Fwd: Demand and Pay for STEM Skills – Scan No. 8057

[Eva Scates-Winston]

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Demand and Pay for STEM Skills – Scan No. 8057

People with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
degrees or
certifications are in a prime position in the economy, according to
STEM (http://cew.georgetown.edu/STEM/), a
recently-released workforce study by the Georgetown University Center
on
Education and the Workforce.

Workers with associate's degrees in STEM fields out-earn 63 percent of
people
who have bachelor's degrees in other fields. Almost half of workers
with
bachelor's degrees in STEM fields out-earn workers with Ph.D.'s in
other fields.

That doesn't mean people with STEM degrees are necessarily working in
STEM
fields, says center Director Anthony Carnevale, the lead author of the
report.
He says technical skills have "become the common currency of the labor
market,"
much the same way a liberal arts education was seen as a basic
requirement for
high-paying jobs in past years.

Occupations in STEM jobs will continue to grow - the center estimates
that
careers in the field will make up about 5 percent of all jobs by 2018,
but
demand for STEM skills in other fields has skyrocketed.

Carnevale says STEM competency has become a "foundational skill" for
those
looking to go into upper management. This causes a divergence in STEM
talent -
people with STEM degrees go into lucrative careers in finance or
management,
Carnevale says. For every 100 students who graduates with a bachelor's
degree,
19 graduate with a degree in STEM, but only eight are working in a
STEM
occupation 10 years down the line, according to the report.

This isn't a problem for the workers, according to Carnevale, but it
can be a
problem for corporations. Workers may leave STEM occupations for
higher-paying
jobs, but he also says being a lab scientist doesn't "satisfy social
or
entrepreneurial interests" for many.

"It's not a problem. The economy wants this, it's good for the
individual," he
says. "But the economy wants more [STEM-qualified workers]. From the
point of
view of employers, they feel frustrated, but the reason they can't keep
people
is themselves. They keep stealing people from each other."

With job switches come salary bumps. Regardless of occupation, people
with a
bachelor's degree in a STEM major make roughly $500,000 more over
their
lifetimes than non-STEM majors. Over the past 30 years, salaries in
STEM-related
jobs have jumped faster than those in any other occupation other than
healthcare
professionals and managerial occupations. STEM wages jumped 31 percent
over the
past 30 years, compared with 23 percent for all non-STEM occupations.

Carnevale says this data contradicts the assertion some make that the
United
States has enough STEM graduates, an argument made by Richard Freeman
in a 2008
report
(http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf51/conf51d.pdf)released
by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Freeman wrote that believers in the STEM shortage favor "guest worker
programs
to keep a sizable ow of less-skilled but legal immigrants coming to
the
country."

He says that "increased supplies of skilled labor in low-wage countries
will
squeeze highly skilled as well as less-skilled U.S. workers," and
writes that
there's a problem with "attracting homegrown American talent to science
and
engineering in the face of increasing supplies of highly qualified
students and
workers from lower-wage countries."

Not so, says Carnevale. He says Freeman and others see that there are
two STEM
graduates for every new STEM job opening. But the migration of STEM
talent to
other fields means there's a shortage of workers wanting to take those
jobs, and
demand pushes the wages up.

"It's the best of all possible worlds. The institutions are chasing
the
individuals, so the individuals have the upper hand. That's what we
want," he
says. "It's not a crisis, it's a market, which is to say that this
skill is
scarce, and employers are chasing the skill. The demand for the skill
is going
up, the wages are going up."

The report asserts that the United States needs more middle-tier high
school
students to study STEM—whether they get a bachelor's degree or an
associate's
degree. If only the best students continue to go into STEM, there will
continue
to be the divergence, he says. "The rest of our economy needs more of
these
people," he says. "In the end, you can track this back to high school
math.
We're very good at the high end, but math is the place most students
fail …
that's the biggest challenge of them all. How do we get young people to
learn
math?"

By Jason Koebler
October 20, 2011
US News and World Report
http://iseek.custhelp.com/rd?1=AvUE~wqBCv8Stzb~GiUe~yL~Jvkq~_v~59vjvTr~&2=1367

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