What are you talking about? There are far too many STEM graduates already. Brilliant people with PhDs from great schools often can't find living-wage work in their fields.
Becoming highly educated in STEM isn't just low-value-add, it destroys value: a smart person wastes years of his life and productive capacity training for a research position he'll never get, then (optimistically) gets a programming or finance job which barely (if at all) leverages a few of his undergrad classes.
The economy, and basic human compassion, require that we stop wasting these people's youth and loading them up with debt. We need drastic cuts to STEM programs until we're producing graduates at somewhere near the rate at which we're hiring them.
That, or a massive investment in private sector R&D and public grant writing such that the output of the existing STEM education machine can find decent, relevant work.
We definitely need the latter more than the former. STEM employment insecurity just drives up profitability of the companies that can hire exceptional talent for less than they're worth, and same for typical employees. Same can be said for most workers today, as wages have been suppressed for a while now afaik
Either companies i know don't know how to find the surplus of domestic stem students and thus hire from abroad (and actively complain about the changes), or maybe we just don't pay enough to syphon people away from the high paying liberal arts professions.
Who knows, maybe the administration is right, we have a glut and need to restrict outside pressure in those fields.
Companies for the most part don't hire scientists and mathematicians. Quant finance may use advanced science and math degrees as a signal to find exceptionally smart and capable people, but the physics majors at hedge funds aren't doing physics. What little work there is for math & science is in government-funded academic research.
Engineers (real ones, not programmers) have a reliable path to middle-class life, I suppose, but this is mostly due to their scarcity. There's enough demand for new bridges, cars, and airplanes to sustain the profession, but not a ravenous expansion.
That leaves technology. Where is technology education? There are some trade schools that will teach you to administer and support Microsoft and Cisco business-oriented products for a decent lower-midde-class life, though they are slowly being eaten by The Cloud. And then there's Computer Science, which is a precursor to working as a programmer only because we lack more direct pedagogical methods.
Becoming highly educated in STEM isn't just low-value-add, it destroys value: a smart person wastes years of his life and productive capacity training for a research position he'll never get, then (optimistically) gets a programming or finance job which barely (if at all) leverages a few of his undergrad classes.
The economy, and basic human compassion, require that we stop wasting these people's youth and loading them up with debt. We need drastic cuts to STEM programs until we're producing graduates at somewhere near the rate at which we're hiring them.
That, or a massive investment in private sector R&D and public grant writing such that the output of the existing STEM education machine can find decent, relevant work.