I see lots of “STEM” promotion activity by well-meaning engineers, persuaded to address a supposed “STEM shortage”. Quite why anyone would need to promote STEM is a mystery to me: I – and I suspect this is true of many engineers – have always been fascinated by how things work. What use are reluctant engineers?
But leaving that thought aside, how can the unemployment and underemployment of engineering graduates (and even highly experienced engineers) be so high if there is a STEM shortage? The answer is simple: there is no STEM shortage.
There are forecasts of shortages, just as there have been for decades. But there is no actual STEM shortage. There are complaints from employers that they cannot get a particular kind of employee on terms which favour the employer. But there is no STEM shortage.
There are complaints from universities that they only have nine applicants for each place on engineering courses. But there is no STEM shortage, just as there was not in 1957, 1982, or 2014, times when we were also told there was supposedly a STEM shortage. What there is, and always will be, is a shortage of good engineers willing to work for peanuts.
The problem here is the very concept of “STEM” itself, which lumps together Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics as if they were four words for the same thing.
Universities are funded to teach and promote “STEM”, but their version is more like SteM – Science and Maths, because in the main they don’t know how to teach anything as practical as engineering and technology (areas which academia often thinks are the business of “industry” to teach).
Some academics even expand STEM to STEMM (including medicine, and sometimes nursing), or at its extreme STEAM (including arts), as some sort of attempt to ride on Engineering’s coat tails towards greater funding and promotion of their subject areas.
But, even ignoring the desperate Arts and Medicine addons, S,T,E and M are quite different. Each of the four letters covers a wide range of academic disciplines and associated industries. Consider for a moment only the “engineering practitioners” part of the “E” in STEM.
Let’s ignore the various engineering disciplines for now, and consider instead the fact that we can split most branches of engineering into graduate “technical” and non-graduate “craft” practitioners.
Whilst the STEM concept is being used to funnel money into higher education in the interests of fixing the “STEM shortage”, very few real STEM shortages are of graduate engineers. What we are short of are plumbers, not chemical engineering graduates.
Is it appropriate then to respond to a temporary shortage of time-served control panel wiremen (a craft job) willing to work for £8 per hour in, say, Ebbw Vale by increasing student numbers on electrical engineering degree programmes which will produce graduates in four years’ time? How about mathematics courses in Germany? Of course not, because there is no such thing as STEM.
There are specific, non-interchangeable skillsets in each discipline, sub discipline and sub-sub discipline. Otherwise all the unemployed experienced chemical engineers laid off by the oil and gas industry could simply go and get a job in the presently booming water sector, or whatever alternative “STEM shortage” career took their fancy.
There is of course a discipline of chemical engineering, and there are generic cross sector skills within that discipline, but with a glut of engineers, employers have no real incentive to help people to train or retrain.
The mystery is why professional engineers would want to help employers and universities on this basis. The answer, I think, is because of our goodwill towards the next generation.
Sometimes our goodwill may be limited to just a subtype of those engineers which we personally identify with, but this is the main motivation of those I talk to.
Our goodwill is being exploited by academia and big business under the guise of a ‘STEM shortage’ to exploit in turn those who we wish to help. I’m not saying engineers shouldn’t help at all, but only in the most direct possible fashion.
Instead of providing your time for free to HE institutions who are charging their students for your input, maybe mentor or take on a student, an apprentice or a graduate. Make them into the engineers of the future. Only engineers can make engineers, so it's down to us.
