STEM Dropouts

Last year, I wrote a blog about research that explained why STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) majors in college become discouraged about their chances of persisting in their major. In this week’s blog, I look at the reasons why graduates of STEM majors drop out of STEM-related careers after they enter the workforce.

The analysis of undergraduate behavior that I reported on last year found that students who become disillusioned with non-STEM majors tend to do so slowly over several years and tend to experience loss of interest and diminishing expectations about the earnings they can expect in their field. On the other hand, students who become disappointed with STEM majors tend to do so precipitously in their freshman year, mostly because of diminished expectations of their ability to earn a decent GPA. In other words, it’s not boredom or lowered career expectations that discourages them, but the challenge of the coursework.

But what about after graduation? Those who graduate with a bachelor’s in a STEM field have successfully met the challenges of the curriculum. Having overcome this hurdle, do they face other barriers once they have left college and entered the workforce? I found some answers to this question by analyzing data from the 2003 National Study of College Graduates, a longitudinal study conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the National Science Foundation. This survey asked 170,000 college grads under age 76 about their education and their current work situation. Although the survey was updated in 2006, I used data from the 2003 sample because it polled graduates of the full range of college majors, whereas the 2006 survey looked only at science and engineering majors.

Using data from the 2003 survey, I was able to compare the work situations of people who held bachelor’s degrees from STEM and non-STEM majors. In compiling the set of STEM majors, I ruled out the social sciences and the health-care sciences that focus primarily on patient care.

One important finding was that STEM grads are more likely than non-STEM grads to be working in a job that is closely related or somewhat related to their major, as shown by the graph below. The differences are not great, but they are significant.

But when STEM grads are in an unrelated career, what is the reason? The next graph compares the responses of the two types of grads. You’ll note that for many of the reasons for not working in a related job, the STEM and non-STEM grads are quite similar. Evidently  the STEM grads have hardly any added tendency to lose interest in their field, because only one percentage point separates them from the non-STEM grads. The biggest difference is shown by the navy blue zone: STEM grads tend to be quite a bit more likely to be in an unrelated field because of their inability to find work in their field. With non-STEM grads, as indicated by the two lowest zones, disappointment with pay or promotion or dissatisfaction with working conditions was a more likely reason for working outside their field.

Keep in mind that this analysis is based on data collected in 2003. It may be that in 2012 and the years ahead, there will be lots of job opportunities for STEM grads, keeping them employed in work that is related to their major. But what I find from this survey tells me that if lots of STEM-related jobs don’t materialize soon, or if career development professionals fail to help connect STEM grads with appropriate jobs, we may lose STEM grads to unrelated careers.

Recession, Austerity, and a Clouded Crystal Ball

Every recession is caused by a different set of economic forces, and therefore every recession hurts a different set of workers. The collapse of the dot-com bubble at the beginning of the last decade resulted in many job cuts in computer occupations, whereas construction jobs mostly escaped mass layoffs. Conversely, when the housing bubble burst four years ago, construction jobs suffered much more than high-tech jobs. This is why identifying occupations with a lot of job security is a hazardous pursuit.

I was reminded of this hazard by two Yale economists who blogged today on The New York Times website. They start by asking, “Why is the recovery from this recession different from recoveries from past recessions?” The culprit, they find, is layoffs and reduced hiring by local governments: “Going back as long as the data have been collected (1955), with the one exception of the 1981 recession, local government employment continued to grow almost every month regardless of what the economy threw at it. But since the latest recession began, local government employment has fallen by 3 percent, and is still falling. In the equivalent period following the 1990 and 2001 recessions, local government employment grew 7.7 and 5.2 percent. Even following the 1981 recession, by this stage local government employment was up by 1.4 percent.” They note that state governments have also cut back on their workforces, but the effect is smaller because state government workforces were less than half the size of local government workforces to begin with.

The Yale economists estimate that if state and local governments were hiring as they did in the previous two recoveries, “they would have added 1.4 million to 1.9 million jobs and overall unemployment would be 7.0 to 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.” The Yale economists use the term “hidden austerity program” to describe these job cuts by state and local governments, comparing them to the policies that European nations are pursuing—policies that are delaying Europe’s recovery and possibly propelling it toward a double-dip recession.

In the light of these comments, it’s interesting to note that last week the presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, “[President Obama] says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin? American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.” It’s difficult for me to understand how job cuts help the American people or why Europe is the model we should follow.

Politicians get to make policy (if they get elected); we who write about future job security in various careers have to deal with the consequences of those policies. In fairness to politicians, I should add that the cutbacks in state and local government jobs may not be entirely the work of Tea Party pressure on policy makers. The Yale economists speculate that the magnitude of the latest recession may have overwhelmed the ability of governments to save jobs as they have in the past through “creative accounting and shifting in capital expenditures.” Of course, the magnitude of this recession was also difficult to foresee.

When I wrote 150 Best Jobs for a Secure Future, I identified seven sectors of the economy that have a history of job security, and one of those was government. At the time, as the Yale economists point out, this seemed like a safe bet based on decades of economic history. Hindsight tells a different story.

Fortunately, most of the occupations with large public-sector workforces also find lots of employment in the private sector, so they remain promising career goals. For example, Registered Nurses, Financial Examiners, Computer Network Architects, and Management Analysts were among the top government-sector occupations that I recommended. They also have rosy outlooks in the private sector.