Looks like there are 3 graduates in STEM for every 2 jobs in the market. Employers also seem to be hell-bent on importing cheaper STEM graduates from foreign countries.
Solution - default on our debt to these countries since our government and employers prefer foreigners over their own citizens. It's the least we can do and it's actually economically justified.
In the meantime it looks like the trades and minimalism is the route to go for most.
28 comments:
The trades are being overrun by Mexicans. This is a soft war where only <5% of the natives faces extinction. I figured STEM was dead or dying based on the big picture and my experience. You're right on, but I would recommend gub welfair, mooching, etc. You recommend the same, just not here. All hard work will be punished. No good deed will go unpunished by the elite. The gravy train exit strategy is conquest, population reduction, and work camps, virtual or real.
Here in fly-over land our (few) STEM graduates get snapped up quickly. In my little corner of the world I don't know of a single STEM student in the last thirty years that didn't get a STEM job pretty much right after graduation.
I don't think there numbers are too good because by counting B.S. M.S. and PHD's the will have some overlap. for example everyone with a master's degree will have a bachelors and some with a PHD will have both.
I'm not sure that a CS degree will be seen as more valuable to an employer than, say, a Cisco CCNA. An Associates + CCNA is probably half the cost of a BS/CS.
May be more valuable, too. Employers can't get enough people to keep the routers routing and the firewalls firewalling. Most don't give a damn how much you know about compiler theory.
This is pretty much where I am now. Sucks, but I've got no choice now but to try to make the best of it.
If I could do it over though... no way would I have gone to college. Huge waste of time and money.
lol Since when has IT counted as STEM?
IT's modern day plumbing & pays alot less then regular plumbing ...
American IT programmers should just form their own private business's & let the larger corporations rot from all the incompetent immigrant IT programmers
This is one thing that I do not understand about "The Austrian School", they tell people that they should "produce more than they consume" and go get a "good degree" such as a STEM at the same time these Libertarians want to abolish borders and have complete free trade. When the young American can't get a job because of cheap third-world labor and is racked in debt he is accused of being a "freeloader". No wonder young people are pissed off.
Most IT jobs are code monkeys.
Not all libertarians support open borders.
The best degrees are trades and medicineh.
You also forget that most STEM companies have a majority of male workers and, as a result, keep hiring female graduates over male ones in order to balance the gender numbers.
Trouble is that, since the women don't stick around as long (maternity leave and never come back or don't like the hours/work) they are perpetually hiring women over men, leaving male graduates jobless and experienceless.
I personally know four male Elec Engineers the ended up in other sectors because hiring women was top priority, but every one of the female WE'd I know got their pick of companies and salaries to boot.
My own employer favours female interns in undergraduate work experience too: 9 out of 10 of our last group of 3 months work experience went to women on fields where 80-90% of grads are men.
I feel sorry for the next generation of men more and more every day...
What blows me away is the amount of young people voting progressive and blowing any chance they have of the American dream.
Roy, you assume that we have a free labor market. We don't. Unemployment is high because of various policies that price people out of the market (Obamacare for example) and make it difficult for labor to start their own firms or craft new working arrangements. Your intuitions mislead you--in a less regulated market, employers would be willing to put you to work. But the expected costs are too high.
Interesting article, but they missed one big point. If an H1B visa is dependent on continued employment, then that employee is now a slave to their company. Don't wanna work 12 hour days with no end in sight? No problem. Feel free to leave, then get on the next boat back to your country or origin.
Call it motivation that a lazy American like me no longer has.
building maintenace, mechanics, welding. i will being allowing the gov't to pay for these 3 trade schools after i graduate.
minimalism......you DO have the book i lent you, right?
MackPUA wrote: "lol Since when has IT counted as STEM?"
It's the 'T' in "STEM."
Roy:
What the hell are you reading? The Austrian School is a school of economic thought that has a major hard-on for its "wertfrei," or value-free, approach to economics. The Austrian School of thought never says anything like "You should get a STEM degree." You seem to be confusing stuff that an Austrian has said with Austrian doctrine. If Rothbard and Mises preferred hamburgers over cheeseburgers, would you say that the Austrian School says you should eat hamburgers instead? Cripes.
@MackPUA
It's what most STEMs end up doing. I have many friends with Chemical, Mechanical, and Electrical Engineering degrees. Most of them work on computers in one way or another.
As well, it's one of the few quantitative degrees one can realistically complete part time. Engineering programs that allow you to work full time while studying part time are almost unheard of.
Oh yeah, and what Pax said
The only sector that has the market cornered on US citizens in technology is in Defense where a US citizenship is a perquisite and an easy background check is required to get a security clearance.
Oh great!
I can only hope that the situation for STEM improves in the future and that I somehow get lucky. Fuck college period. There, I said it.
I'm amazed at how there aren't more people worried about this.
@Roberto Severino
I am not sure if it ends any time soon. I am one of those cheap engineers working for US company which offshored some of their business (except defence). Would you be willing to work for approx. 17k USD per year after taxes?
If USD debases other currencies will follow, so the wage disparity is not going to end so easily.
At my workplace, a state agency, I see masses of South Asians, mostly men, doing number-crunching and IT. Out of, say, 3000 workers, maybe 500 are probably on H-1B visas. How can the powers that be possibly justify this with the level of unemployment among Americans? And this is an outfit that doesn't have to make a profit and wouldn't even know what one looked like. Democracy in action!
I taught engineering for 37 years before retiring in 2007.
The oversupply of STEM graduates goes back at least 50 years. In some engineering disciplines (mainly civil) as many as half the BS graduates go on to something other than engineering. The oversupply of PhDs is extreme. At nearly every graduate program at least half the PhD candidates are foreigners, and in most the fraction approaches 3/4. Almost all of these go home. If they all stayed, unemployment among PhDs would be extreme.
The fact is that STEM programs, especially the graduate level programs, principally benefit the schools. PhD candidates in particular provide schools with cheap, highly skilled labor.
Being a code-monkey has nothing to do with technology
Programmers are no better then feminist liberal art degree's
IF they want to make serious cash, learn to program pcb's & REAL pedal to the metal circuit design & electrical engineering
Jerking off on your keyboard in java is almost as useful as a degree in watching porn ... or even womens flower arranging
I got out of STEM years ago. It was obvious to me, way back in the late 1980's, that Molecular Biology was no place to be unless you liked being poor. Perpetual post-docs, long hours, being one of 400 applicants for a tenure-track job... sorry, wasn't interested, and I had at least two offers for an all-expense-paid PhD.
The reason the job market was so bad (and is even worse today) was supply vs. demand, with supply being way over-inflated by foreign students. Some of them were good at what they did. Most were just cheap.
The H1-B program was created specifically in order to lower salaries. Now it's hitting IT; soon it will be Nursing and Engineering. MD's have ObamaCare to deal with, and Bio and Chemistry are long gone as viable careers. Obammy effectively killed the Manned Space Program, so there's a whole bunch of Aerospace jobs we can wave goodbye to. I frankly don't know if there are any STEM careers at all worth persuing.
"The jobs of the future don't require a college degree"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2013/05/07/the-jobs-of-the-future-dont-require-a-college-degree/
If you noticed, those nurses that died in the limo fire were all immigrants.
@MackPUA
There are not nearly enough of those "serious cash" jobs to employee even the current number of domestic Engineering degrees. I have a friend who has a Masters in Aeronautical Engineering who programs websites in Java for a living. Drives a beemer and just bought a very nice condo. Pretty nice for a code monkey.
Your criticism is not constructive or even accurate.
I'm starting to question your advice of "Study STEM, be good at it, an you'll always have a job!"
I majored in Computer Science and Math, and now I can't find any job at all. All my experience is in programming languages that are 1 generation behind, and I can't find anyone willing to hire me to program in a newer language. I can learn them, and have been reading and experimenting, but nobody will consider me.
They say "We want 5 years of experience in X. You don't have experience in X. Therefore, we won't consider you." Or "If we're going to hire someone who doesn't know X already, we'd rather hire a recent college graduate than you."
What's the point of studying STEM if you're considered washed up at 40? What's the point of STEM if your experience loses its market value every few years?
This is just Galt's Gulch under construction, as it has been for thirty years. Nobody is immune. Eventually, once the unions have been all busted, hiring will pick up again.
Only a jackass learns pcb & circuitry design & hardware engineering to join a shitty 24/7 corporation
Go form your own company
A code monkey, programming java will always be an underpaid, code monkey
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