Imagine a country that had so many high-paying jobs that it didn’t have enough potential employees to fill them. Now imagine that country made it hard for high school students to learn how to fill those jobs, even though the jobs themselves were critical for the economy.
If you are struggling to form this mental picture, just look around — the U.S. is in this situation now. But we can, and must, resolve this problem through a more practical approach to higher education.
The U.S. has an expanding need for STEM graduates to fill tech jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall job market will grow by 2.8% from 2022 through 2032. But tech job categories are exploding.
Growth in demand for information security analysts will be 31.5%, Computer information research scientists 22.7%, software developers 25.7% and data scientists 59.4%.
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The U.S. must find 174,400 employees to fill just these four occupations per year. But in 2023, the estimated number of undergraduate degrees conferred in computer and information sciences was only 136,500, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The U.S. needs 28% more graduates to keep pace with job growth.
College graduates face extremely high housing costs and an increasing basic cost of living. Tech jobs offer an opportunity to succeed financially despite such obstacles.
The median wage in the U.S. was $46,310 in 2022. BLS shows that salaries for the four example STEM occupations were much higher.
Information security analysts earned $112,000, computer information research scientists $136,620, software developers $127,260 and data scientists $103,500. Clearly there is a huge incentive for students to study STEM, so why do we see a gap between open jobs and tech graduates?
One hypothesis is that higher education institutions are scaring away potential students while enforcing curricula that are unnecessarily theoretical or difficult.
Just over half of Americans believe that students don’t pursue STEM degrees because they are too hard, and that belief is still more prevalent among college graduates, according to Pew Research Center. There is truth to this.
Common admissions advice is to take AP Calculus while in high school. But rushing to take calculus without a solid grasp of pre-calculus can backfire if a student struggles in the course and leaves with a perception that they “aren’t good at math.” And the curriculum for computer science is becoming more difficult, not less.
We should eliminate unnecessary hurdles to STEM degree programs so that more aspiring students can study computer science and engineering. We should make sure that students without calculus in high school know they are welcome.
Higher education institutions should focus instruction on mathematics to cover only what is truly needed to succeed as a tech worker. One way to do this would be to combine topics from multiple courses such as probability, discrete math and linear algebra into one class. Some students could still elect to take entire courses on elements of the class that either excite them or are relevant to a specific career.
The University of Oklahoma Polytechnic Institute is launching its first degree, a degree completion program in cybersecurity, in the fall of 2024. OUPI faculty seek to make STEM education accessible to more students while educating students on topics in demand by industry. The college aims to take students from a variety of sources, especially those who have finished two years at a community college.
OUPI faculty seek to demonstrate that STEM education should be accessible to more students while educating them on topics in demand by industry. We would like to collaborate across universities to cultivate a technical talent base that can fill America’s job gap while providing more students a pathway to financial success.
Matthew J. Beattie, PhD is an adjunct professor with the OU Polytechnic Institute.
