Post: #1

This essay:

https://peerj.com/preprints/3v1.pdf

Gives an overview of what is happening in the US with STEM BSc degrees and compares to Germany. It is a very good critique of a bachelor's degree leads nowhere even in the STEM fields and I think needs wider circulation.

Post: #2

You know, i was a STEM major (engineering) but i changed major. reason was, STEM is also as fucked as the other majors. the whole educational system of the US is completely fucked. it's not worth all the work when i could do a major in languages and learn languages that i want to learn and then get a celta certificate and teach english abroad (which was I was going to do anyway. I wasn't going to work in engineering here in the US). ultimately, everything is going to hell in the US. roosh was a STEM major and he decided to leave his boring job and be his own man. this is what all men who see things differently do.

Post: #3

Nursing Degrees, Physician Assistants and Info Tech degrees can find jobs pretty much anywhere...but especially nursing. I know nurses who drive 100k cars.

Post: #4

(09-08-2013 11:11 AM)PhilE Wrote:  Nursing Degrees, Physician Assistants and Info Tech degrees can find jobs pretty much anywhere...but especially nursing. I know nurses who drive 100k cars.

nursing is a good thing to work in, especially with the baby boomers retiring. that's if you're staying in the US. for me, not good because i am desperate to leave the US.

Post: #5

One of the political issues with STEM is that the industry claims they are short of workers, while lots of people with STEM degrees claim nobody wants to hire them. So industry lobbies for H1B's and politicians lobby for more STEM education, programs for WAM, etc.

The issue is that the sides are talking past each other - industry wants either cheap, compliant worker bees (like skilled union workers) or they want turbocharged, business-oriented ladder-climbers or brilliant inventors. People who aren't skilled in the right way or cost too much (both read: too old) get the boot by HR filters, and they continue to claim they need foreign workers to "fill the gap."

STEM degrees and STEM jobs are both dozens of little micro-economies, you can't take a petroleum engineer and fit him into a job for a virologist.

I wrote about this in a post called "Reciprocal Scarcity":

http://badgerhut.wordpress.com/2013/06/2...two-parts/

Post: #6

Take a look at what's happening in the pharma industry right now. Merck, Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly, all are laying off thousands of workers. I hate the pro-STEM rah-rahism. Most of the boosters have no clue what people are going to do after they graduate with their amazing degree. The actual acronym is asinine itself: medicine and engineering are professional degrees. What the hell is a science or technology degree?

You know what I also hate? Those stupid high-school displays of students in lab coats doing "experiments." Our nation's future scientists! Bullshit. 80% of those kids would flunk out of a college-level science class.

Post: #7

(10-08-2013 02:33 PM)Menace Wrote:  Take a look at what's happening in the pharma industry right now. Merck, Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly, all are laying off thousands of workers. I hate the pro-STEM rah-rahism. Most of the boosters have no clue what people are going to do after they graduate with their amazing degree. The actual acronym is asinine itself: medicine and engineering are professional degrees. What the hell is a science or technology degree?

You know what I also hate? Those stupid high-school displays of students in lab coats doing "experiments." Our nation's future scientists! Bullshit. 80% of those kids would flunk out of a college-level science class.

I agree, lots of people are ignorantly pumping this the same way they'll tell a kid who likes to argue at the dinner table that he should be a lawyer without knowing what practicing law really means.

"Science" really is a multi-layered thing:
-The appreciation and understanding of the physical world at a granular level
-A discipline that involves formulating and rigorously testing hypotheses so as to disprove or add to existing knowledge
-An industry of interlocking academic, political and corporate interests that funds the testing of hypotheses and the accumulation of knowledge, usually with the financial gain of a person or a business at stake

Underneath the celebrity scientists (like Dan Gilbert on those insurance ads) are tons of people toiling in corporate jobs.

Interestingly, from what I can tell undergrad degrees in science are extremely poor at educating students about the realities of working in science, let alone advancing.

I think the activists consider "technology" degrees to be something like IT certifications and accredited technical skills - white-collar trades. The salaried, self-driven nature of the jobs is an important sociological distinction, because they are trying to sell STEM to college-educated people (and their parents) who don't want to punch the clock for hourly pay. Nursing is universally regarded as a shift job where you take orders from doctors, so while it's a great career for some it can't be marketed to upwardly-mobile people (esp women) as a career path. I suppose an EMT is a STEM job but most would regard it as a blue-collar affair, again like nursing you are just doing triage until the "real professionals" show up.

Still, I've done pretty well career-wise with my tech degrees and skills (admittedly with the help of mentors and advocates), but that's largely because I really love the work I do and managed to find jobs where I get to do it with minimal interference. Like in any field, to really get a lot out of it you have to really enjoy it, and we'd be better off as a society screening people for whether they'd actually enjoying doing a STEM job before we promise them a great career just because they can show up, do some coding and then and jerk off on the keyboard (sometimes those are the same thing).

Post: #8

(10-08-2013 02:33 PM)Menace Wrote:  Take a look at what's happening in the pharma industry right now. Merck, Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly, all are laying off thousands of workers. I hate the pro-STEM rah-rahism. Most of the boosters have no clue what people are going to do after they graduate with their amazing degree. The actual acronym is asinine itself: medicine and engineering are professional degrees. What the hell is a science or technology degree?

You know what I also hate? Those stupid high-school displays of students in lab coats doing "experiments." Our nation's future scientists! Bullshit. 80% of those kids would flunk out of a college-level science class.

Unless I got the wrong end of the stick...engineering and medicine both get lumped under science.

Post: #9

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