

New Evidence: There is No Science-Education Crisis - luu
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114608/stem-funding-dwarfs-humanities-only-one-crisis

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ItendToDisagree
If you've ever worked as a bench technician in a Bio/Genetics/Testing lab you
know that the hours are totally ridiculous and/or unstructured (expected to
work weekends without much notice or the like). Also you are expected to make
just a touch above minimum wage (take home) as a salary while working much
more than 40 hours a week. (Post-docs and Grad Students are also expected to
work for similar low pay and extreme hours but this is more to further their
career.)

I'd say that this part of the article describes more or less exactly why the
Science workforce is in such a bad shape (at least in the States):

 _Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish
benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable
employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated
or imported, is to their benefit_

There are very few who even bother to make it to "the top" where the actual
salaries are because to get there involves getting stepped on, scooped (or
outright left off papers), and generally used/abused. At a certain point most
people burn out or just say screw it and move on to a different career.

What you end up getting are a lot of people who had good intentions, loved the
idea of a STEM job, and/or idealistic beginnings, and then were destroyed by
the reality of working in Science.

~~~
Aloisius
Isn't a bench technician kind of the lowest rung on the ladder? I was under
the impression that once you had a Ph.D., salary for say, a Scientist at
Genentech, paid pretty well.

~~~
ItendToDisagree
Getting to the 'Ph.D' as opposed to just 'post doc' is exactly the struggle I
described. You have to make it through that whole cluster f'ck and get enough
(good) publications for your Ph.D to mean a damn thing.

If it doesn't... Congrats 'Doctor' you make 50k a year after working in the
field for 10 years (plus all the schooling you had to pay for)!

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the_watcher
When will these articles learn that the fact that we are graduating enough
STEM students, but still have a shortage of those who can fill the jobs, is a
symptom of the science education crisis. No one would argue we aren't
graduating enough students (or lawyers, etc). We still have a general
education crisis, and a severe legal education crisis.

~~~
rayiner
We have a legal education crisis?

~~~
geebee
You know, I actually think we do.

I understand your response (there are so many law school graduates), but think
about it - there's a huge number of unemployed or underemployed lawyers, legal
costs remain sky-high, and most Americans can't afford a lawyer for very basic
needs.

We force all lawyers to graduate from college without acquiring any particular
background that is strictly necessary for the study of law, then force them to
go through three years of very expensive graduate school, and in spite of
that, many of them are almost completely incapable of practicing law or even
finding reasonable employment when they graduate. It's a 7 year education path
that results in an unemployable person while a substantial need for affordable
services goes unmet.

~~~
rayiner
It's a strange market, but it makes sense if you consider two points, neither
of which is really related to education:

1) Legal services is a product that's hard to mass produce because each job is
idiosyncratic. Plumbers and mechanics, jobs which have similar
characteristics, charge $80-100/hour. Nearly everyone fits in one of a dozen
sizes of shoe that can be cheaply manufactured in China, but every landlord-
tenant dispute is slightly different.

2) At nearly every level, there is a limited supply of experienced lawyers
(this is true for plumbers and mechanics and also consultants and bankers).
Compare with management consulting. The field has zero educational or
certification requirements, as far as I know, but McKinsey doesn't charge less
per hour than a high-end law firm. Corporate clients in particular don't want
to hire professionals that don't have prior, real-world experience with
corporate matters. There are a limited set of opportunities to work on a real
litigation or real merger, and so there is a limited supply of professionals
with the desired experience.

The educational system can't really remedy either problem. There are schools
that put a huge emphasis on clinical, real world education, and yet firms and
clients still focus most of their recruiting on schools that offer classes
like Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology Language and Law:
[http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-
for-...](http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-for-spring-
semester).

~~~
geebee
I agree that it makes a certain amount of sense at the upper level. My guess
is that eliminating the requirement of a 3 year law degree at the state bar
level would have almost no effect on yale law school graduates. Your analogy
to management consulting is an apt one - genuinely (top 3) elite MBA programs
aren't legally required for anything, but they are in demand. That said, I
think you could knock that third year off yale law school with no discernible
loss of quality, and in the absence of a government-enforced 7 year
educational requirements, I do think that you would see the emergence of a
tier of very elite lawyers who haven't done the 3 year JD as well.

Another big question is the effect this has on the lower end of the scale.
We're talking about the daily grind of law, divorces, child custody cases,
drunk driving charges, and so forth. My guess is that a lot of people dealing
with these issues would benefit simply from having access to a highly literate
person who can research things for them without getting threatened with
charges of "practicing law without a license".

I don't think that these needs are well met by requiring someone to major in
(I'll go with Obama here) "art history" for four years simply because they
have to get a BA before they can go to law school, followed by three years of
very expensive graduate education. A much shorter course in law, with perhaps
some apprenticing, might yield lawyers who can afford to charge much less
(then again, many of these folks have so little money that there really is no
difference between $20 an hour and $700 an hour, they can't pay it).

I've heard cynics say that state bars are mainly concerned with preventing
paralegals from hawking cheap wills in strip malls, providing assistance with
immigration forms, that kind of thing. I'll admit I don't really know, I'm not
involved in this sort of thing. I read about a case a while back (I really
wish I could give you a link, it was an interesting article) where a judge did
issue an injunction against a woman who had a law degree from another country
who was providing immigration council in texas. The judge went out of his way
to mention that her work was of high quality, but she clearly hadn't done her
4 years of art history + three years of JD, so she wasn't allowed to take the
bar exam an was ordered to stop (like, you will be imprisoned if you keep
offering these services).

~~~
rayiner
I would support letting anyone with a college degree take the bar exam. That
said, I don't think it would make a big impact. At the low end, the sporadic
nature of legal work makes it difficult to charge much less than lawyers
already do. If you're doing divorces, child custody, DUI, etc, it's very hard
to fill 40 billable hours a week because any given matter is so small. You
spend most of your time just finding work or waiting for work. If your
utilization is 50%, then a billable rate of $50 per hour translates to
probably $20 per hour worked when accounting for overhead, or less than you
can make working at Costco. If your utilization is 35%, you have to charge
$100 per hour to beat working at Costco. To make this work,bayou have to drive
volume, taking on very large numbers of cases and closing them quickly, which
requires expensive advertising.

At the high end, I do think you'd see a class of non-JD lawyers, probably
MBA's. However, I don't think you'd have larger supply and thus lower prices.
Supply is already quite elastic. The Chicago market used to hire about 1,000
new lawyers at large firms per year, and is probably down to 350 today. The
elasticity of the supply comes from firms going more or less deeply into the
class at the schools from which they hire. If you open the pool up to say MBAs
at U Chicago and Northwestern, what happens? The job market becomes more
competitive, but supply doesn't change. At the end of the day, there are only
so many M&A deals happening in Chicago and only so many lawyers are needed to
work on them. Indeed, the trend has been in the opposite direction. Over the
last decade, technology and an intervening recession have reduced the need for
entry level lawyers to perform say due diligence. However, rates have gone up
over the decade and have held steady even after the recession, because the
reduction in entry level positions has resulted in a reduced supply in the
ranks of experienced lawyers.

------
Fomite
The truth of the matter has always been "There is a shortage of STEM majors
willing to work for the wages we'd like to pay them."

Pumping up the idea of the "STEM Crisis" is just a way to inflate supply.

~~~
naterator
> Pumping up the idea of the "STEM Crisis" is just a way to inflate supply.

Perhaps, but this should be seen in the larger context of a general glut of
supply of high-skilled AND low-skilled workers. The truth is, it isn't just
STEM where oversupplied & underpaid workers exist. Humanity is becoming more
efficient at everything, and there is less work to go around. White collar is
the new Blue Collar, it's just that no one acts like it. Economists have
acknowledged this[1], but of course haven't proposed real solutions. The real
solutions are: (A) White collar Unionizes against an ever shrinking
management, or (B) we come up with some kind of shared work program, where we
finally start towards the goal of 100% unemployment for humanity. But no one
of any power really wants to talk about that. A psychological phase change
will be needed for that to happen.

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21586581-economi...](http://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21586581-economist-asks-provocative-questions-about-future-social-
mobility-american?zid=297&ah=3ae0fe266c7447d8a0c7ade5547d62ca)

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alexgolive
Top tech companies end up paying more for H1-B engineers than US engineers.
Not only that but they have to pay for legal fees and wait for the legal
process to take place. Why would they go through this if there were good US
candidates available? Also tech salaries for entry level engineers at top tech
companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox etc.) have increased by about
_50%_ in the last 4 years.

~~~
redwood
Presumably the answer is because those H1B individuals do more for the same
amount of investment (where we must quantify everything involved in the
competitive hunt for talent).

The problem comes when these individuals are more valuable not because
equivalent talent wasn't available but because they're slave-like workhorses
without flexibility or options.

H1B offers companies power of employees that they simply cannot wield over
American employees, period. This is especially popular in some industries.
Look at the IT work force here in midtown Manhattan for example.

It's complicated.

------
bigd
I recommend this read on the topic.

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html)

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michaelochurch
We have a science _capability_ crisis. It has little to do with formal
education. It's an issue of leadership, especially in top organizational
roles.

There _is_ a lack of competent, available workers for low- and mid-level roles
(if you've ever been on an interview loop, you've seen how uninspiring the
general ability level is) but that's more an artifact of decades-long
discouragement and organizational failure than an intrinsic problem of the
people. Knowledge is spotty and hard to find. Formal education, on the other
hand, is really easy to find in NYC or Silicon Valley or Boston. There are
zillions of people with PhDs from prestigious schools (but many of those
aren't any good).

All of this is dangerous in the long term, because after a decade of terrible
leadership, competent people tend to leave for greener pastures, or burn out
and lose motivation to do anything more than follow orders.

The fact that we fall short of where we should be in STEM is entirely an
artifact of the (mostly terrible) organizations we build and the roles those
define. It's not the teachers' fault at all, nor can it be fixed by throwing
more resources at education without fixing the larger (and probably unfixable)
society.

~~~
aantix
Why must the capability already exist?

With so many specializations, isn't it partly a company's duty to train?

~~~
ahomescu1
Let's say you were a company CEO or head of HR, and decided to hire untrained
people and then train them. How would you handle the following:

1) The reality that life is uncertain, and the company might be bankrupt a
year from now. There's no sure thing in life, even huge companies disappear.
If training a new employee would only pay off in several years, would you
still do it?

2) At-will employment, where the employee could stick around for the training,
then quit as soon as that's done. I think forcing the employee to stay for N
months/years after that is a raw deal.

3) The fact that that employee isn't contributing as much to the company, but
you're still paying him/her market wages. Would you offer them lower pay
during the training period?

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inspectahdeck
One question I think is worth considering: if the quality of STEM education
increased, wouldn't that increase the number of vacancies in STEM jobs per
year? Theoretically, more qualified people -> better research -> new companies
-> new job opportunities.

