America Is Facing a Great Talent Recession
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Note: I know you can get quality education in the US, but it's a luxury service for most at this point.
And that’s ok, but we shouldn’t expect just because the admissions office let someone into a program that they’re qualified to build bridges after spending 4-5 years on a campus. It shouldn’t be emotionally abusive or anything like that, but I personally want to know that engineers have been put through some serious training so that the buildings I’m in stay standing, the water I’m drinking stays clean, and the electricity that I depend on for all but the barest of life’s essentials keeps flowing.
What we need to do is normalize failure being acceptable, and encourage trying.
To lean on a sports analogy: Not every kid who plays little league baseball is going to play for their high school team, not every high school player gets a shot in the minors, not every minor leaguer gets into the pros, not every pro is an all star, not every all star is the MVP. And all those are ok, sometimes physical and mental limitations come into play, and sometimes people just decide they’re not interested in pursuing something anymore due to the trade offs required for the next level.
I'm reminded of Harvey Mudd's(1) success in creating a Comp Sci program with good gender ratios. They found the main reason women were dropping out of or not trying comp sci was due to intimidation factors, or to simplify grouping experts with beginners in the same classes made the beginners feel inadequate and quit. The solution they came up with was to split the classes based on computer experience levels and let the experts take a fast track class.
I believe engineers or any medical professions could benefit similarly, instead of merely weeding people out with difficulty(which mostly translates to familiarity or previous experience)we could instead let those already familiar fast track it and those less familiar become familiar to the point of competence. It could benefit everyone really.
1. https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-...
Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake.
The conditions you described sound closer to "unfair" than just "weeder". I've heard of people describe certain courses as "weeder", but that's because they covered difficult material and had difficult assignments, not because the teachers were actively sabotaging the students.
* Large lecture sizes, often with professors who cannot teach or don't care to
* Little student-professor engagement
* Large discussion sections with TA's who can't teach either
* Usually focused on calculation over rigor or depth. Usually no proofs, actual reasoning behind things hand-waved away, focus is on memorization.
* Large homework loads
* Large test loads or particularly high-stakes exams
* De facto pass requirements drastically different from the actual grading scheme used in the course (eg: requiring an 80-90% grade to stay in the major in a course where the professor expects the average exam grade to be 40-50%). This often leads to curving the grades arbitrarily to get the cohort size the department actually wants.
Programming requires a certain individual that likes solving problems and learning. Not everyone is made to program. Currently, software engineers in US are some of the best paid individuals with just a bachelors degree. Frankly, if you are intelligent, can code, and learn math on your own you don't even need one. That kind of money drives more students towards CS programs.
In my programming 101 70% of students did not even attend the final. Then, next programming class was a better with high percentage of students passing. Eventually, when we got to class like theory of computation 80% of people failed to finish.
I met a guy who graduated after trying to obtain his BS in CS for 7 years. He still is not employed in the tech field.
I'm kind of astounded that your program was so badly calibrated that first 70% of freshman dropped the major rather than take the final exam, and then, several years of curriculum later, the 300 or 400-level theory class still fails 80% of its students. What the hell? But I suppose by my own definition, that's basically what we should expect from using weeder courses to stop people majoring in a field for money.
Still, at least at my undergrad institution, once you got past the weeder courses, a fail or drop rate of 80% would be considered pretty bad.
Of course it's normal. It's the "normal" that society chose. It's just only sustainable during an indefinite glut of applicants, which lets everyone pretend that the problems in our pedagogical methods are the kids' fault.
In the productive economy, direct labor has been relegated to being viewed as replaceable human-robots, and so there is little money in actually performing the work. Rather one achieves financial success by getting into the position of managing the work, and the prevailing wisdom is that you're a sucker if you don't do this.
I'm currently interviewing for jobs in biotech, and it's been pretty tough. Between all the interviews, take home assignments, coding challenges, presentation and interview prep, I'm putting in 10-12 hour days 7 days a week.
I suppose it's possible that there really is a talent shortage, but I've seen little evidence of it personally. Companies are demanding and it's not uncommon for me to be treated in an inconsiderate or discourteous manner.
The politics are nuts, keeping people out who would do the jobs and not providing a path to citizenship. And they make it hard for people who come to study to stay.
The aging population is the same all over the world, and there will be competition for young, talented people. These policies will kill US competitiveness in the next 10-20 years.
Oh, they've been complaining at least since I started in the early 90's.
Is it more or less sustainable than hiring new staff each and every year to replace those who leave?
Anyway, the premise seems wrong. The post doesn't do a good job convincing me that there is a problem. U.S. employers may have been "crying out in vain for new workers" even before the pandemic, but getting a job was just as hard as ever. If there's a skill shortage, overseas talent can and has been filing it.
Most people here seem to be responding to the angle that skilled U.S. workers are a thinning herd. This is likely exacerbated by the fact that getting an education in the U.S. is almost impossible. Most people can't afford college, and financial aid doesn't go far enough.
"In absolute numbers, the United States has a larger immigrant population than any other country, with 47 million immigrants as of 2015. This represents 19.1% of the 244 million international migrants worldwide, and 14.4% of the United States population. ...
According to the 2016 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the United States admitted a total of 1.18 million legal immigrants (618k new arrivals, 565k status adjustments) in 2016. Of these, 48% were the immediate relatives of United States citizens, 20% were family-sponsored, 13% were refugees or asylum seekers, 12% were employment-based preferences, 4.2% were part of the Diversity Immigrant Visa program..." [1]
That's roughly 3,200 new Americans every day, 365 days a year. 1/5 of the world's migrants come to one country: The USA. I personally think this is something to be proud of. We are still a nation of immigrants and though the Trump administration did try to curtail immigration, the system is still functioning and relatively robust.
Now, what to do about top international talent avoiding the country because of radical right wing politics that demonize immigrants and conservative lawmakers that consistently try to prevent people coming? I think that's a solution with an obvious answer.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_St...
— Isaac Asimov
Here are some things to consider if you're hiring and you think you're facing a shortage:
- Have you examined desk-rejected candidates' applications manually? I know someone who was contacted by some HR quality-control person at one company after never hearing anything back about multiple opportunities they applied to there. As it turns out, HR's automated software incorrectly decided my friend was unqualified and never forwarded their applications to a human. That was despite the fact that my friend was apparently one of the most qualified applicants for those positions. I'm sure this is common.
- Are you advertising the job in the right places? A lot of jobs aren't posted widely. I get that you'd have to filter through a lot of unqualified applicants if posted widely, but if you're not getting as many qualified candidates as you want you probably should do something to increase the number of applicants.
- Would a qualified candidate decide to apply to the position if they read the job ad? I've read a ton of very vague job ads that I hesitated to apply to. Yet, after applying I got an interview and learned that I was a good fit for the position. It's unclear to me why these ads are so vague. Also annoying are the job ads where the title doesn't describe the position well. Argonne National Laboratory has a ton of positions titled "Postdoctoral Appointee", which basically tells you nothing aside from that you need a PhD to apply. How would I even know to click on that? I have to check each one manually.
- Are the job "requirements" actually requirements? I've seen many that list things that would be nice to have or things that are not actually necessary, eliminating many good candidates who may not look like what the employer expects.
- Are you proactive in reaching out to candidates? In programming jobs this seems to be the norm (often via quite annoying recruiters) but it's quite rare in my experience outside of programming.
- Is the job in a bad location? Does it have relatively low pay? I see the various DOE-funded labs complain a ton about having trouble hiring people, but they seem unwilling to do much anything about the facts that their pay is quite low and their locations are often terrible.
- Are your application and interview processes unnecessarily difficult and/or time-consuming? I'm much less likely to apply to a company again if they require me to prepare something first like a presentation and have all-day marathon interviews. That's a huge time investment for a relatively low chance of getting a job. In fact, at this point I might decline to interview once I become aware that's a company's process.
- (Added later.) Do you place onerous restrictions on non-work activities of your employees? For example, a lot of IP agreements assign basically everything an employee does on their own time to their employer. I know someone who has turned down a job offer because they considered these clauses to be overly restrictive and the company was unwilling to change the clause to something more reasonable.
I have this fun situation at the moment. I applied for a job with a company that apparently decided that wading through the resumes was boring, so they just threw away all applications (a friend works there so I have inside information).
I didn't bother with a referral as I assumed, incorrectly, that I should glide through the process.
That same company went through my friend's LinkedIn connections and wanted their help to recruit me.
Here's an idea: have your low-level managers write the job requirements. (1) Your low-level managers know what tasks need to be done, (2) they know what competencies those tasks require, and (3) they know how to articulate the requirements in a way that makes sense to someone who can fulfill them.
> Is the job in a bad location? Does it have relatively low pay?
Also, have you adjusted your salary offers based on the 7-9% increase in cost of living that happened over the last year? A mid-market salary by 2020 standards is inadequate, especially if you expect your employee to live somewhere that was already expensive.
some people want to be entertainers, some want to do charitable work as humanitarians
not everyone is suited nor wants to be in STEM
We don't want to steer _everyone_ into STEM. But we could be doing a better job of prepping students and giving them the tools they need to enable them to go into STEM if they so choose.
Unnecessarily hot take: UBI should start in the second trimester.
This is a disingenuous frame on two counts:
(1) Wanting the US to succeed does not mean that one wants other nations to suffer. Success is not zero-sum.
(2) The United States doesn't suck up intellectual talent. Individuals apply for visas and travel here willingly, often at great expense. Providing opportunities to those with talent and ambition is absolutely moral.
Because individuals matter more than countries: the right to pursuit of happiness and all that.