STEM Degrees Not Worth Effort, Money

Little by little, the truth about academic life on university campuses is leaking out. Although not as dramatic or headline-grabbing as the Harvard, Penn, and MIT scandals, the myth that science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees will lead to a well-paid, white-collar job is gradually being debunked.

In his Los Angeles Times opinion commentary, U.C. San Diego sociology professor and author of “Wasted Education: How We Fail Our Graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math”, John D. Skrentny, exposed a STEM degree’s true worth in the employment market---considerably less than advertised, and perhaps not worth the monies spent on exorbitant tuition fees.

Long-hyped as a path to a big-ticket IT job, and with employers and the federal government’s tacit endorsement that helped promote more foreign-born labor to displace U.S. workers, STEM classes popularity soared. Another carrot that encouraged young adults to enroll: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that STEM jobs would increase 8 percent by 2029 compared with 3.7 for all other occupations. From 2006 to 2015, bachelor’s degrees in the STEM fields rose from 22 percent of the baccalaureate degrees awarded to 30 percent of the total, the highest level since 1987 when detailed national record-keeping began.

But the Census Bureau’s June 2021 report refuted the popular narrative. STEM degrees don’t guarantee a coveted job in the prestigious science, technology, engineering and math fields. Among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37% earned a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a STEM occupation. Moreover, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, in its 2023 analysis, found that STEM degrees held by diverse graduates hardly moved the needle. Despite corporations’ vocal commitment to DEI, black, Hispanic, American Indian, and disabled persons remain dramatically under-represented in tech.

Although warnings about pro-STEM fallacies have been reported for at least a decade, they’ve fallen on deaf ears. Forbes journalist and Duke University School of Law J.D. George Leef wrote in 2014:

     “Interest groups that want more STEM education, research funding and workers know how to capitalize on that belief to get politicians to enact the policies they want. Even through there is nothing approaching a [labor shortage] crisis, they keep lobbying as if we have a dire one...Strong business and educational groups lobby for nice-sounding policies that benefit themselves, frequently employing dubious arguments and misleading claims. The costs of the resulting pro-STEM policies are dispersed among the public, and fall particularly hard on the unfortunate individuals who invest a lot of money and years of their lives in pursuit of credentials that are apt to become almost worthless."  ("True Or False: America Desperately Needs More STEM Workers," by George Leef, Forbes, June 10, 2014.)

The year after Forbes published Leef’s critique, Jesse Jackson traveled to Silicon Valley where he found that its overall workforce was only 30 percent female, 3 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black. Countless studies from respected academics and prominent think tanks came to the same conclusion---U.S. tech workers are effectively shut out. But only a smattering of the published research, including Skrentny’s op-ed, address the most obvious reason that American minorities are consistently kept out of white-collar jobs. Employers prefer to hire younger, less qualified, cheaper foreign nationals, mostly from Pakistan and China, that work on H-1B visas, the so-called guest workers who rarely go home. In the 10 years since Leef, Jackson, and countless other scholars have sounded alarm bells, hundreds of thousands of H-1B visa workers have entered the domestic labor market to take jobs that would otherwise go to U.S. STEM grads.

Year-after-fiscal year, and regardless of economic conditions, the federal government approves 85,000 H-1B visas. In late 2022 and throughout 2023, Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech giants laid off thousands of workers. And 2024 is off to a similar start as Duolingo, Twitch, and Discord made deep cut while Amazon and Google continued their 2023  significant firings. Despite the layoffs, H-1B approvals continued.

As long as H-1B visa workers are readily available to employers, and as Artificial Intelligence makes a greater, ever-growing societal impact, STEM degrees will become increasingly less valuable on job-seekers’ resumes.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org