President Obama Shouldn't Have Disparaged The Liberal Arts

A few weeks ago, Obama made fun of art history, comparing it to a useless endeavor that sentences college students who major in it to a lifetime of poverty and misery.

But the NY Post has an editorial that suggests the liberal arts are not the poverty-inducing, misery-causing majors people like Obama claim them to be:

In popular lore, a liberal arts major is held to be a prescription for poverty in the hard-charged information economy we now live in.

But a new report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the ­National Center for Higher Education Management Services says it may not be as bad as you think.

Inside Higher Ed sums up the report this way: “By their mid-50s, liberal arts majors with an ­advanced or undergraduate degree are on ­average making more money than those who studied in professional and pre-professional fields, and are employed at similar rates.”

In short, while liberal arts majors may start off more slowly, over the long run they hold their own.

Now, it’s true that compared to engineers and math and science grads, those with liberal arts degrees lag behind in earnings.

But the findings also point to something too many of the debates on college miss: The real test for both college and life is whether students are learning.

In a book released three years ago, NYU Professor Richard Arum noted that 36 percent of college students show “little or no evidence of improvement in critical thinking, complex ­reasoning and writing” after four years of ­college.

Even worse, students with degrees that parents might regard as more practical — business, communications, social work, education — had, according to Arum, “the lowest measurable gains.”

By contrast, “students majoring in traditional liberal arts fields” demonstrated significant gains in these areas.

The American Council for Trustees and Alumni has been making this point for years: A genuine education depends on a real and demanding curriculum that is the only way to develop young minds so they can realize their full potential.

So, Mom and Dad, here’s the bottom line: It’s not that liberal arts are not practical. It’s that it’s worthless to pay tens of thousands of dollars to put your sons and daughters through college if they are not going to take courses that require them to work hard, master the knowledge and learn how to think.

Hard to believe this is the NY Post editorial board writing this laudatory piece about liberal arts.

But they ought to send it to Obama and Arne Duncan, and Governor Cuomo while we're at it, because these guys keep saying the only majors worth anything these days are the one's related directly to STEM careers.

There Is No STEM Worker Shortage

One of the memes you hear in education circles is that there is a terrible shortage of trained workers in STEM fields and we simply MUST graduate more STEM students or import them from foreign shores before the Russians or the Chinese or the Venetians overtake us in this highly competitive, globalized economy.

Like so many memes in education these days, that STEM meme turns out not to be true:

A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth.

The EPI study finds that the United States has “more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations.” Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they’ve been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the IT industry. (IT jobs make up 59 percent of the STEM workforce, according to the study.)

The answer to whether there is a shortage of such workers has important ramifications for the immigration bill. If it exists, then there’s an urgency that justifies allowing companies to bring more foreign workers into the country, usually on a short-term H-1B visa. But those who oppose such a policy argue that companies want more of these visas mainly because H-1B workers are paid an estimated 20 percent less than their American counterparts. Why allow these companies to hire more foreign workers for less, the critics argue, when there are plenty of Americans who are ready to work?

The EPI study says that while the overall number of the U.S. students who go on to earn STEM degrees is small — a fact that many lawmakers and the media have seized on — it’s more important to focus on what happens to these students after they graduate. According to the study, that they have a surprisingly hard time finding work. Only half of the students graduating from college with a STEM degree are hired into a STEM job, the study says.

“Even in engineering,” the authors say, “U.S. colleges have historically produced about 50 percent more graduates than are hired into engineering jobs each year.”

The picture is not that bright for computer science students, either. “For computer science graduates employed one year after graduation . . . about half of those who took a job outside of IT say they did so because the career prospects were better elsewhere, and roughly a third because they couldn’t find a job in IT,” the study says.

Whereas those with liberal arts degrees might be used to having to look for jobs with only tenuous connections to their majors, the researchers say this shouldn’t be the case for graduates with degrees attached to specific skills such as engineering.

The tech industry has said that it needs more H-1B visas in order to hire the “best and the brightest,” regardless of their citizenship. Yet the IT industry seems to have a surprisingly low bar for education. The study found that among IT workers, 36 percent do not have a four-year college degree. Among these, only 38 percent have a computer science or math degree.

The bipartisan immigration plan introduced last week by the so-called Gang of Eight senators would raise the number of H-1B visas, though it would limit the ability of outsourcing firms to have access to them. Tech companies such as Facebook and Microsoft have fought hard to distinguish themselves from these outsourcing companies, arguing that unlike firms such as Wipro, they’re looking for the best people, not just ones who will work for less.

But some worry that the more H-1Bs allowed into the system, the more domestic workers get crowded out, resulting in what no one appears to want: fewer American students seeing much promise in entering STEM fields. 

There is no shortage of STEM workers.

Americans with STEM degrees having problems getting work in STEM fields.

Companies are looking to import foreign workers so they can pay them 20% less in wages and drive down wages in STEM fields even more.

That's the takeaway here.

As one commenter at the Washington Post article puts it:

We who work in STEM, which I have done all life, including in the Army, know that if there was a STEM shortage the answer is granting full citizenship to foreign immigrants with a working knowledge of English and an advanced degree from a US university.

H1-B is just a way to suppress wages and line the pockets of the 1% that Congress works for, at the expense of almost all US citizens.

 Another one writes:

We have known this for quite a while. Next breaking story: there is really no shortage of American construction workers.

What we have a big surplus of are big businessmen and politicians who are globalists, not nationalists. People who will sell out Americans for a few bucks. To put things in old-fashioned words, we are talking about those willing to engage in economic treason.

Remember this STEM meme is a myth the next time you hear Arne Duncan or his boss, Barack Obama trot it out as another excuse to bludgeon teachers and schools.

Push For Science Majors, But Lots Of Unemployed Ph.D's Already

So reports the Washington Post:

Michelle Amaral wanted to be a brain scientist to help cure diseases. She planned a traditional academic science career: PhD, university professorship and, eventually, her own lab.

But three years after earning a doctorate in neuroscience, she gave up trying to find a permanent job in her field.

Dropping her dream, she took an administrative position at her university, experiencing firsthand an economic reality that, at first look, is counterintuitive: There are too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs.

That reality runs counter to messages sent by President Obama, the National Science Foundation and other influential groups, who in recent years have called for U.S. universities to churn out more scientists.

Obama has made science education a priority, launching a White House science fair to get young people interested in the field.

But it’s questionable whether those youths will be able to find work when they get a PhD. Although jobs in some high-tech areas, especially computer and petroleum engineering, seem to be booming, the market is much tighter for lab-bound scientists — those seeking new discoveries in biology, chemistry and medicine.

“There have been many predictions of [science] labor shortages and . . .robust job growth,” said Jim Austin, editor of the online magazine ScienceCareers. “And yet, it seems awfully hard for people to find a job. Anyone who goes into science expecting employers to clamor for their services will be deeply disappointed.”

Oh, but wait - Obama and the rest of the corporate education reformers say if we just push more students to study science, we'll have a much more competitive workforce and people will have good paying jobs that will allow them to live a middle class lifestyle.

Except that's horseshit:

One big driver of that trend: Traditional academic jobs are scarcer than ever. Once a primary career path, only 14 percent of those with a PhD in biology and the life sciences now land a coveted academic position within five years, according to a 2009 NSF survey. That figure has been steadily declining since the 1970s, said Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University who studies the scientific workforce. The reason: The supply of scientists has grown far faster than the number of academic positions.

The pharmaceutical industry once offered a haven for biologists and chemists who did not go into academia. Well-paying, stable research jobs were plentiful in the Northeast, the San Francisco Bay area and other hubs. But a decade of slash-and-burn mergers; stagnating profit; exporting of jobs to India, China and Europe; and declining investment in research and development have dramatically shrunk the U.S. drug industry, with research positions taking heavy hits.

Since 2000, U.S. drug firms have slashed 300,000 jobs, according to an analysis by consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In the latest closure, Roche last month announced it is shuttering its storied Nutley, N.J., campus — where Valium was invented — and shedding another 1,000 research jobs.

“It’s been a bloodbath, it’s been awful,” said Kim Haas, who spent 20 years designing new pharmaceuticals for drug giants Wyeth and Sanofi-Aventis and is in her early 50s. Haas lost her six-figure job at Sanofi-Aventis in New Jersey last year. She now works one or two days a week on contract at a university in Philadelphia. She has to dip into savings to make ends meet.

“Scads and scads and scads of people” have been cut free, Haas said. “Very good chemists with PhDs from Stanford can’t find jobs.”

Largely because of drug industry cuts, the unemployment rate among chemists now stands at its highest mark in 40 years, at 4.6 percent, according to the American Chemical Society, which has 164,000 members. For young chemists, the picture is much worse. Just 38 percent of new PhD chemists were employed in 2011, according to a recent ACS survey.

Although the overall unemployment rate of chemists and other scientists is much lower than the national average, those figures mask an open secret: Many scientists work outside their chosen field.

“They’ll be employed in something,” said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a senior adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who studies the scientific workforce. “But they go and do other things because they can’t find the position they spent their 20s preparing for.”

Many Ph.D's are working low wage jobs - sometimes doing low paying post doc jobs for five, seven or ten years. Most post doc's are being exploited by a system set up to do just that:

The lack of permanent jobs leaves many PhD scientists doing routine laboratory work in low-wage positions known as “post-docs,” or post-doctoral fellowships. Post-docs used to last a year or two, but now it’s not unusual to find scientists toiling away for six, seven, even 10 years.

Until recently, Amaral, 39, the neuroscientist, was one of perhaps 100,000 scientists — the figures are fuzzy — in the United States working as a post-doc. After earning her expensive doctorate in neuroscience, which took seven years and she financed by working and drawing down her savings, Amaral spent a year counting blips on a computer screen for another scientist.

“I couldn’t answer the question of how this was any different from undergraduate work,” Amaral said.

Salaries for university post-doc jobs start at about $39,000, according to the National Postdoctoral Association. They require a science PhD — which can leave the recipient buried in debt. Benefits are usually minimal and, until a decade ago, even health insurance was rare.

Stephan calls the post-doc system a “pyramid scheme” that enriches — in prestige, scientific publications and federal grant dollars — a few senior scientists at the expense of a large pool of young, cheap ones.

“I don’t think anybody minds sucking it up for a year or two, seeing it as an apprenticeship,” said Zoe Fonseca-Kelly, a PhD geneticist who spent seven years as a post-doc at three universities. “What’s very frustrating is that it’s turned into a five-year process. People get very disillusioned with it.”

Fonseca-Kelly got fed up with it, too. She left the lab for an administrative job at Harvard Medical School.

The post-doc system is “dysfunctional and not sustainable in the long term,” Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman told top brass at NIH earlier this month. Tilghman heads an NIH-appointed panel that is wrestling with overhauling how that agency trains new scientists. A new report from her group calls for better pay and more benefits for post-docs and major changes in how NIH funds young scientists.

Like many scientists, Amaral grew disillusioned with the system that left her with an expensive degree but few job options. She left her lab in December after federal funding for her post-doc position ran out. She now works as an administrator at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and is in a “holding pattern,” unsure whether — or how — to advance a science career she spent more than a decade working toward.

“I’ve listened to this stuff on the news about how we need more scientists and engineers,” she said. “I’m thinking, ‘What are you talking about?’ We’re here. We need something to do besides manual labor for another academic person.”

So Obama is pushing for more scientists when we already have a glut of them, there are few jobs for the ones who are already here, and the future looks even bleaker as budget cuts and outsourcing makes the situation even worse for science Ph.d's.

And of course he blames public schools and public school teachers for many of the country's economic woes, but he says once we re-do the system so that we can graduate more STEM majors, all will be well.

Except we already have a glut of many of those majors and they're working at the science equivalent of The Gap while they watch the interest owed on their student loans crush them for life.