From Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell. It covers a lot of ground, but I was struck by the education/employment disconnect.
[1] For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.
[2] 36 percent of IT workers do not hold a college degree at all.
[3] The annual number of computer science graduates doubled between 1998 and 2004, and is currently over 50 percent higher than its 1998 level.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who focuses on other results.
My questions:
[1] What are the other 50 percent of STEM grads doing? How many are going to grad school? How many are flipping burgers? If the latter, are their degrees maybe not so impressive, for whatever reason?
[2] What counts as an IT worker? The security guard at Google? Or only people who do technical work?
[3] Does everyone agree on this? Using a different endpoint, Alex Tabarrok wrote,
we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago!
Assuming consistent measurement between Alex and these authors, we must have had a huge drop in computer science degrees between 1985 and 1998. Note that the drop from 2004 to today seems to be large, also.
[1] Using their STEM education in a non STEM job, for the most part. Lots of engineers in the finance field these days. I work in the legal field in a position that is probably not listed as a STEM position, but I couldn’t do it without a STEM education.
I have a math/biochem degree and work in economic consulting. It’s partially because the pay is better, but there are very few science jobs attainable without a PhD. I have friends who completed fairly rigorous physics and chemistry degrees but ended up with low-paying business jobs.
Between Wall Street, other finance, management consulting, and grad school you could account for the missing 50%.
I quit grad school. It’s basically indentured servitude and it lasts years and years. It’s paying your dues in order to… maybe not be employable. PhDs in bad times are liabilities — I remember people in the 90s leaving them off their resumes because no one would hire someone too overqualified.
I quit a PhD program in biophysics and went to silicon valley. My pay as an intern for a job I had no credentials for (technical writing) was higher than I could get with my BS in science. And it allowed me to sometimes telecommute, sit down, eat at my desk, and not get burned by acid or carcinogens. 😉
I miss science, but it’s a very hard job, made worse by the “rules” you must follow in order to do it.
Does it make sense to take someone with a degree in X, working in a field that doesn’t seem to be related to X, and classify them as some kind of failure purely for that reason?
I have a degree in Economics and I work as a software engineer, and I make a good sight more money than your average Econ BA doing it.
Also it’s hard to reconcile their claim that STEM majors are having a hard time finding jobs with the very small observed unemployment rates for STEM degree holders. Or to reconcile the claim that there are plenty of these folks ready to do jobs when it’s SO. DAMN. HARD. to hire a decent engineer. Just because you have a degree doesn’t make you useful.
Probably best to start prizing apart STEM into computers/software, engineering, and science. The three will often have different paths.
As for “what are the other 50% doing?” – well, software people often end up in business positions (sometimes in software companies) or management positions. They also create a lot of startups. So do you count somebody who spends 100% of their time managing other people, or raising money for their startup, as “stem” or as “management/founder?”.
You also need to divide software into “engineers” and “it/admin” people. The first group writes new code and often gets paid a lot by people like Microsoft or Google. The second group keeps the wheels on and the water running, and may be paid poorly or very very well, depending on lots of things.
Computer science HAS taken big dives at various points. It seems to run hot, then people discover it’s actually about computers and is really hard, so it runs cold for a wild, then swings back when people realize the starting pay for a good BS in comp sci is now often well clear of the starting pay of a lawyer or doctor.
And finally (as has been discussed here before) @Noah Yetter “Just because you have a degree doesn’t make you useful.” I noted elsewhere that the ratio of best to worst in comp. sci. types is huge. Others claim the same is true of economists, etc. What bearing does that have on these statistics?
I’ve been making these arguments against college education and especially STEM for some time now. This WSJ article from a couple years back notes that STEM majors who end up in managerial and professional positions make 30% more than those who stay in a STEM career. It also mentions another study which found that only a third of science and engineering majors stay in those fields, an even higher attrition rate.
Doubt they’re counting Google’s security guards as IT workers, that number jibes with others I’ve seen, for example, this page that references a 2002 survey that found that 35% of computer programmers didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. Anecdotally, there are a lot of self-taught programmers who do very well. Even the ones who went to college often start programming in middle school and just get the degree as a backup, if they don’t drop out like Bill Gates did. 😉
The whole emphasis on college and particularly STEM, which even Tabarrok falls for, is highly misguided. Steve Jobs dropped out of a non-STEM degree program, didn’t stop him from building the largest computer company on the planet. Okay, not everybody is Jobs, but neither do most people have the aptitude for technical work. Could be we had so many CS grads in the ’80s because more people were pushed into it, which perhaps happens less now. The great thing about the death of the college in the coming decades is that people will be more able to experiment and evolve towards what suits them best, rather than the ridiculous system we have in place today.
As for all those performing arts, communications, and psychology grads that Alex mentions, the ones who apply themselves will have no problem in the information age we are entering, while those who just coasted along to an easy degree would have done badly no matter what.
[2] 36 percent of IT workers do not hold a college degree at all.
I’m a web developer, with no degree and that matches my own experience, in fact some of the best programmers are those with no degree. Sys Admins seem to me to be slightly more likely to be uncredentialed than programmers.
A friend who grew up in India said only a fraction (1/4?) of the large number of engineering students that graduate from Indian colleges are any good. That may explain some of the stats, but some of it probably has to do with needing more “training”, say in graduate school. From experience, I wasn’t too employable with only an undergraduate in physics. Maybe a dual major with electrical engineering would have helped my job prospects. For computational physics, graduate school did the trick for me, as a method to signal companies that I could do this kind of work. I know others who are more self taught and do great work. YMMV.
When interviewing new computer science graduates for jobs writing software, a great many of them, many from prestigious universities, could not write software.
[2] is consistent with my experience. I’m a Director in IT that entered the field without a degree. In fact 5 and 10 years ago you would have found degree rates much lower. And I’m talking about a major metro area, (Chicago), so this isn’t a backwater exception.
You should also notice that they mention degree rates not STEM degree rates. I continue to be surprised by the variety of degrees in my field. My boss is a communications major, colleagues with music, English and economics degrees. I have a liberal arts degree.
I have thought a lot about this and have some theories.
1. In the dot com boom IT needed bodies, we were hiring everyone that could spell computer (it’s how I got in). The entire field was desperate to get stuff done and quickly that there was a ton of hiring and dead weight wasnt staying for long. This taught us a bunch of valuable lessons. First, credentials didnt mean anything. Some of the best hires had no degree or training. Traditional interviewing just didnt work, you couldn’t ask what a candidate what they could do, they had to demonstrate that they were capable. This led to recruiters doing skill assessment tests and interviewers doing scenario based interviewing. Personally, I don’t even check to see if they have a degree, it simply doesn’t matter.
2. On the scale of normalcy, IT folks trend closer to the Aspbergers end of the spectrum. This leads to a bunch of people caring for less about the normal signals (what car you drive, what school you went to, what kind of degree do you have) and more emphasis on what you can actually accomplish. This, I think, leads to more acceptance of “unqualified” candidates mucking up the place.
3. Business doesn’t really get what we do, so we are outsiders in our own firm. As outcasts we are completely comfortable ignoring conventional wisdom.
4. There is a complete disconnect between what we do and what colleges teach. In my 15+ year career I have only once worked with someone that actual was doing computer science. It isn’t relevant in 99% of the IT organizations outside of Slicon Valley.
I agree with the comment above that sys admins tend to have degrees at a slightly lower rate than developers. Interestingly, sys admins tend to make more money than developers.