http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2701The Myth of STEM Labor Shortages
By Jay Schalin
Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
May 31, 2012
Everybody knows that the best way to get ahead today is to get a college degree. Even better is to major in one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects, where the bulk of the jobs of the present and future lie. Politicians, business leaders, and academics all herald the high demand for scientists and engineers.
But they are, for the most part, wrong. The real facts suggest that, in many STEM specialties, there is a labor glut, not a shortage.
That is not to say that the STEM subjects aren’t worthy of study—there are many reasons to do so. And if a talented young person really wants a job in a STEM field, he or she can eventually get one, with a little perseverance.
But there is no urgent need for STEM graduates, at least not in a general sense.
The roots of STEM labor gluts go back over half a century, according to Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and a leading authority on this topic. Sputnik, the 1957 Soviet missile launch, created a national concern that we were falling behind in the race for technical superiority. Talk of labor shortages in science and engineering arose, and talk led to action. Beryl Lieff Benderly, a journalist who writes about employment for scientists for Science magazine and other publications, described the result of the national response to Sputnik: “Federal money swiftly poured into science and engineering scholarships and so successfully attracted students that, by the early 1970s, the market for young scientists was flooded.”
The flood grew in the 1980s, after the National Science Foundation (NSF) warned of imminent shortages of scientists. Eventually, the NSF’s predictions turned out to be so off-base that the agency was subjected to an investigation by a House subcommittee in 1995, during which NSF director Neal Lane flatly stated, “there really was no basis to predict a shortage,” according to Teitelbaum and Benderly. (Lane was not involved with the NSF at the time of shortage prediction).
More recently, a PhD. in electrical engineering who follows labor trends in his specialty, Dan Donahoe, wrote for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) magazine that there has been a “myth of a qualified labor shortage” in his field for a long time. He says that the myth started in the late 1980s, and that the myth continues despite expansion and contraction of the labor market.
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There is demand for certain subsets of STEM majors, for example petroleum engineers, as the article mentions, and one should look at starting salaries to identify those majors. But the notion of a general STEM shortage is a myth.
