When I Steal A Blog Post, I Leave A Link
I wanted to look at the WSJ job database, suspecting what I might find, but currently lack the bandwidth in a major way.
Fortunately, Noah took some (more) time from his thesis (“distraction from productive activity”) and did the dirty work. Apparently, being a STEM undergraduate isn’t the path to Nirvana:*
I went through the Wall Street Journal database that Phil cites, and found the following unemployment rates:
Genetics: 7.4% unemployed Biochemical Sciences: 7.1% unemployed Neuroscience: 7.2% unemployed Materials Engineering and Materials Science: 7.5% unemployed Computer Engineering: 7.0% unemployed Biomedical Engineering: 5.9% unemployed General Engineering: 5.9% unemployed Engineering Mechanics Physics and Science: 6.5% unemployed Chemistry: 5.1% unemployed Electrical Engineering: 5.0% unemployed Molecular Biology: 5.3% unemployed Mechanical Engineering and Related Technologies: 6.6% unemployed Compare these with a 5.0% unemployment rate for all bachelor’s degree holders in 2010.
And why do those Astronomy and Astrophysics people** have jobs?
Earth to [Phil Plait of] Bad Astronomy: your short-list of fully-employed science majors is totally cherry-picked….And all those astronomers who have plenty of jobs? Guess what: they’re employed because they work for the government. Yep, that’s right, the same government whose ability to provide employment Phil laughs at.
*Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this. Mine is not up.
**Full disclosure: I speak as someone whose wife’s cousin, with a Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics, currently has a Fellowship in the Astronomy department at DeLongville.
Ken,
Maybe you had better luck, but I could not find how many years post college was the data based on. I would fall under either Aerospace Eng/Mathematics/Astrophysics. Do I count towards that 3.6% unemployment for Aerospace Engineers? I entered the workforce a long time ago and things have changed mightily.
The question is what is employable NOW.
A better article is this (SFW):
http://volokh.com/2011/11/09/reforming-higher-education-incentives-stem-majors-and-liberal-arts-majors-the-education-versus-credential-tradeoff/
More up to date and tends to agree with what my kids are facing.
And you do know that the Government jobs are generated by taking money from other people in the form of taxes don’t you? Money that could have been used to creat jobs by buying products without the Government pass through cost to creating the Astronomer. And I doubt that sector has an unemployment rate of 0%…but it is another STEM program.
Or did you miss the OWS story oon the $35K indebt puppetteer?
Islam will change
I think that even Noah under states the erroneous nature of the Bad Astronomy article. I went to the WSJ chart and clicked the Science tab. Only Actuarial Science (a form of commercial use of statistics, a good field but boooooooring) showed the 0.0% claimed. Here is the rest of the sciences chart:
http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/NILF1111/#term=Science
Maybe I’ve found the wrong data, but I don’t see any significant difference for the sciences regarding unemployment.
So I am trying to understand how this fella Phil came to present such a distorted picture of the data in the WSJ data base, which comes from the 2010 Census. So I start with who publishes such material without fact checking the details, especially when the data in Phil’s chart looks so hard to believe. Frankly I didn’t check every drop down on the WSJ data chart, but the Science group doesn’t support Phil’s argument. But I digress. Check out the web site of Discover or its parent, Kalmbach Publishing. For a publishing organization there sites are uniquly devoid of any reference to upper management and ownership. I find that strange. In effect we don’t know who Phil works for so we don’t know how to judge his motives in the performance of his job.
I am getting older. I am aware that this is not an open forum, but I have to say what I have to say.
It began as a pain in my lower back. Spreading to my hips, my femur, my knees, my shins, my ankles, my feet and expressed into full blown gout. I realized that the 20 megaton dose of Liprocil that the “Doctor” ordered to control my raging, Irish high blood pressure may be the cause. I couldn’t walk. I went from running two mpd to a cripple in six months.
When I met with the Doctor I was irreverent. He was indignant. I figured the asshole was going to show me what an insignificant POS I was by poisioning me.
I was taking my personal limit of Ibuprofen, the miracle drug, just to walk. It just wasn’t taking away the pain, even after two weeks of withdrawl from the High Blood Pressure medication. I was unsure whether the poison was killing me or whether the family curse of rhuemitism was doing me in.
I went to the hot tub in the gym, purposefully, to speak with a woman who was obviosly afflicted with rheumatism. She told me she had symptoms like mine, including the head aches and the depression until …
She obtained medical marijuana. She gave me a small dose. It did what Ibufrofen and withdrawl could not. What a miracle drug. I am back running after 6 days, without pain and taking a 10 megaton dose of Liprocil.
Sorry for the multiple posts. It is Firefox.
Anyway, you blokes have no clue what the 1% are up to. All the engineers in my shop are green card chinese or indian. They don’t seem to be able to find anyone else.
IMO, they perform as I would expect third world employees to perform.
Let’s call a spade a spade. The goods are more expensive and of less quality. So much for Brad De Long’s utopia.
“Apparently, being a STEM undergraduate isn’t the path to Nirvana:*….
*Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this. Mine is not up.”
The point of this post would make sense if one didn’t take the time to read more from Georgetown’s CEW, the source for WSJ’s database.
-‘43% of STEM majors did not enter the field after graduation.’
-‘Ten years after graduation, another 20% will have left their STEM career.’
-In a 2007 study, only one third of science and eng. grads went to work in their field.
-STEM graduates are diverted heavily into management, finance, and consulting positions.
-Taking an entrepreneurial path also drains talent away from the area.
Graduating from a top tier E-school and going into finance or consulting was a popular move in the early to mid 2000s. Those professions, along with managerial roles were hit hard in the downturn and it’s difficult entering an engineering field with a five year old degree and little to no experience. Doesn’t matter as most disciplines have experienced drops in unemployment and salary increases in the past year.
Earning a degree in STEM and making a living in a STEM profession are two different things. Unemployment rates for people with a certain degree doesn’t tell you about that field’s opportunities, for the most part (nursing and architecture may be much more accurate).
I’ve probably told this story before but the strategic marketing VP for my business group has a PhD in physics. Head of personnel: PhD in Engineering.
Very few people in general continue to work in what they are trained in, that’s why acquisition of learning related skills and critical thinking are important. You need enough specifics to have a credible primer in your field of choice, but ultimately you also need to be able to progress in that career, in terms of knowledge and social aspects, otherwise you won’t last very long in it.
Kevin I agree with everything you said here. To add to your observations, a friend recently created a database of a few hundred job opennings (in one field) posted by top companies and it was clear that experience counted far more than a degree. Most opennings that required a degree were opennings in a couple of companies that are arguably concerned more about their statistics for PR purposes than ability to get the jobs done. And for them, the type of degree seldom mattered. I highly value education but we often overstate the economic and employment value of pieces of paper on the wall. I dare say that the correlation obtaining a degree and obtaining employment may be partly spurious because go-getters perhaps are more likely to both.
The fact that people change careers during their working life is clear. I started out in geophysics and gradually moved over to IT. With all the talk of job mobility its more likley to be true in the future. In many private outfits one will move up into management at least as a group leader as one follows the path, the problem of a technical track is well known, how do you comphensate the tech experts as well as middle management? If not solved one has to move to management to avoid an effective wage freeze.
So what is the import of Noah’s findings? His critique has nothing to do with the reality of employment levels in the sciences. It has every thing to do with the lack of veracity of Phil Plait’s article in Bad Astronomy. That article claims to provide factual data about an important and topical issue, unemployment. However, the basic data on the data site provided is not what Plait suggests. He would have to have gone through all five categories to find the ten out of 173 fields that appear to have significantly low levels of unemployment. Phil doesn’t make that point clear, that he found a minute number of college trained positions with better than average unemployment stats. Whether there are other statistical anomalies to the data isn’t even addressed.
So now Plait offers a mia culpa here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/10/mea-culpa-about-studying-science-to-get-a-job/#more-40478
But still he fails to address the issue of his having scoured a data file looking for “good news” in the employment of science educated graduates. Note that three of his low percentage fields are education and not science education at that. Three others are applied science, like pharmacology, acturial science (better referred to as commercial statistics) and medical technician. Noah’s list of poorly employed science grads is much more a listing of fields generally recognized as sciences. Plait, in his mia culpa, doesn’t give up on his original point in spite of the inadequacy of his presentation of the data.
“I’ll note that this doesn’t change the point I was trying to make: that a large fraction of the college majors with the lowest unemployment numbers are science-based. But that’s where I think I made a bigger mistake.”
If we subtract out the three education areas and the three almost science fields that leaves us with four closer to science fields out of 173 fields of study available in the original data source. That’s a large fraction? I would question the motivation of an article that so significantly distorts the picture.
How many students were in each discipline?
If there are 173 fields of study, but 30 to 40% of graduates are in the four or seven fields mentioned, Then it is still a large fraction.
But our friend selected ten fields, only four of which were real scientific disciplines, three were education amd three were applied science or math. So what are the ten fields a large fraction of? We might say that they are not liberal arts though some could argue that the educational areas border on liberal arts. Noah’s list is more sciencecentric and it shows no basis for Phil’s conclusions. Phil is trying hard to make a bogus point in both the original article and his supposed mia culpa (in which he excuses his errors and over statements, but still summarizes that his first conclusion is still valid. Little that he concludes in either article makes much sense, based on the data source he provides.
“ I highly value education but we often overstate the economic and employment value of pieces of paper on the wall.”
So true. When recruiting talent, firms that filter out candidates due to education level are usually making a mistake. Degrees don’t make someone a better employee as many people have personalities that are not fit for many workplaces. However, on a company or industrial level, attracting highly educated people is usually a good indicator of growth/success. The best organizations attract highly educated individuals, yet they are open enough to recognize talent in those who didn’t pursue some degree level.
This emphasis on education too often discounts contributions from ‘amateur’ research and work. We have confused academia with competence and insight. The default ‘guest expert’ for a news story is some PhD (usually tenured at some university) who just trots out a common view.
“Most opennings that required a degree were opennings in a couple of companies that are arguably concerned more about their statistics for PR purposes than ability to get the jobs done.”
Again, I agree with you 100%. Companies often list the number of licensed professionals or certified workers for PR and to cover their tail when things go wrong. These are usually the same firms that don’t innovate and they find their talent leaving for more interesting work or more lucrative paths. It’s one of the reasons STEM workers go into management in many sectors.
“So what is the import of Noah’s findings? His critique has nothing to do with the reality of employment levels in the sciences. It has every thing to do with the lack of veracity of Phil Plait’s article in Bad Astronomy.”
In his commentary about the misuse of data, he in turn misinterprets the same study’s statistics. How does this help? We can agree that someone who ignores evidence that repudiates his theory deserves some rebuke. Yet when the criticism itself suffers from a bad premise, the reader does not gain any insight.
The job statistics for most “hard science” jobs are always fuzzy because of the limited amount of work actually decidedly in the fields of those sciences.
It’s disingenous to compare science fields like “astrophysicist” to most other jobs because the working numbers are so disproportional to other “normal” jobs.
Funnily enough, this has been the scam forever in these polls that list things like “physicist” as a lucrative job. That may be the case but the conclusion is invalid because the market for physicists is vastly more limited than the market for “Medical Doctor” even.
Even corporate laboratories have minimal demand for highly educated “hard scientists.” And so, for the most part, those working in such capacities are research and/or teaching staff exceptionally valued to extend the knowledge to others…. Outside of academia (which is heavily “public sector”) just how much demand for astrophysicsts do people think there is?
Now, that doesn’t mean that work opportunities are equally limited for such trained professionals. The value in such training extends beyond the field named for the training… I know that I’ve never been hired because of the word “physics” on my degree but my background is invaluable to me for my success in the software world.
On the contrary, in my wife’s capacity the words “ecology” and “doctor” are essential for *any* opportunities at all… different strokes, different folks… or however that saying goes.
Noah’s accurate or mis-use of the data set is irrelevant. The focus of the critique is on the absurd selection of only those bits of the data that lend support to a proposition that Phil wants to put forward, science students are getting jobs much more so than are graduates in other fields.
And so Angry Bear has a range of backgrounds!
What a remarkably unverifiable piece of trash.
I suppose I will have to accept it as the truth!
Oh, and liars, and I use the word liars specifically, everyone in engineering knows that companies requiring five years experience at a paper making plant in order to consider you for the job is MUCH MUCH MUCH harsher than “needs five years accounting at a large business”. Because having five years experience at a detergent making plant doesn’t really help you there.
But of course, the liars neither know nor care about the facts. The thing is, can they spin something believable to pass off on those who don’t know any better?
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Changing careers in life is something common nowadays. It all depends on the world job market. The more careers/experience you have, the higher the chances of getting a good job.