[mjn]

I think it is important to avoid using the term STEM and specifically dissect it in the discussions about shortage. Computer Science is a very peculiar part of STEM and not all of the STEM fields face the same challenges.

I think there's a bit of a rhetorical issue with this, though. The dominant narrative is that we have too many people doing soft, fuzzy, weird, useless liberal-arts degrees. Studying things like literature, history, philosophy, political science. What we need is more people doing hard, rigorous, mathematical, technical STEM degrees. Studying things like physics, biology, mathematics, computer science, chemistry.

If you admit that there is no shortage of mathematicians, though, you undermine the whole strategy of "we need more STEM, less liberal arts", because mathematicians are the rhetorical core of STEM: rigorous, technical, mathematical, non-fuzzy. If it turns out mathematicians are about as useful as historians (useful in principle, not directly in a major applied shortage), the whole narrative fails.

To a certain extent I think the whole STEM construction is based fundamentally on trying to hand-wave across this gap: math and physics are prestigious and perceived as hard/rigorous, while computer programming is in demand. The union (not intersection) of these two fields is STEM, which perceives itself as rigorous + hard + in-demand.

[Malarkey73]

To add to this I was very surprised recently trying to hire Statisticians/Mathematicians for a computing data-sciency bioinofrmatics role to find that a couple of PhD students had no computing skills at all. No DB, no linux, no scripting.. just stat applications on Windows. Curiously a few of the best candidates I saw were from "soft" subjects like ecology, geography, social science - where they have real cutting edge statistical chops but were also used to dealing with databases, mapping tools, and modern computing infrastructure.

[NAFV_P]

> To a certain extent I think the whole STEM construction is based fundamentally on trying to hand-wave across this gap: math and physics are prestigious and perceived as hard/rigorous, while computer programming is in demand. The union (not intersection) of these two fields is STEM, which perceives itself as rigorous + hard + in-demand.

[0] was linked in the article, detailing the unemployment rates and earnings among most college majors, mentioning 7.8% unemployment among recent college CS graduates and 5.6% for experienced ones. This is used to support the claims of the article.

If CS was broken down into specialised fields, like the rest of the STEM, you would get a more accurate picture.

[0]https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/og6p8y9x1yeacejk1ci0

[hueving]

You forgot about the E in STEM. Engineers also have very little trouble finding employment.

[leoc]

Well, even maths and not-applied physics tend to produce technological advances down the road in a way that history tends not to. But it's true that very different ROI timescales are being blurred together under the STEM brandname.