Since the first use of the term “STEM” in 2001 by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the term has been part of mainstream propaganda. “STEM” is an acronym for the phrase “Science Technology Engineering and Math”. Like motherhood and apple pie, what could possibly NOT be positive about supporting more STEM courses in our schools? Well, as I’ve uncovered about so many commonly held beliefs, there may even be something “less than perfect” related to this craze. In fact, there may even be something SINISTER!
I was a member of the Jacksonville FL STEM Task Force during 2012. To launch the effort, we were given some high-level government generated handout material to read. It included a top level overview (no longer available. Here is an updated version). Being a former MIT “rocket scientist”, I was not willing to just accept the briefing material at face value, especially since the cover pages were so full of government insignias and art work. The night after the first meeting, I sifted through the material with a “fine tooth comb”. I checked every claim it made. From the very first paragraph, the claims didn’t add up. Ironically, it appeared the text writers either never read the numerical material included near the back of the document, or, ironically, they weren’t able to understand it. The irony, of course, is that some writers were given the responsibility to write a “summary” to create strong national support for STEM who were, themselves, not STEM proficient. If they were, they would have understood that the conclusions drawn by the statistics DO NOT support the major government, industry and public media push for STEM we are seeing. In fact, the statistics overwhelmingly suggest pulling back on STEM education. You can understand how hard it was for me, a former “rocket scientist”, to accept this conclusion. I have used STEM practices all my life. What was really going on here?
Long story short, STEM is a SCAM! It keeps going on, as usual, because a lot of people stand to make a lot of money off of this scam. If we follow the money, we can get an interesting look at who’s pockets it goes into!
At this point, however, I’d like to add a disclaimer. While the case I present below clearly discredits the “STEM message” that the public is being hood-winked with, this does not mean I’m against emphasizing STEM subjects in school. However, STEM should only be taught for those students who are strongly attracted to it – yes, both boys and girls. The way the government and education are pushing it, however, is just very far from how it should be ETHICALLY and efficiently handled.
So, following the money, we run smack into – you guessed it – the government-military-industrial-academic complex! The military-industrial complex is promoting it to reduce wages in military industries. That boosts executive income and benefits. The academic push is obvious – more grants, more students, more infrastructure support, and ultimately, higher administrative income and benefits. Government leaders go along for the ride because it provides more justification for government military and education expenditures for their congressional districts.
Here is an example of how this was clearly happening in Florida at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa. First off, notice where this “South Florida” school facility is located – Tampa. Tampa is not in “south” Florida. It got this name in 1956 because at that time (before air conditioning), it was the furthest south Florida university. But, as Florida grew, USF was in direct competition with The University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville.
The next piece of this puzzle is to acknowledge an important “problem” in modern education. Education has become “big business”. For USF to compete with UF, which is much larger and has extensions all over the state, USF has to be very competitive. To keep expanding its campus and student count, it won the privilege of leading the government’s STEM promotions in Florida.
But direct government funding is not the only benefit. Each of the colleges that support the STEM effort also lobby Congress to increase foreign student visas. Once Congress opens up visas for colleges, they also do so for military contractors and government agencies like departments of transportation. A lot of financial benefits are involved.
Now, back to what I found researching the government report that supports my skepticism about STEM. Here’s were my conclusions focused directly on Florida. I took the information provided for the U.S. analysis and tracked down the related data for Florida. (While this is 2012 data, things have only become worse since.)
• STEM jobs – that is, jobs that required the heavy related math and science training – accounted for only a very small proportion of Jobs, both in Florida and across the U.S. – about 4%.
• While STEM jobs were expected to be the “fastest growth RATE” sector over the following 6 years ( +17% ), because of the small percentage of the workforce (4%), they wouldn’t really create a large absolute number of jobs ( 17% X 4% = 0.7% of all jobs ). That is, the total number of new STEM jobs was only expected to grow from 4% to 4.7%.
• The total STEM employment in Florida in 2012 was about 385,000. The reports expected that to grow to 411,000 by 2018. While 411,000 is a big number, the reports tragically failed to remember that 385,000 of those jobs were ALREADY FILLED! So, the REAL “new jobs opportunity” was not 411,000, it was only filling the new growth ( i.e. 26,000 jobs ). Of course, we need to add to that any expected retirements over that 6 years. The result was a TOTAL of 75,000 new jobs. But remember, that’s also over 6 years. So, the total number of NEW STEM openings for ALL of Florida was ONLY expected to be 12,500 per year.
• But this wasn’t the end of the calculation. I then added in another factor. These 12,500 new openings were NOT all at the entry level. In fact, a Task Force attendee from a STEM job recruiting company said MOST employers with new job openings were looking for “experienced” workers. So, the TOTAL number of placement opportunities for NEW STEM college graduates in Florida is more like ONLY 300 – 400 per year!
• This number was a huge shocker! Why? Assume Florida’s then already existing high school graduates who were STEM qualified, went on to college and then went looking for jobs. Florida was ALREADY graduating about 36,800 students per year with STEM curriculum profiles at both the high school and college level! Please reread that last sentence! That’s already 100 TIMES as many graduates as Florida’s high tech industry needed, even without counting students coming from other states or outside the U.S.! What then can possibly be the justification for increasing this number of graduates?
When I presented this information, informally, on a one by one basis to some team members, they were very annoyed. Some argued that maybe industry wasn’t able to find experienced STEM workers. Where were those 12,000 experienced STEM job applicants per year going to come from? The statistics in both the national and state data also answered that question, and in a very discouraging way for STEM. It turned out, that the U.S. was ALREADY graduating 9.3M students each year with STEM degrees. That rate had been going on for a long time. Guess what? Of these 9.3M graduates, 5.9M didn’t go into STEM related employment. Why? Because they couldn’t find STEM JOBS! RIGHT! 64% of those graduates already capable couldn’t find STEM jobs! Again, this over production of STEM graduates had been going on for years! So, there was a HUGE backlog of workers with job experience ready and able to fill the jobs. The competition for any new STEM jobs was always highly competitive against the available supply. The industry used that to keep lowering wages.
My personal employment history supported all of these observations. I was forced to change jobs frequently, much more than I ever imagined. For each move, I averaged over 300 job applications to find the new position. Being an MIT “rocket scientist”, hundreds of inventions, major discoveries and break throughs – the more I showed what I could accomplish, the more rejections I got. Ironically, challenging the foundation of this STEM program, to find “work”, I had to DUMB DOWN my resume! Right! I had to essentially hide my STEM capabilities!
I’m sure most readers have already beat me to the next obvious question, “So, if there was such a huge oversupply, how could the high tech industry CLAIM there was such a shortage?
If anyone read the references right on the Workforce Florida STEM webpages or in the STEM government papers, they would have seen that the discrepancy between rhetoric and statistics repeated over and over again. YET, the people writing the introductory summaries still didn’t get it. They obviously didn’t understand it – or were somehow receiving some “incentive” not to understand it. The U.S. did not, and still does NOT have a STEM shortage! The STEM push was then and still is now just a big cover-up for manipulation of political policies and misuse of STEM employees by business. The reason that industry can show statistics that appear to indicate a job shortage is that they have depressed the salaries so far that trained people refuse to apply. The shortage is thus a created hoax.
It should also be obvious that I couldn’t have been the first person to spot this. One example was Mike Vasquez of the Miami Herald. He had been writing about it for years. His material provided the basis for my earlier post first posted in 2012: Stem Degrees – Vasquez.
There is another big factor that keeps pushing “STEM” forward: the BANDWAGON! Once the STEM “bandwagon” got rolling, a lot of other academic departments wanted to jump onboard. The first led to the addition of a new letter to “STEM”. It became “STEAM”. The new letter “A” stood for “Arts”. It didn’t matter that there could hardly be an academic subject requiring skills further away from what STEM stood for. The subject matter, of course, was not actually a critical driver. The driver was that STEM academics had found a process to get more money. The bandwagon was rolling!
Before long, the banner on that wagon became very long. It added versions like: STREAMi, eSTEM, STEMiE, STEMLE, and STEMM, where the extra letters represented: R – research; i – innovation; e- environment; a second E – entrepreneurship (they had to get the $$ directly in there); LE – Law and Economics (why not?); and a second M – medical. There were even versions like: THAMES – Technology, Humanities, Arts, etc., and MINT – Math, Informatics, Natural sciences, and Technology. Every one of these was pushed with the same, key, justification: the U.S. “needed” them to compete, economically, with the rest of the world. That of course has completely NOT worked. No sooner did the U.S. mint each acronym listed above, than the other advanced countries around the world also jumped on their own “bandwagons” and outdid us.
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