STEM Job Readiness A Useful Distraction | Missouri Education Watchdog

STEM Job Readiness A Useful Distraction | Missouri Education Watchdog:

STEM Job Readiness A Useful Distraction

It was announced last week that Microsoft, the tech giant, plans to eliminate 18,000 jobs. That has rankled many in the anti-common core movement because Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, has been out there promoting Common Core ostensibly because we need more STEM workers for companies like his. The claim he and other have made is that there is a shortage of such workers in the United States. What has upset the anti common core crowd is that Microsoft, along with other mega tech companies like Hewlett Packard and CISCO are simultaneously pressuring Congress to expand the H-1B Visa program to allow more highly skilled foreign workers in. While demanding more highly educated workers from the American education system, these large companies are demanding to import more labor from outside our shores. Something just doesn’t match up.

Computer World covered Senator Jeff Sessions response to the Microsoft firings (they are not lay offs). On the floor of the Senate he questioned the claim high tech companies are trying to make true by repeating it often. “What is the situation today for American graduates of STEM degrees and technology degrees? Do we have enough? And do we need to have people come to our country to take those jobs? Or, indeed, do we not have a shortage of workers, and do we have difficulty of people finding jobs?”

Sessions knows the answer to those questions. According to the recent US Census, we have a glut of STEM graduates. Seventy four percent of those who have a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering and math — commonly referred to as STEM — are not employed in STEM occupations. Liana Christin Landivar, a sociologist in the Census Bureau’s Industry and Occupation Statistics Branch concurred. “STEM graduates have relatively low unemployment, however these graduates are not necessarily employed in STEM occupations.” The Center for Immigration Studies says that only one-third of native-born Americans with an undergraduate STEM Job Readiness A Useful Distraction | Missouri Education Watchdog: