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Unread 01-04-2015, 10:46
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Re: Focus on STEM education only, good or bad?

Here is something to consider. Our view of our education system rests on some probably false assumptions that we just *know* are true. Such as the idea that we had a good education system and it is broken, or that your choice of major is hugely important in getting employment. I know a lot of people are blowing up at that last one, so I will address it first.

Yes, there are differences in the amount of money that people make based on majors chosen. But two factors need to be addressed. The first is that way too many of the surveys on how much people make by major are based on the starting salaries or the first three, five or ten years of a career. Biology majors consistently make the least money of any science majors in those years. Yet they tend to earn as much or more over the course of their careers as any others. Why is this? Because so many of them go to medical school. So they spend a lot of time after getting their degree working on getting another degree. So looking at salaries needs to be done very carefully. Another example: Philosophy majors have really high average lifetime earnings because so many of them because lawyers.

The second factor is that choice of major and choice of career are not the same thing, but they are closely related. Not everyone can have a job that they love. But most people can find a career that they can live with, if not love. My dad was an economics professor at Denison University. DU has a good econ department, and it was always the most or second most popular major. He had lots of students who majored in econ because they wanted to go into business. His advice was to take the econ, math and writing intensive classes they would need to get a job in business and major in something they enjoyed, because they would get better grades were more likely to get jobs they wanted as a result. (This was advice developed out of the evidence DU had from several decades of students.) If that subject they enjoyed was economics, great. But if it was something else, fine. There is a corollary to this advice as well. Majoring in something you don't like tends to lead to worse grades and worse outcomes. Plus he pointed out to them that if you wanted to really advance in business you needed to get an MBA, and once you do that your undergrad major choice was less important.

There are differences in unemployment statistics by major, and it is certainly easier to get a first job in engineering than in some other fields. But those differences are not nearly as big as some imagine. And if you control for other factors such as grades, desire/ability to relocate and family economic status the differences are smaller still. There are certain kinds of jobs that are very hard to come by, and some people really want those jobs so they set themselves up to have a difficult time. For example being a tenured faculty member at a college or university in just about any field is really difficult. Faculty members tend to hang on to their jobs for a long time and universities are hiring many, many more adjunct faculty members. Being any kind of published author is difficult. If you want to support yourself that way it is just about as hard as being an actor or an athlete. So you get a lot of people who want to pursue such careers and choose majors to do that. If you look at people who say they want to pursue careers in business and look at their choice of major, you don't see much difference between choice of major and employment in business. One recent study I read concluded that a foreign language major was the best choice if you wanted a career in business. Again this assumes that you know you want a career in business so you get the requisite technical and communications skills. These days if you really are just concerned with getting the big bucks, there is no contest. Be a math or physics major and go work on Wall Street.

Another part of all of the statistics about jobs and majors is that most of the surveys look at majors and jobs within "that field." I first noticed this when I looked at English majors and their unemployment stats. Which at first glance look really high. But I noticed that the total number of English majors was too low. Then I realized that all of the English majors who became lawyers and business execs were not counted in most of the studies. Side note, the reason you see so many philosophy and English majors (and history) in law is that being a lawyer is large about writing effectively.

Another thing to consider that a significant part of the shortage in STEM professionals is due to the fact that so many unfilled STEM job openings have relatively low pay. I have been teaching for 23 years. In my 20th year I got to the salary I walked away from as a programmer/data person. But I keep current enough (and occasionally consult) so I have a CV on a few sites. I get offers for interviews and jobs all them time. Almost always for way less money than I was making two decades ago. I know some head hunters, and they say that at least half of the companies who come to them to find employees are offering wages that make it pretty much impossible to get someone with the qualifications they want. So those companies make do with less qualified and/or temporary workers. This doesn't mean that there is not a genuine shortage of qualified people in many STEM fields, or that there are not good jobs in those fields. Just that the shortage is not quite as simple as it might seem.

As for the first point, I have gone on for a while and I don't want to rant too much. I will just say that we don't have an education system that used to work fine, broke and needs to be restored. We have an education system that used to be asked to do something different than it is being asked to do now. Specifically we are no longer trying to produce millions of people with the skills to work in a factory, because there are many fewer manufacturing jobs now, and they don't pay as well as they used to on the average. I am a teacher, and I firmly believe good schools are important, but they can't solve all of our problems. Most people think the drop out rate is higher now that it was "in the past." This isn't true. But it used to be possible to get a decent job even as a high school drop out, and to get a good, family supporting kind of job if you graduated from high school. Both of those eventualities are much less likely now. Even some ideas about who we do relative to other countries are pretty misleading. Once you control for poverty, and in particular concentrated poverty, the majority of differences between the U.S. and other countries go away. In fact, the majority of difference between almost any two countries goes away.

So in closing, these words of advice. If you want to be an art major, take some computer science classes. If you want to be an English major, take some statistics. If you want to be a computer science or engineering major, take some English or History classes and learn how to write effectively. Seriously, on that last one. If you want to advance in your career you need to be able to communicate effectively. And everyone benefits from studying things outside their comfort zone once in a while. It's just like practicing for a sport. If you are good with your right foot and not your left, you need to spend time practicing using your left.
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