One of the most comprehensive and rigorous considerations of the idea of a STEM shortage comes in the form of a research paper, released this April, from the Economic Policy Institute. Among their findings:

The flow of U.S. students (citizens and permanent residents) into STEM fields has been strong over the past decade, and the number of U.S. graduates with STEM majors appears to be responsive to changes in employment levels and wages. For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job. In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable, and 53 percent say they found better job opportunities outside of IT occupations. These responses suggest that the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry…. Analyzing new data, drawing on a number of our prior analyses, and reviewing other studies of wages and employment in the STEM and IT industries, we find that industry trends are strikingly consistent: Over the past decade IT employment has gradually increased, but it only recovered to its 2000–2001 peak level by the end of the decade. Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels."

In 2011, Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, gave Congressional testimony in which he disputed the idea of a STEM major shortage.

At present, "there are too many skilled workers chasing too few jobs." Focusing specifically on computer and mathematical occupations, "a field where Mr. Smith argues there's a shortage of workers," Hira also finds "unemployment rates...much higher than we would expect at full-employment." These two fields, which constitute "the largest of all STEM occupations," suffered "unemployment rates of 5.2% in 2009 and 2010,...more than twice the levels at full-employment" based on historical data. In fact, in 2010, the unemployment rate for computer and mathematical workers exceeded that of all college graduates by half a percentage point. The unemployment rates for electrical and electronic engineers and for medical scientists in 2010 were 5.4% and 4.1%, respectively, Hira writes. Again, he finds that, instead of any "broad-based shortage" in these fields, "there are too few jobs for those skilled workers."

Also in 2011, Vivek Wadhwa, who holds a large number of academic and corporate appointments in these fields, wrote an open letter to President Obama, asking him to stop claiming that there is a STEM shortage. Among Wadhwa’s purposes is to dispute the idea that China and India are churning out an unstoppable army of engineers who will render the United States incapable of competing. As Wadhwa points out, many of the professionals identified as engineers in these stories would in fact not be labeled as such here in the United States, with many of them in fields like automotive repair and HVAC. Wadhwa also relays the fact that 94% of the people who are offered jobs at Microsoft take them. That’s great for them, but a 94% acceptance rate indicates a field where applicants lack bargaining power. Wadhwa’s discomfort with claims about a STEM shortage, given that he’s a true insider in this domain, is in keeping with a lot of my own investigations on this issue, which I’ve been pursuing for several years. When I talk to professors in these fields, they are often quite forthcoming in saying that many undergraduates expecting to find an easy job market are in for a rude awakening. (They are also, naturally, protective of the perceived value of their fields, and rightfully so.)

If you prefer your data in graph form, you’ve got plenty to choose from. My friend Alex Waller, the Abstracted Engineer, pointed to this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Alex, a biomedical engineer, also reports anecdotally that he is constantly approached online by recent engineering graduates who are desperate for a job.)

Similarly, Jordan Weissmann of The Atlantic has been covering this issue for awhile. He points to these charts from the National Center for Education Statistics.

None of these would indicate that getting a STEM major is some sort of economic panacea. And there’s a lot more charts and graphs where that came from.

There’s another side to these STEM shortage arguments, and they are straightforwardly moralizing: the reason for our continued employment crisis is that too many students took “impractical” majors and are suffering as a result. As Virginia Postrel pointed out last year, this narrative simply is not supportable. We don’t, actually, graduate a ton of people in the supposedly impractical arts or humanities. While participation in the humanities is stable, the number of students who pursue humanities majors is low, around 12%-15%. (Incorrect claims that the humanities are in a crisis of plummeting enrollment somehow coexist with arguments that too many students are taking them as majors.) These majors are also disproportionately concentrated in elite colleges, whose graduates enjoy far better economic outcomes than the median graduate, whether through quality of education, selection bias, or some combination of factors. A quick glance at the actual data shows that the notion of an army of deluded dreamers taking supposedly impractical majors is simply not supportable. What sticks out, more than anything, is the relentless rise of the Business major, by far the largest and one which now produces a mind-blowing 350,000 BAs or so a year. (I’d be very interested to see the economic outcomes for graduates of this eminently “practical” major.)

The notion that recent graduates are facing such steep economic challenges because of choices they made in major or career is not supportable. We face a stagnant job market and a crisis for the long-term unemployed because of inadequate aggregate demand, not because too many people decided to study French poetry. (French poetry, somehow, has become the go-to for “frivolous major.” I suppose it just speaks to people’s biases about cultural elitism.) As both Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke have argued, the idea of a skills mismatch is not supportable from evidence. I think the point of claiming one is to blame broad macroeconomic problems on individuals, and to make our problems seem easier to solve than they really are.

I could go on. We could talk about changes in the pharmaceutical and chemistry industries that have caused them to hemorrhage jobs. We could point out that the notion that H-1B visas, used to pull highly educated workers from abroad, have no relationship with the underlying economy, despite the common claims that the need for such visas demonstrate a domestic STEM shortage. Earlier this year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers sounded a warning about soaring unemployment in electrical engineering. Given our media’s crude assumption that “STEM jobs = jobs in consumer technology,” a soaring unemployment rate in electrical engineering cuts directly across the prevailing narrative. An earlier Rutgers study (PDF), from 2009, found the idea of a STEM shortage unsupportable. Among its findings was that computer scientists actually lost jobs at a higher rate during the financial crisis than the national average, speaking to the idea not only of unemployment rates but how susceptible individual fields are to economic fluctuations.

Like I said— I could go on.