Google’s top search result for “STEM shortage” (STEM is an abbreviation for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) on May 31, 2019 is/was “Why the U.S. has a STEM shortage and how we fix it (Part 1)” by Ben Weiner (Recruiting Daily, November 6, 2018). (See featured screenshot of the Google Search Results for “stem shortage” on May 31, 2019)
Remarkably, this article prominently claims a shortage of STEM workers in the United States, citing a study by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Deloitte accounting firm claiming that employers will need to fill 3.5 million STEM jobs by 2025, with more than 2 million of them going unfilled because of the lack of highly skilled candidates in demand, while also stating:
Higher barriers to H-1B visa access is compounding the STEM shortage: there are low numbers of U.S. STEM field graduates coupled with decreasing foreign STEM talent to mitigate the supply shortage. Forbes reports in 2016 that there were 568,000 STEM graduates in the U.S., compared to 2.6 million in India and 4.7 million in China.
Emphasis Added
Note that an annual rate of production of 568,000 STEM graduates in the United States multiplied by the seven years between 2018 (the date of the article) and the 2025 date of the NAM/Deloitte projection gives over 3.9 million STEM graduates, substantially more than the NAM projection of 3.5 million jobs to be filled. Thus:
What STEM Shortage?
In fact according to the US Census about half of all US college graduates with STEM degrees are not working in STEM professions despite pervasive claims of a desperate or severe shortage of STEM graduates by STEM employers and others! (For a more in depth discussion of STEM shortage numbers see my recent article “A Skeptical Look at STEM Shortage Numbers“)
Note that the Recruiting Today article, repeating a common theme in STEM shortage claims, attributes the non-existent STEM shortage to a lack of interest in STEM fields by pre-teen and teen K-12 students in the United States, implicitly absolving colleges and universities (or STEM employers) of any responsibility for the alleged STEM shortage. At the same time it actually cites a number of annual STEM graduates that grossly contradicts its assertion of lack of interest in STEM fields and its central claim of a STEM shortage at all.
Neither the article’s author or presumably editor at Recruiting Daily nor Google nor Google’s vaunted ranking algorithm seems to have noticed this astonishing contradiction.
Why is an article on “STEM shortage” with such an extreme (and unexplained) internal inconsistency ranked number one on Google?
(C) 2019 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
