STEM Pipelie

I endorse everything in this comic strip.

NYT gonna NYT

This article in the NYT a few weeks ago started off so promising, skewering many of the "STEM Shortage" narratives.  But then they started talking about how hot and promising "data science" is.  It used to be that I heard stories of people getting hired into "data science" jobs with no prior training specific to the field, just a decent background from a PhD in some data-heavy science or engineering field.  Then I started hearing of various "boot camps" to prepare data scientists, because employers didn't want to train people.  Lately I've seen ads for "data science" MS programs.  And now a NYT article saying how hot it is.

Data Science is about to be saturated.

Higher Superstition, Chapters 6-9

I paid less attention in these chapters.  I think Gross and Levitt started off with a fair point in chapter 6, on environmentalism:  Romanticizing non-Western cultures or ancient civilizations is a really bad idea.  Rejecting science while searching for solutions to environmental problems is just plain dumb.  To the extent that environmentalism is pursued as an ideological project, as opposed to applied science that takes into account human factors (and ideologies pretty much always over-simplify human factors wrong), such anti-scientific perspectives are just plain dumb.

Gross and Levitt go too far, however, when they go after scientists who take alarmist stances.  If this were a book on strategies for communication, I would probably agree with most of what they say against alarmism.  However, this is a book on anti-scientific attitudes, not un-scientific attitudes.  A scientist who exaggerates his or her findings is not doing good science, but they certainly aren't acting with animus toward science.  If anything, they are making the pedestal too high, not toppling it.  There are any number of valid criticisms to make against alarmists, but the alarmist is NOT rejecting scientific data.  There's a difference between rejecting science and abusing it with fanatical excess.  Environmental alarmism by scientists does not belong in a book on postmodernist and sociological critiques of science.  Alarmists are NOT saying "Science is just, like, your opinion, man."  Quite the opposite.

Also, the Gaia types lost.  Public pitches for environmentalism in America today are overwhelmingly dominated by appeals to science.  Somebody somewhere might be saying "Technological society is just a damaging Western construct based on scientific knowledge that poses as objective while in fact being a produce of heteropatriarchy..." but that person has no influence outside of their book club.

Chapter 7 covers a number of miscellaneous topics, among them AIDS and Afro-centric science.  I won't defend every statement made by every AIDS activist ever, but to my knowledge most of them criticized science from a place of frustration with the slow pace of good science, not from a place of rejecting scientific knowledge.  Even if some individuals adopted some anti-science rhetoric, it clearly was coming from a desire to speed up science, not replace it.  I would not have placed them alongside the postmodernists or the gender essentialists.

Afro-centric curricular with false historical claims about the scientific feats of African civilizations are a different matter, and tend to also blend in much of the same cultural relativism ("Science is just a Western way of looking at the world...") as many of the other targets of Gross and Levitt, albeit with appeals to different texts.  Gross and Levitt were fair here, and perhaps the best evidence that they were fair is that they also singled out a place where Afrocentric curricula are correct:  The first known example of steel production was in Tanzania 2,000 years ago.  It's worth noting the paradox of asserting, on the one hand, that ancient civilizations accomplished amazing innovations in science and technology, and on the other hand that science and technology are just arbitrary Western constructs.

Chapters 8 is on why people believed in the various sociological and philosophical critiques of science.  The basic conclusion of Gross and Levitt is restlessness with a Western society that failed to fix the problems people hoped it would fix.  I think that restlessness is indeed at work, and is also the source of many edufads.   People want a fix, and they want to rebel against whatever isn't delivering it.

Chapter 9 is on whether any of thtis matters.  They believed that it did.  They contended that it would lead to a schism between STEM and humanities (with social science probably being torn in two), with the revolt being led by STEM faculty.  That's not what happened, however.  Administrators put STEM on the pedestal because of grant money, but also pushed on us to deliver it (making many tenure-track jobs effectively into grant-writing jobs) and to take in more students rather than weeding out students.  We didn't tell the humanities faculty to shove it, the administrators did.  And they didn't do it in response to the postmodernists.  They would have just as easily pushed aside conservative defenders of the traditional Western Canon, and probably faster (in the name of diversity).

They argued that this will lead to the debasement of science education, but the people who have done the most to weaken science education are the people pushing edufads at the highest levels, and the people who have declared it a political imperative to get every available warm body into STEM.  Keynes was right about practical men being slaves of defunct intellectuals, but it doesn't follow that every defunct intellectual will enslave a generation of practical men.

They argued that it will debase public discourse, but ultimately it's not the left that did the most to weaken science in public discourse.  The left has much to answer for in the politics of the outside world, including misunderstanding and misusing science in certain cases, but the left has NOT tried to dethrone science.  If anything, lefty technocrats have elevated science above its station, ignoring the is/ought distinction.

Why were they wrong?  I think they were wrong because they over-estimated the power that humanities professors have over the next generation.  As I said above, one must not over-state Keynes' observation on the power of intellectuals.  Dethroning science was never an interesting project for Gen X, coming of age as the internet did.  Science kept improving things for us; why would we take up torches and pitchforks at the behest of our comparative lit profs?  Instead, we made the mistake of listening to the other idea-pushers, the ones insisting that we'd soon face a STEM shortage.  And the final result of that was to make traditionalists like me so pissed off that I've spent two and a half years reading and blogging about humanities and social science.

The real enemy we face now is a technocratic class that somehow rejects meritocracy.  Hey, I don't get it either.  But they see stubborn social problems and believe that we can fix it by defining away merit in STEM education.

Strange times.

Shills gonna shill; it's their code

The CEO of General Motors (a company that recently laid off workers) is announcing a $10 million initiative to improve STEM education and get more kids to learn how to code:

But the engineering talent and computer coding skills that the industry needs is in short supply. That's why General Motors CEO Mary Barra announced a new push to train engineers on Wednesday in New York City. The effort is specifically aimed at recruiting women and minorities. 

GM has long helped train engineers. Barra earned a degree in electrical engineering from General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan -- now Kettering University -- an engineering and business school that was, at the time, operated by GM. 

"A car today has hundreds of millions of lines of code," Barra said in an exclusive interview with CNN. "We do see a shortage if we don't address this and I mean fully fundamentally. Every child needs to have these skills."
...
Wednesday's announcement is part of GM's larger push to spend over $10 million in 2017 to improve education in the so-called STEM areas of science, technology, engineering and math.

Well, I checked out their job openings.  As of June 28, 2017 they have 254 engineering jobs open, at a wide range of experience levels.  They could, if they wanted, take that $10 million and use it to bump up the pay and benefits by an average of $40k per opening.  Or they could invest in on-the-job training, bringing in people whose resumes show potential but aren't ideal matches to the jobs.  That's what they would do if the talent shortfalls were as serious as they claim.  Instead they're talking to reporters about STEM education.

What I find most fascinating is that GM used to operate Kettering University but has walked away from it.  If they have such great needs for STEM talent, why not keep running a university that meets their needs?

The hand-wringer test

I have a casual interest in linguistics--I enjoy browsing an Indo-European dictionary and occasionally tweet about what I learn.  I thus came across this discussion of whether linguistics qualifies as a STEM field.  If the question is whether linguists approach questions in their field with a scientific mindset, or draw upon approaches akin to those in the natural sciences, the answer is an unambiguous yes.  Moreover, if that is enough to qualify a field as STEM then most/all social science fields are either STEM fields or at least have sub-fields that count as STEM.  Linguistics may have elements that are more akin to humanities (qualitative and descriptive analysis of texts and behavior), but it also has social science and even natural science (e.g. neuroscience) components.  It is, a minimum, a good fit for the stated description of STEAM, if not STEM.

However, I mostly approach the definitions of words from a descriptivist perspective, not a prescriptivist perspective.  STEM sits on a pedestal, and the descriptivist's question is not whether linguistics belongs on the pedestal but whether the gatekeepers will recognize its right to stand on the pedestal.  Linguistics may fit the gatekeepers' stated criteria for inclusion in STEM, but people are rarely honest about the criteria that they actually employ to determine admission to a pedestal.  You have to watch their actions, not just listen to their words.  And from my experience in a university where the local culture perceives its moral legitimacy as deriving from our work on bringing students into STEM, social science is only STEM when we're trying to be collegial with social science faculty, or when a social scientist is studying issues of STEM equity and the STEM workforce.

As I said in my post about STEAM, the way to figure out if a field is STEM is to do a thought experiment involving students changing majors.  Suppose that two twins, Alice and Bob, start off as electrical engineering majors.  Alice then changes majors to physics, while Bob changes to a social science field.  Which decision would elicit more hand-wringing among the people who worry about the STEM Pipeline?

A tempting rejoinder is that we shouldn't care about the hand-wringers, we should just look at the intellectual rigor of the field, and we'd have to agree that there are plenty of things in linguistics that qualify as science.  I don't deny that, but I would note that (1) there are plenty of people whose work is definitely not science but is nonetheless intellectually rigorous (e.g. good scholars in the humanities) so why is intellectual rigor a sufficient criterion for inclusion in STEM? and (2) if we go down that road then most departments on a university campus would have STEM components (e.g. there's plenty of chemistry in art, plenty of acoustic science and technology in music, plenty of behavioral science in marketing, etc.) and STEM becomes so broad that it papers over the distinctions that make for intellectual diversity.  If STEM is the arbiter of good then everything is STEM and everything is good and everything belongs on campus, but we already agreed that the art and literature and business faculty should work on the same campus as the physicists and biologists and mathematicians, so what was the point of this label again?  Oh, right, STEM is on the pedestal.  Well, maybe instead of putting everything onto the pedestal we should point out how silly the pedestal is, and how ultimately destructive it is to the notion of intellectual diversity.

Anyway, I have a casual hobbyist interest in linguistics, and I certainly respect the rigor and value of the field, but I think that instead of including everything in STEM we should question why inclusion in STEM is considered so valuable.

How narratives are formed

One should always take it with a grain of salt when CEOs complain about skill shortages (maybe they'd get more skilled people if they offered more money), but here I'm less interested in the CEOs' claims than in the response to them.

Here's what CEOs said about the challenge of filling jobs:

One executive said in discussions with White House officials that his company has 50 participants in a factory apprenticeship program, but could take 500 if enough were qualified. But he said that in his experience, most students coming out of high school lack the math and English skills to absorb technical manuals.

That certainly accords with my experience.

Here's what the sub-headline says:

Manufacturing leaders urge President Trump to encourage high-tech skills training.

Basic math and English skills are not high-tech.  They're essential to a high-tech job, but they themselves are not high-tech.  And that's the problem: People want the hot and new, not the fundamentals.  CEOs say that they will train people for high-tech manufacturing if they have basic math and reading skills, journalists translate that into high-tech skills, and no doubt some shill in higher ed is busy explaining that this is why we need people with advanced degrees in STEM...because a CEO wants a reasonably competent high school grad who can be trained to work on the production floor.

On the other hand, I find it fascinating that the CEOs are talking about technical manuals.  Normally we assume that it's higher ed that's stodgy and unable to Get With The Times, but here we see business executives saying that they need people who can read manuals while the most progressive kool-aid drinkers in higher ed all say that we need to embrace the post-literate society and de-emphasize books in favor of videos.  I find this amusingly ironic.

Two Cultures: Where's the other one, dude?

I finished reading C.P. Snow's Two Cultures essay of 1959.  It isn't quite what I was expecting.  I've always heard it described as a lament of the divide between the two sides of academia.  I was thus expecting some sort of essay along the lines of a defense of broad liberal arts education, and I was dreading the platitudes.  Instead, it seems to be more of a critique of the UK's historic emphasis on humanities over the sciences in their elite educational establishments, followed by a comparison of the ways in which the UK, US, and USSR educated people in the 1950's and a discussion of alleged needs for more scientists and engineers in the UK. He's not trying to integrate science and humanities so much as get STEM up on the pedestal.  He might insist that it's a call for equality, but there's precious little discussion of the UK's needs in any area outside STEM, or a comparison of how other countries educate people in subjects besides STEM. In many ways it could be read as an early "STEM crisis" narrative.  However, it's difficult for me to extract much from that for comparative purposes, because I'm mostly only familiar with American "STEM crisis" narratives, not the UK analogues, so I can't really say if this essay is sign of everything happening before and happening again, or a sign of genuine change.

Here are some interesting tidbits that I can take away from it:

First, Snow acknowledges that the Industrial Revolution happened in the UK despite the lack of a first-rate basic science establishment in the 18th century, and without much involvement from college grads.  This is an important thing, one under-appreciated by the STEM crisis hand-wringers.  I made this point before regarding Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon.  I wish he'd considered what this might mean for future economic development.  We academics over-estimate our own importance, and he went from academia to the Ministry of Labour and then a post as a civil service commissioner.

Second, the differences that Snow notes between the US, UK, and USSR systems, regarding their relative levels of specialization, seem to remain true today.  To this day, Russian scientific research institutes often have incredibly narrow names and mandates.  They don't produce mechanical engineers; they produce graduates in computational thermal systems analysis, and structural mechanics, and so forth.

Third, he traces the cultural differences between science and humanities to the fact that the humanities scholars study the human condition, which tends to inflict pessimism, while scientists believe that technical solutions to problems are possible.  On that point I agree with him completely.  I wish he'd said something interesting about how to educate people who integrate those mindsets on some interesting level, not just "OMG, I'm, like, so broad-minded!  Because I see multiple perspectives!"

Fourth, I give Snow credit for recognizing that the production of Einsteins is not the main task of a STEM education program.  He believes that the "alpha plus" types will do fine as long as they're put in some sort of half-decent academic environment.  It's hard to screw up with them.  It's also pretty hard to screw up the "alpha" types.  (He seems to have adopted the language of Huxley's Brave New World here.)  He recognizes that the hard part is training people in the third tier, some of whom will do technical work but many of whom will go on to do managerial or business ("human") work in the technical fields.  I give him credit for recognizing that that's more important than trying to ensure that a system maximizes the output of top talent.  With the top talent you mostly have to get out of the way, and it's only the dilettantes who worry about how The System is allegedly so unfair to would-be Einsteins.  He doesn't have much in the way of practical advice on how to do it, but he gets full points for at least recognizing it.

He has one spectacularly wrong prediction:  He predicted that since human ability is pretty much the same everywhere it's inevitable that the gap between the rich industrialized world and the rest of the world would evaporate by 2000.  While he was right on the even distribution of ability around the world, he under-estimated the systemic, cultural, and institutional factors that are needed to develop successful industrial sectors.  That said, he was at least right that the poor countries would start to compete with rich countries; by 2000 the off-shoring of factories was well underway, and this November we felt the effects of that in the US election.

So, in sum, Snow's "Two Cultures" lecture isn't what it is usually cited for being about, but it contains an interesting bunch of tidbits.  I purchased an edition with several more essays and lecture transcripts, so I'll have more to say about Snow in the coming week.

Beltway advocacy groups gonna Beltway

Something making the rounds among physicists right now is the following press release, which was posted by the American Physical Society but soon taken down after many physicists called it inappropriate:

(Click on the image too enlarge it)

The American Physical Society is a DC-area advocacy group.  Yes, it exists to serve its members rather than the federal government, but most of its members are scientists who work or study in institutions that get federal money for research and educational purposes.  In recognition of that reality, the American Physical Society has its headquarters in College Park, Maryland, just outside DC.

Professional Societies that want the federal government to spend money on science invariably articulate that goal in language that will be pleasing to the people in power.  Donald Trump has used "Make America Great Again" as his slogan, and while that slogan carries quite a bit of baggage (e.g. it is historically uninformed, and carries an embedded assumption about certain demographic changes representing changes for the worse) it is clearly something that he likes to say and hear.  In fact, there's already an official government website devoted to the concept.  Moreover, we've been hearing for decades about an alleged "STEM crisis" threatening America's scientific pre-eminence and global leadership, so Trump's catch-phrase is (on the surface) tailor-made for the neuroses of academic scientists.

Seen on that level, the press release put out by APS was completely reasonable and squarely within their charge.

However, Donald Trump is also a bigot who threatens peace, prosperity, and freedom, and in light of his complaints about Mexicans and Muslims there's a clear implication that America will be great when we have sent certain people away.  Seen on that level, no decent person should invoke his catch-phrase in anything except a critical (or perhaps ironic) manner.  To the extent that the American Physical Society exists to serve its members as more than just an advocate for federal spending on science, they should pay attention to how the members will read and process their statements.

Here's the thing:  Barring some unexpected change in direction, the American Physical Society will, one way or another, engage with the Trump Administration.  It pains me to type "Trump Administration", but that is the reality that we live in, at least in this sector of the multiverse.  Most APS members are dependent on federal research funding, and the APS will almost certainly pursue an agenda that is cognizant of that fact.

There are two possible responses to the reality I just identified:  One is to ask something more substantial of the APS than slightly more sensitive phrasing of press releases while they continue to advocate for federal funding of science.  It means operating as an opposition group rather than a group that seeks a piece of the pie within the existing system. There have always been proud dissidents in the physics community (e.g. some great anti-Soviet dissidents) and perhaps the American Physical Society should rally us in that spirit of dissent.  But this is a radical path.  It means retaliation both on the large scale (reduced funding for physics) and the individual level (professional consequences for federal employees who resist their employer).  It is noble to choose that, and we can have that conversation, but it comes at a cost that people will have to weigh.

The other option is a practical one:  Accept the reality that the American Physical Society will serve primarily as a DC-area advocacy group, and just ask that press releases be sensitive to the fact that most (but not all) APS members don't want to be reminded that this means engagement with the Trump Administration.

I'm not writing here to promote one path over the other.  Resistance is hard.  Physicists have mortgages and kids and medical conditions that necessitate keeping jobs with health insurance.  Maybe it's better if the APS sticks to advocacy and lets physicists who choose the path of dissent do so in some other venue. On the other side of the coin, dissent is virtuous and the world may someday applaud those who took risks to dissent.  Maybe the APS should do that.  We can argue it either way and I'm not going to reach and defend a considered conclusion in this post.

What I am suggesting in this post is that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that the second path is all that virtuous or sensitive.  It is practical and seemly, but it is NOT making a stand in any meaningful sense.  It is NOT a stride for social justice.  It's just what people do when they have mortgages to pay.  The reality is that--barring some substantial change in direction at the behest of the membership--professional societies will engage with the Trump Administration, and that engagement will mean speaking in the catch-phrases of the Administration.  Now, I've written curmudgeonly articles on eschewing buzzwords and catch-phrases, so I'm fine with doing so, but I also choose not to chase large sums of money.  Advocacy groups advocating for large federal research budgets will not make my choice.  At best they will cloak their choices in seemly appearances.

Finally, remember that the physics community engages in hero worship of people who built nuclear bombs.  Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that using a new President's catch-phrase is the worst thing we've ever done.  Moral outrage over pure appearances is shallow.

Final thoughts on _They're Not Dumb, They're Different_: The policy consensus side

In her conclusions (pages 83-86), Sheila Tobias starts off going in a promising direction:  She briefly questions the forecasts of a shortage of scientists.  These questions are so juicy, so refreshing, that for a moment I was taken to the present!  (Where a few people--just a few, mind you--are starting to question that narrative.)  I felt like maybe I'm reading something from the here and now, not the 1990's.  But after acknowledging that we can't be certain, she moves on to make recommendations rooted in the consensus assumption of a 1990's science education researcher.  I shall quote the bottom of page 86:

The first step is a moral and strategic imperative: no college student should be permitted to say "no" to science without a struggle.

I cannot imagine anyone in a modern university calling for such an overbearing push to get more students  into humanities.  I cannot imagine majoring in humanities being declared a "moral imperative."  The STEM pedestal is an astounding thing.

Anyway, Tobias goes on to recommend the formation of an industry of advisers, mentors, recruiters, and STEM education and pipeline professionals who will devote all of their efforts to trying to get more students into and through science programs.  To a large extent the National Science Foundation has done as she recommended more than a generation ago.  There is indeed an industry of such people, largely funded by NSF.  She wasn't the only person urging this, and such an industry was already present in some form then, but we see how the elite chatter of a generation ago to some extent does shape the enterprises of today.  John Maynard Keynes was right about "practical men" being "slaves of some defunct economist."  Even as we hear rumblings against the notion of a "STEM crisis", tremendous numbers of well-funded people proclaim their desire to seek "data-driven best practices" to solve a crisis whose existence was proclaimed as gospel a generation ago.

Tobias, Chapter 2

I don't have time to write up my full thoughts on chapter 2; a lot of the themes seem to be repeated in what little I've read of the next chapter, so I think I'll just respond to those themes after I've read the whole book.  But a few quick thoughts:

1) The student in the second chapter took a physics class.  Some of the things that he reports are valid criticisms of how we teach physics.  I think we've actually made progress on a subset of them (remember, this book is more than 20 years old), but we could stand to make more progress.

2) Some of his critiques go to points that sound nice on the surface, but they would not work as well as he thinks if we actually tried to do it at scale with the students that we get.  The student does note that we actually do some things right, that our students do get motivated in certain ways that many humanities students don't (in his observation).  Of course, we also fail to motivate in certain ways that the humanities do more effectively.

It's tempting to say "Well, obviously just take the best of each!" but that implies that upsides and downsides are completely separable.  I don't think real life works that way.

3) I'm not going to name names, but in addition to the observations of the student, the author frequently cites (positively) the observations of someone whom I've interacted with.  I was...not impressed.  To put it mildly.  That colors my reading.

4) One thing that outside critics of physics often miss is that we'd love to spend more time on the Big Picture but we have a hard, cumulative, technical task in front of us.  There's no evading that.  We can talk about Big Ideas all day, but the real progress on those ideas was only made through painstaking technical work.  On the margin, we could (and probably should) spend a bit more time than we do on Big Ideas rather than technical calculation, but those technical skills are vital to either using physics or making progress on advancing the field of physics, and they take a lot of time to hone.  I'm open to providing more complementary/supplementary treatment of Big Ideas, but if students don't get a whole lot of practice on the hard, technical side of the field then we are cheating them out of the opportunity to have a career where they either use physics or make advances in physics.

5) Frankly, a lot of the "I am more, like, into the Big Ideas, man!" types are dilettantes, and usually white dude dilettantes.  Sorry, but it's true.  Yes, yes, there are flaky women and flaky people of color; I recognize and support the right of people of diverse identities to be flakes.  Still, the flaky "I'm, like, more into, like, the ideas than, you know, the math, because my mind is more about being weird and flexible and seeing the Real Ideas, you know?" types are disproportionately white dudes.  That's my in-the-trenches observation.  I try to avoid stereotyping but this one is born out by observation.

That's not to say that everyone who wants to talk about Big Ideas is a flake, but the flakes ALWAYS say that.  Always.

Why am I commenting on it?  Because everyone agrees that physics needs to diversify, so I find it hilarious that our critics then come at us with something that the dilettante white dudes have been saying to us since forever.  Believe me, you don't want us designing curricula around those guys if you want us to attract women and people of color.

6) That said, there are curricula that do more to address Big Ideas while also developing technical skills.  Moore's Six Ideas That Shaped Physics and also the Matter and Interactions curriculum are both excellent examples of that.  We need to do more of that.

7) While I can and will weigh the pros and cons of the critics in more detail, it is very much a marker of when the book was written that she couches the critiques in terms of "Maybe if we addressed this we could solve the STEM shortage..."  I am listening to Sublime as I type this.  The 90's were good times, man.  Good times.

90's flashback: _They're Not Dumb, They're Different_ by Sheila Tobias

My next reading project is They're Not Dumb, They're Different by Sheila Tobias.  Whatever else I might ultimately come to dislike about this book, it's 94 pages.  Too many people turn out 200-300 page books because they think that they need to, but Tobias doesn't do that.  Kudos to her.

This book was written in 1990, and while I've only read the introduction I can say that it definitely feels like a trip back to the 90's and old ideas about STEM shortages. You can almost hear Kurt Cobain singing Heart-Shaped Box.  You can almost feel the political and racial tension in the air as people are glued to their TV for the latest twists in the OJ case. It's easy to remember an era when X-Files was on TV and the Clinton Administration was rocked by sex scandals.

In the intro, Tobias motivates her work by talking about the country's shortage of science talent, and the need to recruit more people into science.  She mentions a longitudinal study that started with 750,000 high school students who declared a possible interest in science in the 1970's, and after more than a decade of follow-through a bit less than 10,000 of them have gotten PhDs in STEM.  In my opinion, 1.3% of a potentially interested cohort getting a PhD in science is hardly a problem; it might actually be over-production. But it's presented as evidence of a problem.

More tellingly, she notes that 61,000 of them started graduate study in STEM, even though "only" 9,700 of them got a PhD.  This is a lesson in how narratives are made when people start from the assumption of a moral crisis in need of resolution.  If 61,000 people enrolled in PhD programs and only 9,700 of them got a PhD I would agree that there's a problem.  I might not classify it as a problem of under-production, but I would agree that there is a problem of inefficiently identifying and channeling talent.  There's no reason for so many people to invest prime years in a hard endeavor that so few will finish.  But who said that they all entered graduate school in pursuit of a PhD?  The gold standard for an engineer in industry is an MS (and many have great careers with just a BS, or even a BS and MBA).  And who said that the gold standard for retention in STEM is completion of a PhD?  Can't a person have a career doing economically and socially significant things in science and engineering without a PhD?

The fact that Tobias opens with these dubiously status quo assumptions, these cultural artifacts of a long-standing consensus, does not mean that there will be nothing of value in what follows.  But it does mean that when I read it I detect a certain voice in the author's writing.  It's like reading an old novel written in the musty language of an earlier era; you know you're reading something of a particular place and time and class.  It's a narrative that sounded so seductive when I was young and dumb, something that never should have made sense yet somehow did even in an era where the SoCal aerospace industry was being completely restructured (and mostly downsized) while the IT industry was taking shape.  A narrative of a strange era that is past.  Oh, people still tell this narrative, but now it's a narrative that faces challengers, because the internet exists and every disgruntled postdoc and adjunct out there can take to social media.

Anyway, the focus of this book will be her "Second Tier" study.  The premise is that science and engineering only select for people who will stick with it through numerous hurdles, rather than recruiting.  (We shall ignore the fact that since Sputnik there have been numerous efforts to sell science and engineering to kids, numerous earnest people standing in front of students and telling them that STEM Is Our Future and we desperately need them, numerous Official Reports On The Need To Recruit and subsequent curricular redesign efforts in k-12 and beyond.)  So, Tobias recruits smart people who have been successful in other fields but never gave any thought to science, and asks them to audit college math and science classes, to provide a field study of one tribe by another.

Sociologically I agree that it's an interesting concept on its own, and certainly worthwhile for a science educator who wants to engage in introspection and take in some outside critiques.  I can read it with that goal in mind.

What I can't do is read it as a study that must a priori be relevant to solving systemic problems in my field, and not just because I reject the narrative of a STEM shortage.  Working in the trenches of college-level science education, the problem that I face is not an abundance of empty seats while students flock to other fields.  Rather, I live in a world where the classroom is filled with ill-prepared students, the cultural mindset of my peers and superiors is that it would be unjust to tell them to consider another field, and scholars in the humanities and social sciences are scared that their disciplines will be axed for the ascendant STEM fields.  In this world, our biggest challenge is not to win over the bright kids who chose to major in literature or accounting, but rather to help the ill-prepared kid who harbors a dream of rocket science, and either make them into a rocket scientist or gently guide them to another path.

We can still learn something from the observations of genuine outsiders, just as we can learn something from any number of experiences and observations.  There may be serendipitous insight in here, and if so, great!  But I don't think that I can feasibly or realistically approach this book as one whose design promises solutions to the practical problems immediately in front of me.  The design of the study means that any such solutions will emerge by lucky happenstance, not by careful targeting.  I can learn new things to add to my general mental toolkit, but my inner Bayesian assigns a low prior probability to the notion that this book has direct solutions to my problems.

Also, I can read this book as a cultural artifact, as an example of what people actually believed in the early 1990's, an era when the Cold War was won, our greatest geopolitical problems were (allegedly) solved, a tech boom was building in the aftermath of a recession, the House of Clinton was ascending after a Bush presidency, and the music on the radio was good.  The elite consensus that places STEM on a pedestal is a source of never-ending frustration for me, and this book is a time capsule that might help me understand it.  Mind you, STEM mania predates this book by several decades, but in order for a consensus to survive it must adapt, and this book might tell me something about the current incarnation of STEM mania.

With all that said, let's see what outsiders have to say when they observe a science class.

The false ecumenicalism of STEAM

There's an editorial that I half-agree with in the latest issue of Scientific American, and like many things that get at half of an issue it's almost as dangerous as simply ignoring the issue.  The editors make the completely valid point that our society need more than just people who are trained in natural science and engineering, that we also need people who study the humanities and social sciences.  I agree completely, as you might gather from the fact that most of the books I've blogged about here are written by people who aren't trained in math, natural science, or engineering, and are primarily about non-technical issues.  I denounce the short-sightedness of politicians who want to focus our higher education system primarily on STEM.  Partly because (as I've said before) putting STEM on a pedestal is actually quite bad for STEM* and partly because the rest of society (i.e. the world beyond the walls of the science buildings on campus) also needs more than STEM.

The editors of SciAm get that society needs more than STEM, but they can't help but couch this need in terms of the economic competitiveness of high-tech industries:

The need to teach both music theory and string theory is a necessity for the U.S. economy to continue as the preeminent leader in technological innovation. The unparalleled dynamism of Silicon Valley and Hollywood requires intimate ties that unite what scientist and novelist C. P. Snow called the “two cultures” of the arts and sciences.

Steve Jobs, who reigned for decades as a tech hero, was neither a coder nor a hardware engineer. He stood out among the tech elite because he brought an artistic sensibility to the redesign of clunky mobile phones and desktop computers. Jobs once declared: “It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough—that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” 

A seeming link between innovation and the liberal arts now intrigues countries where broad-based education is less prevalent. In most of the world, university curricula still emphasize learning skills oriented toward a specific profession or trade. The ebullience of the U.S. economy, which boasted in 2014 the highest percentage of high-tech outfits among all its public companies—has spurred countries such as Singapore to create schools fashioned after the U.S. liberal arts model.  

My problem with this is that it still has STEM on the pedestal:  There's nothing about the value of the humanities and social sciences** in their own right, only their significance for high-tech industries. Personally, my reason for reading and blogging about so many books on history, social issues, and so forth is that I want to understand people, not that people often work in STEM.  Teaching is an activity in which one can benefit from knowledge of history, psychology, etc. irrespective of what discipline one is in.  The value of humanities and social science for my work can thus be measured by how much my work involves people, not by how much humanities and social science help STEM.  More importantly, the value of humanities and social science should be measured according to more than just the extent to which they matter for my work (or anyone's "work", as opposed to the rest of life).

Now, in academia I can sense a backlash starting to stir against the current STEM craze.  However concerned I might be about how this pedestal will affect STEM, I can hardly expect sympathy from people who aren't in STEM.  The pedestal might have its downsides, but not being on the pedestal has even more downsides.  Consequently, some administrative types now talk about "STEAM", which stands for "Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics."  Nobody is entirely sure whether the "Arts" only include visual and performing arts, or also the liberal arts*** more broadly.  I'm less interested in definitions listed in some particular document and more interested in usage. When I hear administrators talking about the "A" in "STEAM" I've heard several different points, some of which could be roughly summed up as:

1. "Designing technology requires attention to aesthetics."  This is a completely valid point that has been known for millenia, hence the field known as "architecture."
2. "Designing technology requires attention to human factors more broadly."  Again, a completely valid point.
3. "Scientists can learn a lot about their field from historians and philosophers of science and technology."  This is a point with which I also agree completely, and it informs much of my blogging here.  Indeed, I strongly encourage students to make connections between their major and their general education by taking classes on the history of science.
4. "Solving workforce issues in the sciences requires the involvement of people who have considered the cultural factors and problems of inequality that affect the pipeline of talent."  While I might dissent from some of the most common narratives offered in regard to these topics, I completely agree that these are important areas for inquiry.  I would like to see more and broader inquiry on these issues.

However, do you notice that in each case the "Arts" (however construed) are examined only in regard to how they interact with STEM?  That's fine if the specific topic on the table is whether to include some non-STEM people in a STEM-focused endeavor, but not if the topic on the table is the purpose and future direction of a comprehensive university.  The STEAM buzzword could probably be invoked to justify hiring an art historian who emphasizes architecture, an English professor who is an expert on teaching technical writing, or an ethnic studies professor who studies equity issues in STEM.  However, I'm not sure that it could be invoked to justify hiring a historian who studies the cultural history of China, an English professor who's interested in 18th century American poetry, or an ethnic studies scholar who's interested in representations of ethnicity in cinema.  These people might fit under the Arts (at least in the sense of Liberal Arts) but I doubt that they would fit under any but the most bland (and thus pointless) definitions of STEAM.  STEAM is false ecumenicalism, a way of offering University Strategic Initiatives that are nominally inclusive of disciplines beyond STEM while still measuring those disciplines by the yardstick of STEM.  As long as the paramount yardstick of academic inquiry and teaching is relevance to STEM the Academy is going to suffer.
____________

*In a society that is democratic in the way described by de Tocqueville, those academic fields that are deemed most important will have an obligation to take in the huddled masses, however unprepared and untalented they may be.  This may provide some benefit for members of the masses as individuals, at least initially, but it tends to impede the pursuit of excellence, and eventually the phenomenon of credential inflation will rear its head, to the detriment of all, but disproportionately hurting the least privileged.

**Whether or not the social sciences are included in STEM depends on whether the "S" in STEM is implicitly "NS" (Natural Science).  I personally exclude the social sciences from STEM, not because I disrespect the intellectual rigor of those fields but because I eschew linguistic prescriptivism in favor of looking at how people actually use words.  To wit, consider the following thought experiment:  We have two students, both of whom start off majoring in chemistry.  One of them then switches majors to physics, while the other switches majors to economics.  Would a typical "STEM crisis" hand-wringer react to both with equal nonchalance, saying "They're still in STEM", or would they evince more concern over the new economics major than the new physics major?

***We could also ask which disciplines get counted as "liberal arts", or the extent to which the liberal arts overlap STEM, but let's set that aside for now.

Next book: More and Different by Phil Anderson

I'm reading More and Different, a collection of essays (of varying length and, sadly, readability) by Nobel-winning solid-state physicist Phil Anderson.  Most of the essays that I've read so far have been his remembrances of great moments in the history of solid state physics and his work at Bell Labs.  However, in his reflection on the trajectory of 20th century physics as a whole, he makes the unusual move of offering a sober-eyed lament about the state of science careers at the dawn of the 21st century.  People know that there is a game, and so they collect tokens of accomplishment rather than simply pushing forward on problems that they find to be intellectually significant.  I've noted before that sometimes you learn more about people when you observe them in comfortable circumstances rather than competitive ones.  Alas, as we keep expanding the number of scientists (while proclaiming that project to be a moral and economic imperative) we get fewer chances to observe how people respond to comfort and more chances to observe how they respond to competition.  Of course, it is completely impossible in a democratic culture (a concept that is related to but somewhat distinct from a democratic government) to afford intellectual elites too much visible comfort.  Forget about what the masses will say--the educated themselves will recoil from it, because Americans are Americans.  Just look at how the National Science Foundation wants to keep people busy with the democratic work of outreach, whether graduate students or established faculty, rather than let people focus on science.

sySTEM of a downturn

A fascinating quote in today's Science:

“Of every 100 people who walk in [to earn a bachelor's degree], we have about eight who stay through getting a bachelor's degree in STEM and actually working in STEM. And for minority students, it's even worse. It really is dismal,” said Roni Ellington, associate professor of mathematics education at Morgan State University.

Wow, that sounds dire! We lose 92% of the talent!

Leaving aside the fact that the assertion is made without a link to statistical evidence or context on how the number was arrived at, there are two problems with this assertion:

1) Part of the "problem" is that most people with STEM degrees do not work in jobs classified as being in STEM. On any given day you have to roll the dice to see if the narrative is "See, people are leaving STEM!!1!!11!" or "See, STEM training makes you very versatile and prepares you both for STEM careers and alternative careers!"  Nobody ever says "Hmm, maybe it's because the economy doesn't need as many STEM professionals as the shills claim..."

2) Just a few years ago Science published an article in which people admitted that the retention rate in STEM is better than most other majors, and the rate at which people switch into STEM from other majors is higher than the rate at which people switch from STEM into other majors.  They also admitted that they had not examined this prior to 2013, proving that there is indeed a shortage of people with scientific reasoning abilities in the United States...at least among the sorts of people who compile statistics on STEM shortages.

But let's not let "facts" get in the way of a good "The sky is falling!" narrative.

Metzger: Administrations and Bureaucracy

Now Metzger is discussing the growth of university bureaucracy and the backlash against it.  As universities expanded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they inevitably became more bureaucratic.  Metzger has no problem accepting Thorstein Veblen's decision to blame boards of trustees (mostly businessmen) for some of it, but also notes that it helped to protect academic freedom to the extent that professors were subject to rules and procedures rather than the whim of the president of the university.  I definitely need to read something by Veblen at some point.

I also like how Metzger notes that expanded PhD production had an effect on the academic job market.  (Page 454)  This is something that some people still can't wrap their minds around, even though the National Science Foundation just released a report on how many new PhDs are taking jobs as postdocs rather than industry despite the alleged need for more PhDs in industry.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

All of this has been shilled before and will be shilled again

I'm looking at a bunch of things I read a few years ago.  Here's a fascinating infographic from the Brookings Institution:

I don't have any problem with the basic concept of parsing out different segments of the STEM job market,m and I certainly do NOT object to  people who note that not all STEM jobs need a 4-year degree.  At the same time, I have this nasty feeling that definition creep can easily lead to even more inflated estimates of our country's alleged "need" for STEM graduates.  You start with a broad definition, one that isn't just about 4-year grads, and get a large number of jobs.  Then you point to the large number while arguing for the importance of a particular segment, without noting any of the crucial context or caveats.

Seriously, guys, she's turning me into a Newt! Help! Help! I'm being transmuted!

Top of page 164:

Predictions of shortages of scientists and engineers occur with some frequency, despite evidence to the contrary. 

Later on that same page:

But getting egg on their face did not stop the forecast pundits.

Page 165:

Third, shortages are often predicted by groups who have a vested interest in atttracting more students to graduate school and into careers in science and engineering.

Wait, she thinks that people's pecuniary interests might affect their forecasts?  What is she, an economist or something?  Oh, right.

Page 168:

To quote the American Institute of Physics, "The proportion of new PhDs accepting postdoctoral positions has been a better job market indicator than the unemployment rate for PhDs, which is traditionally low and does not fluctuate a great deal."

AIP has always been good at putting out reliable statistical data.  The same cannot be said for APS.

Pages 168-169:

More generally, the proportion of new PhDs with definite plans to take a postdoc generally increases when the size of the graduating class increases, consistent with the idea that job market prospects are depressed due to an increase in supply.

She's just begging to be burned at the stake.

Stephan, first few chapters: Workforce issues

Paula Stephan's book is hard to blog because it is detailed and descriptive rather than argumentative.  It's an interesting read, painting a very wide and detailed picture of how science works, but it's hard to pick out points to ponder or grapple with because it's not about Big Points (which is fine).  The part about intellectual property was interesting:  According to page 50, data shows that universities get more patent revenue for themselves when they let their faculty keep a larger share of the revenue (because their faculty have more incentives to commercialize) but the universities that give a larger share of revenue to faculty don't actually produce more patents.  The difference, then, must be the type and quality of research that they generate, its commercial feasibility, and the aggressiveness of their faculty in going beyond the patent office and actually pushing their idea to market.

On page 68 I learned that one reason (though hardly the only reason) why US university labs rely more on grad students and postdocs while Europeans rely more on staff scientists and similar sorts of personnel is that in the 1980's NSF started pushing faculty to put grad students on their grants rather than technicians.  I suspect that part of the reason was economic, but only partly so:  While a grad student will just about always receive less in salary and benefits than a technician (especially an experienced technician), some universities charge massive tuition for grad students and that tuition then gets covered by the research grant supporting the student.  Consequently, while at some schools the economics will favor the use of students by a wide margin, at others the margin may not be quite as wide.  Moreover, depending on their level of training, level of experience, personal abilities, and opportunities for development, a technician may be more useful than a grad student--the grad students may ultimately go farther as scientists, but it takes a while to get them there, whereas a good technician can keep a project moving forward on a consistent basis.  I suspect that part of the reason for NSF's preference is that they have long had a mandate to expand the scientific workforce because of an alleged crisis in STEM, and supporting students will do that, whereas supporting technicians will simply keep the labs humming along and producing mere science.  And this focus on students apparently started in the 1980's, which is when "A Nation At Risk" came out.

(And let me assure you that I don't buy into a dichotomy:  Clearly the world needs good lab techs AND students training to be scientists, but the answer then is to fund projects that have people in whatever mix of roles makes sense for the success of the project, not a mandate to endlessly expand the STEM workforce.)

ADDENDUM: I decided to look for the original source for the assertion about NSF.  It's a 1998 interview with then-NSF Director Rita Colwell by Science magazine.  Here's the key quote:

On a recent report of a Ph.D. glut in the life sciences: 

In the 1980s, NSF asked investigators to put graduate students on their research budgets, saying that it preferred to fund graduate students rather than technicians. But as often happens, the pendulum swung too far. There needs to be a balance. Well-trained technicians are needed to run equipment and labs, and what better way to provide opportunities for them than to build it into research grants. 

There's great respectability for those who want to be technicians, but we don't give them the opportunity. We've made it a sign of failure if you don't get a Ph.D. Other countries don't have this [negative] attitude. … With all the emphasis on graduate students, I'm not so sure that the question we're facing is one of overproduction. I think we have to look more closely at how we're using our resources. We've created a situation in the career pipeline where there is a bulge at the end of a postdoc and no place to go.

Even in 1998, people were talking about PhD gluts.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.  Of course, that was around the time that NIH doubled its research spending, so for a while things were good for life sciences PhDs.  But exponential growth can only go on for so long.

The customer is always right

Some chemists have decided that if students are showing up in organic chemistry without good preparation in general chemistry, the problem is NOT that the introductory chemistry course (i.e. the prerequisite) needs to be improved, but that the people teaching organic chemistry need to re-calibrate to make the class accessible to people with weak preparation.  How much do you want to bet that they would offer as a rationale "We need to teach chemistry to more people so we can be internationally competitive"?  Well, I'm sure that if we just start teaching more science classes in a manner that's accessible to the poorly-prepared then we'll become much more competitive internationally.

Quick tidbits

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that there are shortages of STEM workers in some fields and at some levels and not at others.  It's almost as if skilled labor were a differentiated good being sold to heterogeneous buyers.  If only there were a social science discipline that could handle this concept.

Meanwhile, a new article shows that the ancient Babylonians were working out the beginnings of calculus.  Now if we could just teach calculus to California public school graduates we'd be making some progress.