Governor Dennis Daugaard is all about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. STEM education is the key to getting our young people ready for all those high-paying jobs.
A recent Census report cast some doubt on that assumption, finding that 74% of STEM graduates don't have STEM jobs. However, Mike Maciag of Governing says the Census data doesn't damn STEM promotion efforts. Among other issues...
...the estimate doesn’t include what the Census Bureau considers “STEM-related” occupations. This large segment of the workforce, which includes health care, comprises roughly the same number of jobs as STEM employment. While these workers don’t hold traditional STEM positions, their jobs often require similar skills.
It’s also important to note that the Census data reflects not just recent grads, but all employed workers age 25 to 64. Many of those surveyed earned STEM degrees decades ago, opting to change fields at a later point in their careers. For some, the decision may have been unrelated to any difficulties in finding a job in the field [Mike Maciag, "Are STEM Graduates Really Having Trouble Finding Jobs?" Governing, 2014.07.28].
Maciag points to other data finding that only 18.8% of 2008 STEM graduates report holding jobs outside their majors, compared with 27.5% of all bachelor's degree holders and 52.8% of us with humanities degrees. (Ah, but only 11.6% of education grads report out-major employment.)
The data reported here only look at bachelor's degrees, not STEM jobs with lower education requirements like vo-tech certificates.
None of these data suggest that going into STEM will be bad for your job prospects. But they don't support the Governor's contention that Girls' Staters should drop philosophy and take up welding, either. The Census data showing all that job shifting suggests that the specific field a student enters may be less important than pursuing an education of some sort. Whatever the reasons, a large majority of STEM graduates find themselves moving to other fields, much like graduates of other programs. It is less important that we shunt students into any particular field in a futile attempt to respond to the ephemeral whms of the market and more important that we give every student a solid K-12 education and make all higher education opportunities affordable.