Some evidence that there is no shortage of STEM graduates

[achinhibitor]

A compendium of evidence that there's no shortage of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates from U.S. colleges.

Comments

[acelightning]

How many of them are women? How many of them are people of color? How many of them are GLBTQ+? How many of them are differently abled?

[achinhibitor]

The article doesn't say. But since the article is more or less addressing the question "Should we generally encourage more people to go into STEM?", it doesn't seem relevant. Encouraging people generally to go into STEM isn't likely to improve the demographic distribution.

[achinhibitor]

The article doesn't say. But since the article is more or less addressing the question "Should we generally encourage more people to go into STEM?", it doesn't seem relevant. Encouraging people generally to go into STEM isn't likely to improve the demographic distribution.

Though in re women at least, something odd has happened in the last 20 years. Back in the 90s or so, maybe as many as 1/3 of programmers were women. My first two bosses were women, and there was nothing odd about that. It was naively said that since one succeeded at programming largely by being good at the job, women were less disadvantaged there than at jobs where there were complex social barriers to success. Fast forward to now, nobody is particularly surprised to see strong women candidates for President (talk about complex social barriers to success!), but female computer programmers are becoming scarce. WTF?

[acelightning]

What I've seen is a general attitude of "women can't possibly be programmers - a programmer has to be good at math and logic, and men are better at those things." It's still widely believed that women aren't able to do STEM at all. I ran into that attitude more than fifty years ago, and I still see it.