Pressured into STEM fields?: IHE article

[polly_mer]

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/10/11/do-minority-and-other-students-feel-pressured-stem-fields-opinion

I agree the question we should be asking is: Do you, in fact, want a life in STEM?

I agree with the statements that are supported by quantitative evidence outlining the current situation.

I disagree strongly with many of the assertions that relate to recommendations and a very narrow focus on individual interests at the expense of community interests.  I currently spend my professional life on the front lines of national security and it's not a pretty picture on how many people can do the work for the amount of work that needs to be done, let alone whether those minimally qualified folks want to do the work and are willing to live where the work needs to be done. 

If anything, the way to change some of the system/culture is to just overwhelm with numbers of people who want different norms.  If "everyone" who is qualified to do the work insists on having a decent work-life balance, then the "suffering for science" culture will change.  However, that means having even more people who are qualified working on the team solving the problems and having even more reliance on teamwork, when we're already short-handed.  Scientific research doesn't tend to partition as easily into distributed parallel tasks the way that standard office work or manufacturing does.

I have noticed very different attitudes as I have passed through varying levels of eliteness and emphasis on cutting-edge, trail-blazing research versus sustained plodding.  Sustained plodding at an adequate funding tends to be much more amenable to flexibility for work-life balance and tends to not have the "suffering for science" culture.  When one has reasonable confidence that the protocol works and it's turning the crank to get data and analysis for set Q in year 10 of the N year program, then one is unlikely to need to regularly put in extra, extra hours to troubleshoot what went wrong this time to have any results for the next deadline to get funding renewed.  The wake-up-at-2-AM Eureka moment after banging one's head against the wall for days is much less likely to come because it's much less needed.


The elite trail-blazing research tends to be an all-in, research-is-everything experience, but that's in part the reality of needing to focus one's attention on all the new things to make progress in a reasonable timeline; splitting one's focus means dealing with the opportunity cost and slower progress.  Another part of the reality is how very, very good having that wake-up-at-2-AM Eureka moment feels after days/weeks of banging one's head against the wall.  The lows of all-in research are generally worth that shining moment when something works.  No other human experience I've had compares to that Eureka moment and one doesn't get those moments very often by working at half-speed. 

One worry in places where I frequent is how few people want to be professors chasing funding instead of finding ways to continue to be the mostly all-in scientist doing the work or transitioning to institutions where the professors focus on teaching.  Professors at the elite research institutions tend to have to transition to being project managers instead of spending their time doing the day-to-day science.  For people who are highly motivated to work long hours because of the frequent-enough Eureka moments, the necessary project management tasks can be very onerous, especially when one becomes the person working long hours at high stress doing only those project management tasks with almost no Eureka moments.

One generally doesn't get to be on the team doing the all-in research if one has always been a plodder and wants to continue to be a plodder instead of doing the sprint again this week to do whatever is necessary to get those necessary results for the next step that is time-sensitive and high priority.  Some parts of engineering are better with plodders; doing interesting research on the side of teaching or raising a family can certainly work out. 

However, working in the national security sector or other big applied science endeavor where the schedule to use the machines is set years in advance so the team's experiment next year is the culmination of 5-10 years of planning and background research after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and has to generate usable data is a very different set of circumstances than doing some basic research that is contributing to human knowledge as a good unto itself. 

We need both types of science, but we're currently really, really short on people doing the applied science and engineering in specific areas where we run the risk of not having a first-world society any more.  Refusing to engage with the human side of the whole world and the history of certain countries means having a blind spot that's result of far more relative privilege than being a white male in physics and astronomy in the US.

[Aster]

I have a personal theory that STEM is merely an extremely clever propaganda device concocted by anti-education politicians to reduce overall college funding. 

But I've been nuts before.

[polly_mer]

As I've written elsewhere, it's not STEM we need; we're short on the knowledge that depends on math.  We're not short in the areas classified as liberal arts.

[spork]

Comments on that article are interesting.

Law school was once regarded by many as the ticket to wealth. The heydays of being an attorney are long gone, yet the myth lives on among undergraduates and their parents (at least where I work). The same process is occurring now with biology, which is how the must-major-in-STEM mantra translates into actual undergraduate enrollment patterns at non-elite institutions (like mine).

Possibly off-topic, but I'll mention it anyway:

As an undergrad thirty years ago, women were only about 35 percent of the undergraduate enrollment. Now they are close to half. And by graduation, women have slightly higher grade point averages than men, even when controlling for chosen major.

I think nationally women are now about 60 percent of undergraduates, and there was an episode of On Point on NPR a few days ago where the guest said that women now compose the majority of college-educated workers.

While I agree with the editorial's author that certain aspects of the academic employment environment (I'm including graduate student/post-doc status as part of this environment) could be improved, I don't see a lot of pushing people to "suffer for science." At my lower-tier institution I see plenty of faculty who are women, and some who fall into various under-represented groups (we aren't very diverse), enjoying what seem to be happy, upper middle/lower upper class lifestyles. People with PhDs in chemistry, various forms of engineering, etc. who work at other academic institutions appear to be similarly happy.

Some things I don't think the editorial focuses on enough:

• There are many undergraduates, whether female, minority, or whatever, for whom three to seven years of post-baccalaureate training is not a financially feasible or attractive proposition. E.g., you can walk off the commencement stage with a B.S. in mechanical engineering or computer science and into a job where your starting salary is significantly higher than that of your parent(s).
• The above option, however, isn't even on the table for people -- often poor and minority -- who received a mediocre-to-bad K-12 education.
• Many of these people, should they enter college, don't understand that their (or their parents', or their community's) dreams of becoming a scientist/engineer/physician/whatever are just not going to happen.

[polly_mer]

Some things I don't think the editorial focuses on enough:

• There are many undergraduates, whether female, minority, or whatever, for whom three to seven years of post-baccalaureate training is not a financially feasible or attractive proposition. E.g., you can walk off the commencement stage with a B.S. in mechanical engineering or computer science and into a job where your starting salary is significantly higher than that of your parent(s).

Anecdotally, good students with internships preparing to graduate in May 2020 are receiving six-figure salary offers right now in CS and closely related fields.  My employer sent representatives to the Grace Hopper Celebration recently.  Even the ability to make on-the-spot job offers to excellent candidates didn't net us enough new staff because "only" $80-100k was not competitive.

Even if we just go to the national starting salaries for all college graduates, people who make the average of $51k are pretty close to the national household median income of $62k right out of school.

I can remember some graduates from Super Dinky who were amazed at being offered $35k right out of the gate since that was about what a parent was making with years of experience.

On the other hand, I remember one particular instance where a good internship resulted in a job offer and the student had be told that asking for $70k for the entry level position was absurd since the manager making the offer probably was only making $50k.  The national values were very off for the local economy.

$50k in NYC is very different than $50k in St. Louis or Ridgecrest, CA, which is something an individual recent graduate must consider and those from very modest backgrounds may not know enough to use a cost-of-living calculator.

• The above option, however, isn't even on the table for people -- often poor and minority -- who received a mediocre-to-bad K-12 education.
• Many of these people, should they enter college, don't understand that their (or their parents', or their community's) dreams of becoming a scientist/engineer/physician/whatever are just not going to happen.

https://www.amazon.com/Ambitious-Generation-Teenagers-Motivated-Directionless/dp/0300082754 from 1999 reported on research indicating that a good many teenagers really didn't understand how poorly their K-12 education had prepared them both academically and in terms of the study habits/time/energy required to learn material worth knowing instead of just going through the motions.

One term I did the calculation of how many hours of practice one had at 0.5 h/day for four years of high school and then sighed heavily about how unlikely it was that my entering students had that much practice and how far short of proficient that level of practice would be for the kinds of classes I took as an undergraduate.

A friend recently sent me a LinkedIn article extolling the virtues of studying the liberal arts and STEM together.  Unspoken in that article was that pretty much we as a society only need the high-performing people who can excel in multiple diverse areas like philosophy and robotics or chemistry and ballet or literature and programming.  The days of having a large secretarial pool or back office from which high performers can be identified and nurtured are long gone.  Automation is taking most of those jobs: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/what-does-automation-mean-for-ga-and-the-back-office

The jobs that are left are the ones that require either more-than-average intelligence or a substantial amount of time because everything is always in motion and last year's information is grossly out of date.

[Aster]

At some point I feel that we are going to see the nursing bubble pop.

The public perception of nursing (easy work, safe work, stable work, reliable compensation) vs. the reality of it are starkly different (reverse all of the former and now add a 5-year average burnout rate).

[spork]

At some point I feel that we are going to see the nursing bubble pop.

The public perception of nursing (easy work, safe work, stable work, reliable compensation) vs. the reality of it are starkly different (reverse all of the former and now add a 5-year average burnout rate).

We set up a grad nursing program to take advantage of the credential creep being generated by the working BSNs who want to move up the career and income ladder. Students in our BSN program are the best we have and admission is very competitive, but there is a firm enrollment cap and I doubt that in reality the program generates net tuition revenue given its operational costs. We still have steady enrollments in our elementary and secondary ed programs, which should be far cheaper to operate than nursing, but the size of that program really needs to be slashed given the decline in the number of children, the pointless ratcheting up of program accreditation standards, and the abysmal teacher salaries in this state. Prospective female students perceive K-12 teaching just like they perceive nursing -- reliable and stable, obvious connection between college and career. But unless you land a job in a wealthy suburb, it's not. And I think the average burnout rate is very similar to that of nursing.

As for the option of a math/science-based career for those who major in elementary or secondary ed, it generally doesn't exist. And when it does (I can recall one instance in the last decade), the student is too clueless to realize what a bad decision K-12 teaching is. The ones who think "science" for the most part choose biology, which is also not the best option given that we also have a chemistry major, and almost every single one of them thinks "medical school" if they are thinking of graduate study.

[Aster]

In my state, we are already seeing the teacher bubble pop.

Enrollments in education majors are plummeting pretty sharply in both the private and public colleges. Word has (finally) gotten out that teachers get paid very poorly, are treated very poorly, and are micromanaged into acting as little more than zombie factory test taking coaches. When the governor decided to remove teacher tenure, we sank to the #50 state in polled teacher satisfaction in under three years.

Plus, teacher burnout averages 3-5 years here. They spend more time in college getting the degree, than they spend employed as teachers.

Most of my colleagues recommend that for students aspiring to be K-12 teachers, that they immediately take their degree and relocate to one of the several pro-education states. But do not stay here.