By Laura Ascione, Managing Editor, Content Services, @eSN_Laura
August 9th, 2018
Most future jobs will involve STEM, and efforts at the K-12 level can help fill the future STEM pipeline
Schools may be out for summer, but STEM education efforts and investments are going strong.
STEM investments are critical for a number of reasons. First, many of the jobs today’s K-12 students will hold in the future don’t exist yet, and nearly all of them are predicted to require solid STEM skills. Second, there are large gender and racial gaps in the STEM workplace. These gaps start as early as middle school, when girls and minorities stop engaging with STEM lessons and extra-curricular activities.
Some educators seem to have it figured out, and they’re doing their part to fill the STEM pipeline with engaging lessons that grab students’ attention with real-world relevance. But in order to do this consistently, broad-scale investments, including funding, time, and advocacy, are needed.
Here’s the latest:
Carnegie Science Center educators have developed a STEM curriculum with Girl Up designed to inspire participants in Girl Up’s 2,200 clubs in 103 countries to consider careers in STEM fields.
The curriculum is part of a program supported by BNY Mellon to encourage Girl Up participants to consider STEM careers, introduce them to female STEM role models, and educate them on applying STEM solutions to real-world problems. It is the first large-scale project Girl Up has undertaken to involve its young leaders in STEM, and the goal of the program is to educate, inspire, and engage girls in STEM for social good. The curriculum developed by the Science Center will introduce girls to design thinking, the scientific method, and problem-solving skills fundamental to STEM and other fields. Girl Up leaders seek to reduce the gender gap in STEM fields, where men are more likely to pursue careers.
“The gender gap in STEM starts early, with many girls not being encouraged to pursue STEM careers. Girl Up’s partnership with BNY Mellon and Carnegie Science Center helps bridge that gap with an innovative approach that focuses on human-centered design thinking, while connecting girls to how STEM can be used to make a difference in the world,” says Anna Blue, Girl Up executive director.
The Girl Up STEM curriculum includes 10 activities that girls will be able to participate in with their Clubs. Once they complete the activities, they can participate in a STEM challenge for social good. Also, STEM boot camps that will take place this fall around the nation will include talks by local female STEM leaders who will encourage the girls to get involved in STEM in their communities. Girls will participate in hands-on skills-based training that provides STEM solutions for issues taking place in their communities.
Ann Metzger, the Henry Buhl, Jr., co-director of Carnegie Science Center, says developing this curriculum fits in with the Science Center’s efforts to increase the number of women pursuing STEM jobs. “We are gratified and honored that Girl Up chose us to participate in this important project,” Metzger says. “Girl Up has a proven record in providing leadership training for girls, and we are excited that its future programming will strengthen girls’ STEM skills. This will give girls more tools they can use to improve their futures and the futures of their communities.”
In other news, Microsoft Philanthropies announced a new partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in which Microsoft will provide $2 million over three years to help CSTA build a stronger community to better serve computer science teachers.
“We’re thrilled that students of all ages are discovering the exciting–and critical–field of computer science. From the Hour of Code, to Minecraft Education, and even Advanced Placement Computer Sciences courses, participation rates are expanding,” says Mary Snapp, corporate vice president and lead for Microsoft Philanthropies, in a LinkedIn post. “This surge of student interest, combined with the premium our economy places on technology skill of all kinds, requires us to do all we can to ensure every student has access to computer science courses. And it all starts with our teachers.”
Microsoft Philanthropies also focuses on computer science education through its Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS) program, which pairs technology-industry volunteers with classroom teachers to team-teach computer science in 350 U.S. high schools.
“While technology can be a powerful learning tool, nothing can replace the expertise, guidance, and encouragement that teachers provide to students each day of the school year,” Snapp writes. “I remember my own favorite teachers who helped me see a world beyond the rural town in which I grew up. I would guess that nearly everyone has a similar story. We thank our teachers and we hope that this investment in computer science teachers, through CSTA, empowers more educators to do what they do best: make a positive difference in the lives of students.”
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NO ONE is a bigger raging global banking 5% freemason/Greek player MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD COMMONER CORE RACE TO TOP knowing the goal will kill 99% of US and global citizens' ability to have that strong, first world, developed nation PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY that made Americans BEST IN WORLD in education attainment-----then these two FAKE 'LEFT' POPULIST players. Sanders is simply a Clinton neo-liberal morphing into far-right wing LIBERTARIAN MARXISM pretending OUR REVOLUTION is populist for our US 99% when it is for global 1% only-----and AFT WEINGARTEN has been raging NEO-LIBERAL EDUCATION partnered with Bill and Hillary---Bill Gates MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD.
We discuss often why these education policies are FAKE NEWS.
'• Maintaining federal support for afterschool programs provided through the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program.
• The inclusion of wrap-around support services like health, mental health, nutrition and family supports'.
So, our choices in US politics are BAD whether voting right wing REPUBLICAN----our left wing DEMOCRAT and even our third and fourth parties are stacked with global banking 5% farm team players.
TO STOP MOVING FORWARD OUR US 99% BLACK, WHITE, AND BROWN MUST COME TOGETHER VS GLOBAL 1% WITH ROLLING PEACEFUL PROTESTS IN ALL US CITIES DEEMED US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES-----LET'S GET RID OF THESE GLOBAL BANKING PLAYER POLS BY DANCING IN THE STREET IN PROTEST.
Sanders making WEINGARTNEN a champion for our US 99% in education ---THAT IS AN INSULT to both teachers and students.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: Teachers Are Part of the 'Political Revolution'
By Madeline Will on July 15, 2018 1:07 PM
Pittsburgh, Penn.
Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke to a receptive crowd here at the American Federation of Teachers' biennial convention, saying there was a political revolution "sweeping across this country."
Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, condemned many of the president's actions and praised recent activism among workers, including the teacher strikes and protests in about six states this spring. He spoke of a changing tide among public opinion for "radical" ideas, such as tuition-free college education. That policy proposal was part of his campaign for president in 2016.
"The American people are going to make Donald Trump a one-term president," he said to huge applause. "We intend in the 2018 midterm elections to ... take back the House and the Senate."
Sanders, who ran against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary presidential election, is widely expected to run for president in 2020, though he has not announced his candidacy. A New York Times article published today looked at how both Warren and Sanders were preparing for a 2020 campaign, along with a slew of other hopefuls. (Warren addressed delegates at the AFT convention yesterday, and Clinton spoke on the opening day of the conference.)
In his speech, Sanders criticized wealth inequality, saying that the "top 25 hedge-fund managers of Wall Street make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in this country combined."
He also slammed Trump for his social policies, including the child-separation policy at the U.S.-Mexican border.
"I know every day, you tell your students, you say to your kids: Tell the truth," Sanders said. "You say to your kids: Don't be bullies. And what kind of terrible example is he setting to the children of this country?"
Sanders, who pledged to fight against Trump's nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, also criticized many of the Supreme Court's decisions, including the recent decision that prohibited "agency" or "fair share" fees that unions in 22 states had been charging to nonmembers to cover the cost of collective bargaining.
"They have recently given us the disastrous Janus decision," Sanders said to boos. "Well, you know, sometimes decisions and actions have unintended consequences, and I have a feeling that those who thought that the Janus decision would hurt the trade unions in this country may be in for a big surprise. It may end up being one of those decisions that helps us rebuild the trade union movement in America."
That line generated a standing ovation among the crowd, as did several other lines throughout his speech. Delegates chanted, "Bernie, Bernie," at the end of his speech. In 2016, the AFT and the other major national teacher's union, the National Education Association, both endorsed Clinton over Sanders—a controversial decision among the delegates, many of whom favored Sanders. Today, AFT President Randi Weingarten said Sanders has "inspired an entire generation" and added that many people have "felt the Bern more and more over those past two years ... including myself."
Sanders concluded his speech by saying, "We are not going back, we are going forward."
INDEED, BERNIE----YOUR REVOLUTION IS MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD FOR ONLY THE GLOBAL 1%.
"As part of this political revolution, teachers are standing up and leading the fight for education reform," he said. "Who would have thought that in West Virginia or Kentucky, in Oklahoma, teachers are demanding decent education for our kids and are taking on right-wing political establishments? Thank you, teachers."
Sanders also praised a wave of progressive candidates who are running in the 2018 midterm elections, including Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City. (Sanders will soon head to Kansas with Ocasio-Cortez to campaign for other Democratic congressional candidates, according to the Washington Post.)
In fact, after Sanders' speech, two campaigning Democrats delivered remarks, as well: Rep. Conor Lamb, from Pennsylvania, and Randy Bryce, who is running for retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan's seat in Wisconsin. Both candidates, but particularly Bryce, a former union activist, were warmly received by the crowd.
"Our job now as is never before is to stand up, fight back, and create the nation we can become," Sanders concluded to the cheering educators.
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