Wasted Education: How We Fail Our Graduates in STEM [video]

He seems to only be talking about tech jobs, which is actually on the sunnier side of the STEM job situation. I thought he was going to talk about how, most non-IT/CS STEM degree graduates won't find an industry position that makes use of their skills at all, beyond some very vacuous notion of being good at problem solving or technical writing. I think that's the real waste. When somebody spends their entirely early adulthood studying and practicing a scientific discipline, only to end up programming SAP applications afterwards.

I tell students thinking of getting into coding that "you gotta want it". If you love that work, great. If you don't, you're going to have a hard time of it. Not impossible, but maybe something peripheral like tech sales would be better, etc. Same reason I'd have a hard time being an accountant.

So it's just a author talking about his book where the central point is that we're "failing our STEM" majors because according to one figure as many as 70% of "STEM graduates" don't end up working in "STEM jobs".

I'm just generally not a fan of this kind of absolutist thinking.

"STEM" is a massive umbrella that encompasses dozens of fields, many of which might not have a robust undergraduate-to-employment pipeline the way that something like CompSci did until very recently. Lots of STEM undergraduate degrees are not by themselves that useful for employment, but generally are part of a track which includes postgraduate education.

It's not that crazy that some 18 year old might think they want to be an MD or PhD, but have changed their minds by the time they complete undergrad. Also lots of Science and Engineering departments at universities have degree plans which are coded as "Science" or "Engineering" degrees but are academically much less rigorous than other programs at the college. Graduates of these majors typically don't end up in jobs that would be coded as "STEM jobs" in official statistics.

So what's the takeaway? That often people end up in careers that differ from their education? Ok sure, but is a sensational title like "Wasted Education" warranted?

S,T,M isn't actually a path to a stable or lucrative career.

Engineering and Computer Science are, though.

We're in need of a new acronym.

Honestly? There is too much graduate. We need competent people, of course, but an army have more troops than officers, not the contrary. Most STEM paths are not STEM, are designed to create useful idiots [1] and chosen by people with zero attitude toward STEM simply because "that's the trend of the moment". As a result we have many with a piece of paper and not really competence good enough for almost anything to the point they fails to even understand their incompetence.

Having them in a path meaning adapting to them, as a result many talents simply loose interests/get frustrated by an environment not designed from them.

The triumph of the mediocrity kill evolution, and we see the results in general.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef...