Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Perspective: Where Do We Get the STEM Graduates?


For some time now I have been writing that the United States leads the world in the creation and application of digital technology, which combined with the windfall we are reaping from the new discoveries of abundant and low cost fossil fuel energy, puts the United States in the cat bird seat in the world wide market we call globalization. Manufacturing is also returning to the United States because of these two advantages. However, there is another factor that is slowing our ability to capitalize on this incredible opportunity. It’s that we lack the graduates with the commensurate skills needed to implement and manage the digital technology and new energy sources to make our economy grow at sufficient speed to meet our Country’s needs.
I am going to start off with a fifth grade word math problem to see if you can figure why we have a shortage of the skills I mentioned. These skills are in science, technology, engineering and math, STEM for short.
“In 1970 there were about 60 men college graduates to 40 women. Today there are 60 women to 40 men. In 1970 about half the boys graduated with majors in STEM while only about 5% of the girls did. Today about half the men graduate with STEM degrees, while only about 10% of women do. How many STEM graduates out of a hundred did we have forty years ago and how many do we have today?”

If you are as smart as a fifth grader, you should have found that there were 32 per hundred graduates in 1970 and 26 today. So, our schools turn out 20% fewer per hundred graduates with STEM majors today than a mere generation ago. As the problem illustrates the reason we have a shortage of STEM graduates is two fold; (1) the men, half of whom normally major in STEM, are not going to college in the first place, and (2) the women who do go to college do not major in STEM.

This problem is not going to be easy to solve, but we must solve it! To be frank, it is not clear that society knows why the men have dropped out. While many writers, notably Bill Bennett, have written about it, they only note that is has happened. If we cannot define the root cause of the problem, we will not be able to solve it. However, it is not clear that society cares enough to even find out why or how solve it.

With regard to the women, it is not that they cannot excel in these majors, but they just do not want to work in those fields. How to get the women to enter and graduate with STEM majors is the challenge. Hopefully, when women learn that they can make twice as much salary with STEM degrees than with non-STEM degrees they might become more interested. If for example, they researched Google, they would find that a graduate engineer’s starting salary probably exceeds $100,000, whereas a major in history or English will usually earn less than $50,000, if indeed there are jobs for these non-stem majors at all. Since both stem and non-stem students end up with the same amount of student loan debt, which graduate is going to be able to manage the loan better?

Now, before the feminists question what right have I, a man, to comment on this, let me state my credentials. I married a Johns Hopkins Medical School 1954 graduate and she, as an MD, immediately entered the medical profession where she practiced and advanced to manage a drug related clinic while I worked as an executive of the DuPont Company. Together we raised three children. One of the children, our daughter, is a Senior Vice President in the field of public relations, who along with her husband, who works at his own profession, are raising their two children. So, I know something about two generations experiencing the stress of two professionals, both in high level jobs, having and raising children together. However, as complicated as managing two careers while raising children is, it can be done. I have always encouraged people, including children, and especially women, to be all they wish to become. Today we need women with STEM degrees more than ever.

The literature is filling up with research to determine why women will not take the lucrative majors, and additional literature is being produced to find out how to motivate them to make the change. However, because of political correctness, genetic differences between males and females cannot even be mentioned. But it seems natural for girls to think of STEM as a “boys thing” because they don’t see many women making careers in these fields. Consequently, many women have no idea this opportunity presents for them. From my point of view it does not matter if it is genetic, because if our Nation is going to be able to capitalize on our assets of enormous energy supply and leading digital technology, we simply must find a way to have women tackle these tasks for the benefit of themselves and the country whether the root cause is genetic or not. The alternate is to increase the number of immigrants who have obtained these coveted STEM majors in our United States schools.

Obama’s idea of what to do to increase STEM graduates is to add pre-school programs. The usefulness of that plan is doubtful considering how Head Start worked out. But in any event, do we have fifteen years to solve this problem? Of course not! A better plan would be to approach females and males in their sophomore year in high school and explain the opportunities we are talking about. Recently I had the opportunity to help a daughter of friends to learn of this opportunity, and I am pleased to say that she is entering college to major in civil engineering. These lessons could and should be integrated into the high school curricula so these young folk can use their high school years to plan for their best post-high school education.

But the high percentage of female college graduates presents another challenge. Women will have to take more of the leadership roles in technology, health, business, education and government than ever before regardless of whether it is good for them or society. This will place a strain on them, and on their families. And then there is the question of how will the human species be perpetuated? Someone has to produce our replacements, and biologically speaking, only a female can perform that duty. Moreover, since it takes eighteen years to turn the helpless baby into a responsible citizen with a working moral compass, who is to be in charge of that? Historically, Mom played the dominant role of raising the children while Dad “brought home the bacon”. For most animals, including man, largely the female assumes the role of the nurturing care-giver for the young. How to deal with this reversal of the natural order of things is the question of our time. It is the first time in all of history we are doing it on such a huge scale, and there are no precedents. We have to solve this problem!

Whether the activists like it or not, the world that they will be entering as managers and leaders was organized by men centuries ago. It will not be possible to change it to the way women might like or how women might have organized it had they been the organizers centuries ago. Now, if you have trouble following what I am talking about, consider the language used in the business world. “We are at war with our competitor”; “We are arming ourselves with a new market plan to attack so and so.” This is the language of men because they have had to fight “wars” with nature, and other men to survive and protect their women and families for millennia. We all know that women do not normally use that kind of language. The language is loaded with blunt and aggressive terms, indigenous of the male animal, and the organizational structures look like a military chain of command.

Another problem pointed to by the AAUW and many women’s organizations is the salary gap between men and women. It is real as the data show,* but we do not fully understand why. It may relate to what we talked about earlier, namely the rules of the game made by men centuries earlier. However, I encourage women not to become mired in this problem because I believe this gap will narrow as women learn how to play the game by negotiating what they want in job assignment or salary, and as their bosses become more sensitive to the advantages that women bring.

The good news for our young women and men who will be assuming these new roles is that there is a growing body of literature sponsored by the American Association of University Women and other organizations that can be found via Google that is very useful to understand what women face and are experiencing. One of the best is a full length book entitled “Lean In”, by Sheryl Sandberg that I highly recommend. Ms. Sandberg is an extremely bright young woman, now in her forties, who currently is the COO of Facebook. Her experiences in college, business school, government, with Google and now Facebook along with her getting married and having children while in the high pressure of her work world ,provides first-hand knowledge of what is going on and how to deal with the issues women are facing.

In short, women becoming leaders in the global economy that has been dominated by males for centuries, is a new ball game. How the men play and have played the game for centuries is radically different than how the women would play, and that can’t be changed overnight. Women will find that they have to speak up if they want their point of view heard or, if for example, they think they deserve a raise, or, in extreme cases they may need to change jobs to get what they want and deserve, even if that feels unnatural for them. Ms. Sandberg talks about this!

In closing, I recommend that if you know a high school female who is getting good marks in math and science, and doesn’t hate these subjects, that you inform her of the opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math. Chances are she may not know about them. To really catch her attention, simply down load the numerous studies that have been made. As I mentioned earlier, many are sponsored by women’s organizations as the AAUW from whose report the following salary data have been obtained.



*Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013, Women in the Labor Force:A Databook (Report 1040) (Washington, DC), Table 11

Note: Each STEM occupation  employed more than 85,000 people in 2011 according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In some large STEM professions, such as biological science, chemical engineering, and engineering management, no significant gender difference in median earnings was found.





Monday, August 5, 2013

Perspective: The Fossil Fuel Supply is Virtually Endless.


Did you ever think that you would live to hear or read such lines as “We will never run out of oil, and fracking is safe”? Well, the title on the cover page of the May, 2013 issue of the Atlantic was “We will never run out of oil”, and in late July, 2013 the Associated Press reported that a landmark Depatment of Energy study showed no evidence that chemicals from the fracking process contaminated drinking water in aquifers in western Pennsylvania.

WOW! Do you realize how significant these two reports are? The mainstream Media is telling us that we have an enormous supply of fossil fuels, and that digging them out of the earth in the United States is safe. This means that we are no longer dependent upon oil from the Middle East, and more than anything else, this also means that a sensible Energy Policy for the United States could be implemented at last.

Oh, but you say, what about global warming which is allegedly caused by the carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of these fossil fuels? Well, let’s assume that global warming is man caused and that carbon dioxide is the culprit. The question then is, can we control CO2 emissions? Actually, we know of a number of possible ways to manage carbon dioxide emissions. Yes, it’s true that these ways are not currently economic and will require research to bring the ideas to fruition. But so are so-called “green’ technologies currently uneconomic, but the government funds these and most have gone or are in the process of going bankrupt.

So do you squander government research funds on wind and solar projects that are uneconomic, where the available energy that could be produced from these sources could ever meet the rising demand for energy the economy of the US requires and where transporting the energy from the wind and sun sources to the end-user is impracticable, or do you want to conduct research to make fossil fuels environmentally acceptable, where the supply is virtually infinite and the transportation facilities are already in place?

If this sounds like a no-brainer to you, go to the head of the class!

Does anyone believe that our government doesn’t know that we have all of this fossil fuel supply and that research could be supported to take care of the CO2 emissions question? Of course the Department of Energy, Congress and yes, even our President, all know this! So why then are they not jumping on the fabulous opportunity? Something else is going on!

I hate to be cynical, and I definitely don’t generally believe in conspiracies, but the answer is staring us right in the face. Ever since President Obama has come onto the political stage he has mouthed one thing, namely, that we must transform the United States to obtain social justice. What better way to transform the country without our being willing than to frighten us with dooms day scenarios about Climate Change caused by CO2 emissions.

But how can the government control CO2? By taxing it! But how do you levee a tax if Congress is the only government agency that can levee taxes, and they have refused to do that? The answer, the President can have the Environmental Protection Agency label CO2 a toxic gas.

But every school child knows that CO2 is not a toxic gas! And besides, what fool would believe that since without CO2, life on this earth would not exist? I hate to let you in on this, but Obama takes all of us for fools!

So, do we and our Congress want to twiddle our thumbs while Obama, single handedly, blocks our country from using our massive fossil fuel supplies and our leadership in digital technology, which together, will allow the United States to experience its greatest century ever? If we do, the current voting generations should be ashamed and the generations that follow should hate us!