bigpicture
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The STEM debate
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ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS IN THE PAST COUPLE OF YEARS, I’VE
had conversations with executives from material handling equipment
makers and integrators during which they’ve mentioned the number of
openings their companies have for engineers. I often hear of large companies having 100 or more open slots.
Another common topic these days across industries is that we’re producing far too few engineers to meet future demand. Observers point to
China and India, nations that purport to graduate by an order of magnitude many times more engineers than the U.S. does. That those numbers
are highly suspect is a topic for another time. The issue here is the widespread worry that we don’t have enough students pursuing degrees in the
STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—to ensure
our future competitiveness.
Yet a number of economists now argue that while
many employers see a dearth of STEM professionals,
the nation actually doesn’t have enough jobs for the
graduates we are producing. Paul Beaudry, an economist from the University of British Columbia, argued
in a paper he and colleagues published in January that
the demand for skilled workers in the U.S. began to
decline in about the year 2000—not coincidentally at
the time of the big dot-com bust.
Why the contradiction? If Beaudry and his co-authors are correct, the decline has been hidden from
view by the peculiar way it has played out. In their
paper, The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and
Cognitive Tasks, they wrote, “In response to this
demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by
lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers’ pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together.”
Or, as he recently said during an interview on the superb radio program
Marketplace, “I wouldn’t want to exaggerate—it’s not like everyone is
getting a barista job, but that’s exactly the feeling.” So the lack of good
jobs for the mostly highly trained STEM professionals plays out in under-or unemployment for those with the fewest skills.
This is important to material handling, logistics, and supply chain management. Jobs in these professions are becoming increasingly technical,
and the tools that support them are becoming increasingly complex. If the
next generation of potential STEM graduates perceives—accurately or
not—that job prospects in those areas aren’t promising and turn to management consulting or, heaven forfend, Wall Street, we have a problem.
