Posted on 12/22/2014 8:25:08 AM PST by Academiadotorg
As we have reported, contrary to current wisdom, studies consistently show that there are more science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors than there are STEM jobs. Nevertheless, those with a vested interest in perpetuating the legend not only still claim that there is a STEM major shortage but declare that women are uniquely qualified to fill it.
Recently, here in Washington, D.C., at George Washington University, Linda Rosen, CEO of Change the Equation (an organization geared toward more STEM education at the pre-K12 level and above), said, “Employers…are having difficulty finding the STEM talent they need.” For example, she noted, “Four in ten applicants lack basic STEM literacy…and 40% lack STEM literacy (or post-secondary) education.”
“I completely missed all the messages that women aren’t good at math…I missed all those messages because I loved it.” Rosen said, “I was too energized but what I think of is the beauty of mathematics.”
Rosen said, “We can’t fill our workforce with white males” because they are a “diminishing population.” Instead, today’s working world “requires a very diverse group of people thinking about it and working on it,” which includes “female voices and also students of color.”
According to her, “the tech companies are being very courageous and are starting to release their data, but they have been showing…30% some up to 40% females.” However, she said these figures show that they are “not all in management level jobs.”
At the same event at which Rosen spoke, Russell Shirling, the Department of Education’s STEM Initiatives Executive Director, said, “We actually set up a STEM office for the first time in six months” and now the government has “over 60 programs where STEM is a primary or secondary goal [to] bring more minorities and women to STEM.” Their goal is to fix the issue of “lack of access to chemistry and physics” by “getting the quality STEM teachers out to the students.” Other aspects of his work include creating “more opportunities for STEM teachers to come into the workforce” and “teacher quality partnership level” coordination.
He said he hoped this would address the problem caused when only “50% [of children] have access to a calculus course…63% to physics.” Shilling said the lack of access to these courses leads to the “struggles that students have when they get to college.” It is not limited to the Department of Education, but goes “across the board” to agencies such as NASA, Homeland Security and Energy. In his words, this is the “part of the strategy we have is to coordinate across the agencies to get the most bang for our buck.”
He praised the value of video games in STEM learning, but admitted, “Games are not a panacea” and “really, it’s somewhere in between, potentially good tools if we design them correctly.” Shilling added, “I don’t think we design games very well right now” because they do not tell “stories and a narrative.” One of his emphases was to get “STEM electronic media out to the classroom” and to send “positive messages” to “really increase the engagement” at the student level. Shilling praised recent LEGO robot competitions, which he said was “one way to leverage games to get to some of the underserved areas of the country as well.”
Gary May, the Dean of College Engineering at Georgia Tech, was also at the event and suggested forming a “cluster of minority students in classes together” and study groups, as well as peer mentoring and “peer bridge programs.”
STEM isn't a myth - it is academic study of actual concepts, physical laws, and the reality of God's creation.
The real myths are feminism, diversity, and any major with the suffix "studies."
STEM programs have managed to avoid the idiocies that have plagued their brothers in the Liberal Arts because nobody who was willing to do the work necessary in these rigorous fields had any time or inclination to mess about in grievance mongering.
This, of course, must change.
Step one is to take all that hard work out of STEM programs, so everybody can participate. Fairness, y’know...
The local university by me has a ST&M program. Science, Technology and Mathematics. They can’t quite bring themselves to require the level of work it would take to have an accredited engineering program, so the E in their STEM program stands for “and”.
A prime example of this is in programming, detailed at Why Can't Programmers Program (worth reading). Upshot is that while there are many job candidates who have passed all the requisite courses, yet are incapable of (or take an inordinately long time to) write trivial programs. To screen out such ineptitude, a category of programming tasks/puzzles called "FizzBuzz problems" are often used: tasks which any developer should be able to do, easy to write in an interview, yet an amazing number of applicants can't do. Much controversy exists around these screening problems, but probably because of the cognitive dissonance invoked by so many STEM graduates being unable to do something so basic.
They’re making the flawed assumption that any graduate with the requisite degree is capable of doing the work.
That may be true in the liberal arts - given that there’s no actual work being done. But in the STEM fields, a great many graduates simply can’t do the work.
No, the myth is that there’s a shortage of people with degrees in STEM fields. They’ve been claiming there is a shortage, there’s going to be a shortage, etc. for decades with no actual evidence, and using it as an excuse to divert NSF money from supporting actual basic scientific research into programs run by politically-correct education types rather than actual scientists.
Good luck with that with Common Core.
Ah ha ha
Aside from my dear ex-girlfriend - blonde, blue eyed, naturally gifted geometrically - there about 2 or 3 (at most) women in the average engineering school class 30 some years ago.
Anyone could register. Anyone could attend. All you had to do was pass the rerequisites and take the tests.
Oddly...few college aged girls wanted to do that. Over in the Education College, they were getting credit for making paper dolls. Great deal! Get a crap degree, get a government job, join the union, summer’s off...yer set.
Here’s a little prediction: you wont be seeing Ms. Lovely Hair trying to find particular solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations at 3 AM in the Engineering library 3 days before the mid terms.
Been there, done that.
But if they really want to be in anything besides website “programming”, thats what it takes.
Maybe the guys are just used to masochism and denial....
Exactly! For every one qualified American candidate I would see at my employer, there would be 100 from somewhere else. My office building now looks like downtown Beijing.There may be more STEM majors than jobs, but there may be more jobs than _qualified_ applicants.
A prime example of this is in programming, detailed at Why Can't Programmers Program (worth reading). Upshot is that while there are many job candidates who have passed all the requisite courses, yet are incapable of (or take an inordinately long time to) write trivial programs. To screen out such ineptitude, a category of programming tasks/puzzles called "FizzBuzz problems" are often used: tasks which any developer should be able to do, easy to write in an interview, yet an amazing number of applicants can't do. Much controversy exists around these screening problems, but probably because of the cognitive dissonance invoked by so many STEM graduates being unable to do something so basic.
Only Western man has fully grasped and developed science and technology. Once such men stop reproducing their kind and are driven from learning and practicing in such fields the world will, over the centuries, sink back into the stone age.
Yes - move students away from hard disciplines where they can actually become employed and self supporting.
This is because we don’t have enough students to support important programs like Womyns Studies, Black History, LGBT Studies, Hispanic studies, Queer Musicology, Art History and Trans-Gender Interior Design.
I teach accounting and business computing. While not technically STEM, like STEM, they are useful skills that you can use in the workforce.
A relatively small percentage of students should be in STEM majors because few have the brains and study habits to be successful.
Admitted racism against crackuhs and Asians completely fine. Diversity at any cost. Companies that don’t hire the best and brightest, regardless of gender or race, will fail and I celebrate that.
At least some of the programs were run by supervisors who had the attitude that the academics didn't have to be all that rigorous because the students would teach themselves concepts they hadn't learned when they came up in projects.
On the other hand, the kids sure could put a presentation together.
I heard a rumor from my son, who I guess is a STEM guy, he’s majoring in astronautical engineering that they are trying to add an A to STEM.
Science, Technology, Engineering ART and Mathematics.
Maybe that will attract more girls.
With more girls it will be STEAM.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.”
Good quote though a little too general. Spengler pointed out it was Western man who really grasped science and technology. As you state progress was made by a very few even among Western men.
I would not disagree. There have been some advances from other cultures, such as Chinese gunpowder and the Arabic zero, that have helped, but it was the western culture that used it to its fullest.
I would argue that it was the Judeo-Christian belief that there is a God of order, and that the laws of His universe can be known that prompted western man’s progress in science and technology.
Art art blew a fart and blew the whole stem Machine apart
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