265 | John Skrentny on How the Economy Mistreats STEM Workers

0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Here's a classic question. What is the use of education? What is the value of being educated? I'm thinking particularly here of post-secondary, post-high school education: College, university, even graduate school, and so on. Why do this? Why get that much schooling into you? There are lofty answers to this question about becoming a more well-rounded human being, understanding the human condition, picking up reasoning skills and learning skills. There's also socialization issues. Meeting people, getting to know the world in a certain way. That's absolutely an important function of going to college. But there's also a lot of down to earth practical issues. You're being trained perhaps for a trade, for a job, to become employable. That's an absolutely valid reason to get an education.

0:01:00.1 SC: In the modern world, especially, we point toward science and technology as skills or fields for which we would like it if people had good training in these fields. We invent the acronym of STEM: Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This is government speak or education speak for the kinds of sciencey, techy kinds of areas that both governments and also employers place a lot of emphasis on. So if you're not within academia right now, you might not know that there's a lot of hand wringing and angst about the decline of the humanities. And the more classic parts of the broad-based humanistic education that we purport to care about and too much emphasis may be, is being put on science degrees and related areas.

0:01:53.8 SC: But there are good reasons, economic reasons. You want people to get a good job that's able to pay them, and you give them a fulfilling life after college. So maybe it's fine to have a bunch of people specializing in STEM areas.

0:02:06.9 SC: Today's guest is John Skrentny. He's a sociologist at UC, San Diego, and actually someone I've known for a long time. We went to graduate school at the same time together and used to play basketball together, as you'll find out if you hang out for the very end here. But he's written an interesting book called Wasted Education: How We Fail Our Graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. The idea behind John's book is, sure employers and governments want a healthy and rapidly growing scientifically and technologically-educated workforce. But does that mean that once created, that workforce is actually fulfilled? Are they happy? Do you get a science degree and are you therefore able to get a good job that keeps you having a good life? And the answer, not always, certainly, but in a growing number of cases, the answer is no.

0:03:04.5 SC: So it's a very interesting argument. We have to say over and over again, and John will say very explicitly in the podcast, of course, certain individuals get very rewarding careers out of science education. But we also have to take into account those that don't. And we're not primarily talking here about people who go into academia or even want to go into academia. We're talking about tech workers, which is a huge fraction of the people who go from STEM degrees into the workforce. They work for computing, technology, software engineering corporations. And it can be a tough row to hoe, as a matter of fact. For one thing, novelty and innovation is, of course, valued. It turns out, for various reasons that we'll discuss, that it can be easier to just get rid of your workers and hire newer, younger ones, rather than retraining the existing workers. The new workers already have the skills. They just learned them, they're fresh in their minds, they're cheaper, and then a decade or two later, they can be fired and they can be replaced.

0:04:13.5 SC: It might not actually be a sustainable way to think about our workforce or what it means to be a scientist, or what it means for colleges and universities to do their students a good service by providing them with an education. Harder to come up with solutions to this issue than to diagnose it. Certainly, very deep features of capitalism and our economic and political system are involved here, but it's an important issue to highlight one way or the other. We need to know what we're doing when we're training people in these different areas that I personally value very much. But we have to be explicit, we have to be conscious of what's happening. We can't just say, "Oh, science is good, therefore do it." We have to look into what happens when we try to do that. So, I think, it's not exactly what we usually talk about here on Mindscape, but sociology, it's an important part of the liberal arts spectrum. So let's go.

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0:05:29.3 SC: John Skrentny, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:05:32.6 John Skrentny: Happy to be here. I'm excited to talk to you, Sean.

0:05:35.4 SC: Since we're old friends, I thought I would start you off with a couple of softballs to get to the ball rolling here, as it were. So what is this STEM acronym and why is it a terrible acronym?

0:05:48.3 JS: Actually, compared to the alternatives, it's pretty awesome.

0:05:53.4 SC: Really? Convince me of that.

0:05:53.8 JS: So do you prefer STEM over SMET?

0:05:57.4 SC: I prefer not using an acronym.

0:06:00.5 JS: Oh, okay. Well, I got to tell you, the government has been searching for an acronym for quite a while, and that's because they've been trying to count people in these fields for quite a while, really, since the Cold War. In the book, I include a New York Times story in which there's this panicky headline in the New York Times about how the United States is falling behind the Soviet Union in the number of technicians. Would you prefer that? Probably not. Probably not. They were talking about scientists and engineers. The National Science Foundation has scientists and engineers, or S&E. So not exactly that euphonious, one might say.

0:06:48.4 SC: But it appears so often in the educational context, and no one majors in technology. That's not a thing. You major in science, engineering or math. They're very different from each other. So I don't like lumping them together. So I like using words rather than acronyms. That's my...

0:07:02.5 JS: Yeah. Yeah. So the technology, I saw a government report that used the acronym SET: Science, engineering and technology. So people really like technology. Sorry.

0:07:11.5 SC: They like that. All right.

0:07:12.4 JS: You might not like that. And then there was some use of SMET: Science, math, engineering, and technology. And that had a rationale to it where science and math are the foundations of engineering and technology. So by putting them first, it's a temporal ordering of what comes first. You do the basic science, you understand the math, and then you develop the technology. But SMET sounds like onomatopoeia from something unpleasant.

0:07:39.6 SC: It's bad.

0:07:41.3 JS: Yeah. Oh, my God. A SMET. So it didn't really catch on. And then a, Judith Ramaley is her name, she was one of the higher ups at the National Science Foundation. She apparently is the one who coined the STEM acronym. Just changing the order a little bit, making it sound a little bit better. And then it just took off. I had a graduate student look, who's doing research assistance for me, and she looked at the rise of the STEM acronym, and it just started to appear in bills in Congress, and it just took off. And so you may not like STEM, but a lot of other people like it, and so...

0:08:29.4 SC: It's a much more detailed and serious answer than I was hoping for, so, good start.

0:08:33.4 JS: Right. So we're stuck with it. And what exactly it means, that's a different question, but STEM seems to have taken off internationally. People use that acronym. They seem to understand when I talk to them about STEM. So STEM seems to be here to stay.

0:08:50.3 SC: Does it include the social sciences?

0:08:53.7 JS: That's a good question. The National Science Foundation officially includes social scientists in its understandings of S&E, Science and Engineering. And then they also talk about STEM. We could go down a very tedious rabbit hole about some of this, but they idiosyncratically, I would say, include social scientists. Because when most of the government policy makers are talking about STEM, they're not thinking about me. They're thinking about you. They're thinking about a lot of other folks. And I can explain why that is. And people might protest that sociologists, economists, demographers can be highly quantitative, political scientists as well, and really use advanced statistical computational methods, so why aren't they included in STEM? And I think that that has a lot to do with what the government wants with its investments in STEM education. And they don't really want more of me. Arguably, don't be offended, they probably don't want more cosmologists either.

0:10:02.3 SC: Oh, my God, no. This is not newbies.

0:10:06.4 JS: Experts on general relativity. They're not saying, "We need more of those. Give us more of those." They are looking for people to, first of all, fulfill employers' demands, and these employers have been crying shortages for quite a while. They want people to innovate, they want people... That technology, that T that you were so skeptical of, that's really what they want.

0:10:29.4 SC: That's what they care... No, I know. I think that they're riding on my coattails, honestly.

0:10:34.6 JS: They are. They are. And they have this hope that by cranking out more experts in STEM fields, they will innovate and they will create new technologies that will boost American competitiveness and boost American national security and grow the economy and provide jobs for everybody. I wrote this book chapter a few years ago in which I traced the history of American policymakers and what they wanted, I'm using the acronym anachronistically now, what they wanted STEM workers to do. Obviously, they weren't using the STEM acronym during the progressive era. But during the progressive era is really when you saw the government trying to think about, "Hey, we've got these experts in these science and engineering fields. We should deploy their expertise."

0:11:33.0 JS: And so the interesting thing about the progressive era was that they wanted to deploy the existing expertise, if we can use existing in relation to expertise, what people already knew. And so like pure food, the Pure Food Act. Wow. We know why food spoils now, we know how to prevent food from spoiling, we know how to keep meat safe. Let's deploy that expertise and make sure that we can make food better. Progressives were real excited about all the new knowledge being generated and they wanted to just deploy it as strategically as possible. Then you had a change that happened during World War II, which I'm sure you're familiar with, with the Manhattan Project.

0:12:23.4 SC: Heard of it.

0:12:23.5 JS: And developing the nuclear bomb, developing radar. And that was a little bit different in the sense that the government really wanted to deploy scientific and engineering expertise to create specific technologies that they really wanted.

0:12:39.3 JS: So they brought together a lot of experts and said, "Hey, we want you to develop a system that can detect enemy aircraft." Or, "Hey, we want you to come and develop a system that can produce a weapon that could potentially end this war, the nuclear bomb." So it was very targeted use of expertise, even though they didn't yet have the expertise. So you can see we're one step away from the progressive era. But by the Cold War, we started to get into a phrase that I called it alchemy, 'cause it suggested this hope that by putting stuff together, something amazing would happen. It wasn't as rational, and the government really didn't even have an idea of which fields were gonna create the most innovations or the most innovations that would create the most jobs or the innovations that would boost national competitiveness, the most economic competitiveness I'm talking about here.

0:13:30.6 JS: It was just this sense that by creating more people with STEM educations amazing things were gonna happen, and we don't know what, but amazing things are gonna happen. Just get them together. Like Bell Labs maybe was a little bit like that. Bring them together and amazing things are gonna happen. And this understanding of STEM education and STEM expertise, there was a lot of hope and faith, a faith. And I like that use of the word faith. We normally connect that with religion, but it was almost like that. It was like, "Wow, these people are gonna save us and let's invest in them and let's make them go."

0:14:13.5 SC: So techno-optimism at an early era. That thing.

0:14:16.5 JS: Yeah. Yeah. That's a phrase that's bounced around a lot in this.

0:14:21.6 SC: So, you've already implicitly answered this question a little bit, but I'm wondering, since we're gonna be talking about STEM education and what happens to people who get STEM degrees, in what sense is this a job for sociologists to think about? We haven't had that many sociologists on the show. We had a great talk with Brooke Harrington about offshore wealth management, but we haven't really gone into enough for the listeners, who I assume listen to nothing but the Mindscape Podcast, to really get an idea about what sociologists do. So are you doing mainstream sociology or are you branching out a little bit with this topic?

0:15:01.6 JS: That's a great question. One of the reasons I went into sociology was that I see it as the big picture social science. I think that economists produce a lot of great knowledge. I think political scientists produce a lot of great knowledge, but I tend to think of the knowledge they produce, especially economists, as looking through the world through a rolled up piece of paper. I'm creating that right now with my hands here, and you can see something, you can focus on something really clearly, but you don't necessarily see all the different things that might be connected to that thing that you're really, really focusing on. So economists can lead us astray sometimes in ways that I think if sociologists were more inclined to study some of the issues that economists focus on, they might have provided a little bit of a corrective.

0:16:03.4 JS: So for example, the world is filled right now with a lot of folks who are upset about free trade. And how free trade produced a lot of economic dislocation, people losing their jobs, people who used to work in manufacturing not having those jobs anymore. Those jobs have gone abroad. This should have been obvious, and I think that the economists tend toward... And sorry for any in the audience. I think they tend toward a really basic utilitarianism. And so they might think, "Well, we might lose some manufacturing jobs, but overall we're gonna be happier because you can produce televisions more cheaply in Mexico or China. Now these are gonna be cheaper for us to buy and these workers can move like water, they'll just flow around to the places where the economic opportunities are and everyone's gonna be better off." But what they don't understand is that people have identities. Their identities are often linked to their jobs. And so they struggle with economic dislocation.

0:17:18.0 SC: So sociologists, I think, can look at this big picture, see all these things going on. And that's what I love to do. I often think of the knowledge that I do compared to the knowledge that you do or that you generate. I think of the science that you do, Sean, is like vertically integrated, like it's really, really deep, and if you are focused on a problem of general relativity, I just keep bringing that up 'cause I know you wrote the textbook on it, and someone knocks on the door and, "Sean, we got to talk to you." You lose your concentration, the whole thing falls down.

0:17:57.4 SC: Very annoying.

0:17:57.4 JS: And then you got to get back into it. Whereas the stuff that I do, and why it's hard to do this podcast, just to give you a heads up, it is horizontally integrated knowledge. It's a lot of stuff at a more superficial level, but really broad. So I'm trying to understand investments and education and what employers in software and oil and gas and chemicals and biopharmaceuticals, all this stuff is just... It's at a superficial level, but there's a lot of it. And I love that though. And I think it fits more with my undiagnosed ADD, that it's easier for me to get back into it if someone knocks on the door, 'cause there's a lot of different footholds I can grab onto rather than that really narrow one. Does that make sense? Do you know what I'm talking about?

0:18:50.0 SC: We did have Herbert Gintis on the podcast. I don't know if you know his work. But it reminds me very much of that, even though he self-identified as an economist. But game theory, evolution, Physics, it all came in. And I absolutely see the appeal of that. That's why I do a podcast rather than just sitting in my office writing papers.

0:19:07.2 JS: Right, right, right. Exactly. So the sociology, when I looked at this situation, I got a little pushback from some STEM workers themselves. "Who are you? What are you doing? You're a sociologist. Why are you looking at this?" I would like to think I'm the guy who can look at the big picture here. I can see things that you can't see. I can bring together different ideas, different systems of thought that maybe you're not aware of, and use those things to illuminate social reality in a unique way that actually adds some value, that makes a contribution.

0:19:40.8 SC: All right. Well, we'll see over the next hour whether we do that. We will illuminate societal reality.

0:19:44.9 JS: Wow. I just realized I put a lot of pressure on myself.

0:19:47.8 SC: Yeah, I know. You really just set yourself up there, but...

0:19:49.0 JS: This better be amazing.

0:19:50.1 SC: Okay. For people who are not professional sociologists or hang out there with, let's set the stage. We have people who get degrees in the STEM, and I guess the two questions I want to ask, you can address them in whatever order is, one, what kinds of jobs do they go into? Within academia, we love it when people go into academic jobs, and we imagine getting a PhD and becoming a professor. But you and I also know that's a small fraction of all the people who get degrees in these fields. And the other is, how does that compare to all the other jobs? What is the fraction of people when they go into jobs they say, "Oh, this is a STEM job," versus, what, management, factory jobs? I don't even know what the categories are.

0:20:34.6 JS: Right. So that's a good question. The government talks about, the policymakers in the US government, I know your audience is international, talks about STEM and non-STEM as a binary. It's one or the other. And it is a few people who go beyond that. But in general, they talk about STEM and non-STEM jobs. And they do that because of what I talked about before, this hope that by putting people into these STEM occupations, the traditional STEM occupations, software developer, chemist, biologist, things that you knew in high school as science and engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, that by getting people into those occupations, these amazing things are going to happen.

0:21:25.5 JS: In reality, as I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, STEM and non-STEM is more of a continuum. I spent a lot of time thinking about that. It ended up getting cut from the book for various reasons. But it's definitely the case that there's a lot of... There are a lot of jobs in which STEM expertise, college-level STEM expertise is very, very helpful. So if any of your listeners are software developers, they would almost certainly prefer a manager who understands software development. And so there's... A lot of people who get STEM degrees do go into management. A lot of people who get STEM degrees go into practicing medicine. Now, the government does not consider practicing medicine to be a STEM job.

0:22:18.3 SC: Really?

0:22:19.3 JS: And people might think, "Yeah." They might think, "Why is that? What's going on?" It's because of this thing about trying to create innovation. And practicing medicine does a lot of great things for people as obvious for anyone who's ever been to a competent physician, but they typically do not innovate and create patents and jobs and things like that. We've got STEM, we've got MD-PhDs who might do that, but, for the most part, practicing medicine is about deploying existing expertise. And another area where people with STEM degrees will go that are not the traditional STEM occupations, is finance of various kinds.

0:22:58.2 SC: Very much. Yeah.

0:23:00.0 JS: Now, I know you're aware of people in Physics who went into quantitative finance and do some very high-powered things there. The National Science Foundation data... The National Science Foundation runs this great survey called the National Survey of College Graduates. And I relied on it a lot for this book. It shows that people go into this category of accountants, auditors, financial specialists. It tends to group them together. We don't know exactly what those folks are doing. It's probably not a lot of Black-Scholes equations and some of the stuff that our friends on Wall Street do. But, so, that's another area where folks go. And then a lot of folks go into jobs that don't use STEM expertise at all. And there's just too many to mention. It's hard to make generalizations that it's a very wide variety of potential occupations for people with STEM expertise. But I want to emphasize, and I do in the book, that when the government invests in STEM education, they want people to go into STEM occupations. And I should say at the outset right here, that about 50% of all STEM workers in the United States are in computers in some way. That's like the 800-pound gorilla of STEM.

0:24:23.9 JS: And we're talking software developers. That's one of the most in demand jobs, computer engineers of various types, web developers. There's just a whole range of occupations that involve computers. And one of the things that's really unique about that particular STEM sector is that whereas chemical firms like DuPont hires chemists, trucking companies or shipping companies probably don't hire chemists. But computer experts of various types, they're their own silo where tech companies will hire these folks, but then they're also like a band across the economy, where just about everybody hires some computer experts to do things, run their payroll, do their logistics. I always think of trucking because we don't think of trucking as being very high tech, but actually they hire a lot of data people, and to manage this whole complicated system. So that computer-related fields, information technology is a band across the whole economy: Retail, all kinds of sectors will use that. Life sciences, that'll be used in biopharma, all that life science kinds of sectors.

0:25:44.6 JS: So computer is really the 800-pound gorilla. And so when we talk about STEM workers, people have commented on the book a little bit. They're saying, "Hey, man, this book seems to be really about tech and really about computer workers." And there's two reasons for that. One is what I just told you, that so many workers go into that field. And the other reason is that those are the employers who argue and complain the loudest about shortages. They're the ones who are saying, "Hey, man, we need more workers. Where are these workers? What's wrong with your universities? What's wrong with your society for not giving us more STEM grads so that we can hire them?"

0:26:28.2 SC: Well, that's good, 'cause that's exactly where I wanted to go next, because... Is the feeling that we get within academia that the humanities are on the decline and STEM majors are taking over, is that accurate? And nevertheless, there's a lot of companies that are complaining we don't produce enough STEM majors.

0:26:45.4 JS: Yeah. So I should say at the outset that the book is really about this puzzle. I've been talking for quite a while here already and I haven't even gone to the puzzle.

0:26:56.6 SC: We'll get there.

0:26:57.8 JS: My apologies. The puzzle is that there's all these claims of the shortage of STEM grads. According to some measures, and this is the Census Bureau, only 28% of STEM grads work in STEM jobs. There's different ways of counting and different data sets. My counting is about 40% of STEM grads work in STEM jobs. So it's a little bit higher, but still a minority. So the puzzle is, there's all these complaints about shortages, "What's going on? Why aren't you producing enough?" And yet the data looks like we're producing a surplus. So that's the puzzle there.

0:27:36.5 SC: Those figures that you quote, one way or the other, are they lifetime? Like, "Sometime 20 years ago, 50 years ago, I got a STEM degree and now I'm not," or is it right out of college?

0:27:47.5 JS: So basically what they do is... The National Survey of College Graduates, it comes out every couple years. And they ask a sample of college graduates, "What did you get your degree in? What are you doing now?" So it's a slice of people. So it includes people right out of college and people who have been out for a while. But that's a great question because I was really interested in whether people go in massive numbers into STEM early on and then move on to something else. But there's a lot of data that suggests, even in high demand fields like electrical engineering, that some data suggests upwards of 50% right out of college say, "Nah, I'm not going to go this STEM route. I'm going to go do something else."

0:28:34.3 JS: So really it's a leaky pipeline. That's a metaphor that's often used. You've probably heard that metaphor. It's a leaky pipeline that leaks at all stages. If we think about STEM as something important, in elementary school, people lose interest there, high school, college, and then right out of college, and then throughout their work lives, people can exit the STEM pipeline. That's one of the things I really wanted to emphasize in this book, is that too many people studying this focus on the STEM pipeline as just about education from K through 16, K through college. But, really, people have to keep, and we can talk about this later, people have to keep their STEM skills up to date. And STEM education, if you want to be successful in STEM, you got to keep your skills up to date. Your education doesn't end at college, doesn't end at a PhD. You got to constantly re-up. You got to constantly... I call it the STEM skills treadmill. I apologize for the transparent attempt to create jargon. But I really wanted to capture something here, which is the idea of moving while standing in place. STEM workers really have to keep moving. They really have to keep learning just to be able to keep their job. And I feel like I'm getting off what your original question was.

0:29:58.2 SC: Well, that is ultimately where we want to go, but that's okay, 'cause we can go back and forth, but just to drive it home, it's okay to get the point halfway through the podcast. One gets the impression that a successful undergraduate majoring in a STEM field is going to come out of college thinking of themselves as elite and well-trained, et cetera. But one of the messages of your book is it's exactly those people who the employers think of as basically cheap and disposable. They're going to use 'em for a little while until their skills are not quite as cutting edge anymore, and they're not going to really mind if they just fire them and hire newer graduates.

0:30:36.9 JS: Right. I talked to a CEO of an innovation economy company, and they hired a lot of STEM workers. And this CEO used the phrase that I title a chapter of the book, Burn and Churn. And it was striking. He said, just so matter of factly, "Yeah, we burn and churn through them. They have a lot of enthusiasm and we take advantage of that. And when their skills fall out of date or when they get burned out, then we hire some more." And there's other studies that show STEM employers like to get new blood. They like to get new folks coming in there. They like this churn. And so that's seen as a positive. And there's not that much concern about what happens to people who get burned out.

0:31:28.6 JS: There's a lot of research. It's funny because for years I've advised students, and maybe you have as well, to major in the field that you're passionate about, to choose a career that you think you can be passionate about. But leave it to the social scientists to find something negative about that. And there's new research, mainly from my field and sociology, about how employers exploit this passion. They think, "Wow, we've got these workers who really love this and let's get 'em to work 60, 70 hours a week. We don't even have to pay them extra 'cause they're so passionate. They've had great teachers and professors who've fired their excitement about this field. And let's ride that wave until it crashes or peters out or something. And maybe we can then hire the next group of passionate workers."

0:32:22.7 SC: So what leads these companies to complain about a shortage? Is it just that they want even more cheap workers just out of college?

0:32:30.6 JS: So I played dumb in the book a little bit. I'm like, "All right, employers, you say that there's a shortage. I'm going to take that at face value. If there really is a shortage, are you behaving like there's a shortage? Are you acting like STEM grads are scarce and valuable and can just produce magic that's going to benefit all of us? Or are you treating these folks as disposable?" There's a lot of good metaphors, Sean, that work here. One of the ones I think about is squeezing an orange, getting that juice out of it. In my LA Times op-ed, I suddenly thought about fast fashion, something that works or that's really great for a short time, but you don't expect it to last. You move through it. And so that's what they do. And I just kept believing them, pretending to believe them and saying, "All right, let's see if your actions match your words." And they just really... It just really doesn't. The New York Times has a headline today. I don't know if I can mention the date in this.

0:33:37.4 SC: Go ahead.

0:33:38.1 JS: But it could be almost any day. There's a new round of layoffs at major tech companies. These are the firms... They created this lobbying group called Forward US, that their whole reason for being is the idea of a STEM shortage. Their whole reason for being is lobbying the government for both more STEM grads, more STEM education, and also more STEM migrants to come. And a lot of these companies, and it's part of the reason I talk about these tech companies, they're rich. Some of these are near monopolies. We're talking Google, we're talking Amazon, we're talking... Well, Alphabet. Google is tedious. They changed their names. Facebook's now Meta, but huge 2 billion people have Facebook. They own Instagram. Apple has like a billion dollars in cash. They lay off workers. They just, "We're done with you guys. We hired too many. Sorry. We don't need you guys anymore."

0:34:46.5 JS: I met a guy who was a former HR expert at a major tech company, and he had a brilliant idea, and I'm not going to give him credit 'cause he actually wanted to remain anonymous, but he moved into the education field, like elementary education and high school education, and in that field for students with learning disabilities, there's this thing called the IEP, which stands for Individual Education Program or Individualized Education Plan, something like that. But the idea is you have a student with some learning disability, you monitor their progress, you figure out what their strengths are, you figure out what they need to know. And he thought that was a great model for these really rich tech companies that are constantly complaining about shortages. If it looks like... And who's going to know better than the employers themselves? If it looks like some skills are about to be obsolete, why not tell these workers, "Hey, you've already got this great foundation in STEM education. Your specialty is going down. We need something new. This looks like it's going to be the new thing. We're going to put a little bit of money in there and we're going to train you and deploy you somewhere else in the firm." They typically don't do that.

0:36:05.4 SC: Never.

0:36:06.6 JS: They let you go. Google, I think it was Google, basically told employees, "You've got this many months to figure out what skill you want to develop. You're on your own to figure that out." How do you know? How do you know what's going to be the next in demand skill? And so they moved into that. They were given the opportunity to move into that, but without guidance or without paid training. So that's really tough. I got to lay another metaphor on you. And this came from someone, a STEM worker, an engineer who emailed me after my LA Times op-ed came out. And I love to get the voices from the field. It's so interesting to hear their stories. This engineer told me that he thought STEM work was something like prospecting and mining in the 1800s. And you've got these people who chase the latest gold rush. We're going to go do that thing. It's going to be really hot for a while. Maybe some people are going to get rich, maybe some STEM workers are going to stock options. There's going to be a lot of STEM people are going to get rich, but then it's going to peter out and then those folks got to find the next big thing.

0:37:22.9 JS: And this engineer told me he didn't want his children to go into these fields because he said it gets tiring chasing these gold rushes, chasing these the next mine to be exploited. And just people really dig into it. Your readers can probably think of examples, but blockchain was really huge for a while. AI is now the huge one. It goes up and down. If you're in oil and gas, if the price of oil is super high, they're like, "Wow, we need more. We can pay 'em a lot." And then suddenly that price plummets, and then that goes down. For people in the life sciences, there could be some promising new technologies in life sciences. Right now, mRNA is really big. Maybe there's going to be some limitations there. Gene editing really big. Might be some limitations there. We'll see. But you get these fields that get super hot and then they hire a lot of folks, if they don't get FDA approval, if the clinical trials don't work out, "See you later." And life sciences will lay off a bunch of workers as well.

0:38:34.5 SC: Is is it possible to oversimplify your argument by saying that there might possibly be downsides to capitalism?

0:38:47.3 JS: I would say that the problem isn't necessarily capitalism, per se. The problem really is... And this is where I really put on my sociologist hat, but I'm borrowing from some ideas that come from economists as well. There are cultural practices that characterize American capitalism, especially American capitalism today and certainly over the last few decades, which are creating this problem. And there's a lot of folks who've written about this, but there's expectations that investors have that they didn't used to have. And that is that they call it maximizing short term shareholder value. Various permutations of that phrase, various versions of that phrase. But there's a whole movement to create this thing that the stakeholders who really matter for a corporation are the shareholders, not the employees, the shareholders.

0:39:54.0 SC: Not the customers.

0:39:56.7 JS: Not the customers, as anyone who's tried to do customer service in almost any field, any sector, not the people in the regional economy where the company might be based. It's the shareholders. And they should expect value on their investment in the short term. And there's a lot of complicated stuff about how this came about. There used to be these massive conglomerates that had all these diverse companies under one roof, underwear and apple pie. Sara Lee owned Hanes, the Sarah Lee company, the underwear company. All these crazy things put together. And they were doing that to hedge their bets, if the apple pie market collapse, at least they can make some money on t-shirts. But shareholders were like, "No, no, no. We want you to do what you do, find your core competency, do that thing." It was a massive redefinition of what corporations were really about. And there was a redefinition of what workers were. And workers became costs. And investors began to applaud corporations that shed workers.

0:41:08.1 JS: This was a big shift. You would always have companies that would lay off workers when the economy was bad. But by the 1980s as we got to shift to this maximizing short-term shareholder value approach to corporations, you got companies that shed workers even in good times. And the stock price would go up. I give the example of Sara Lee 'cause it's just such a great example. And the CEO complained, that, "My god, the investors just want us to get rid of workers. That's what they want." And investors, they don't like training in the United States, especially. The Europeans are better at investing in training than the American corporations are. Why? Sociologists like to talk about training as investing, but investors see that as spending money. And why are you spending money on that when you should be maybe doing stock buybacks or something to boost the value of your stock.?

0:42:03.6 SC: For example.

0:42:06.9 JS: So I wouldn't say it's capitalism. I would say it's this version of capitalism that we have right now. We have similar kinds of short-term expectations among venture capitalists, which I think are very important. It drives them to put their money into software at the expense of other industries, which I think we need very badly. In the book, I'm very transparent about what I want staff workers to do. I want them to save the planet. I really want them to develop clean energy, better plastics, carbon capture technologies. There's so many things we badly need, but investors want software. They love software. Instagram was worth a billion dollars when it had 11 employees. Instagram was software. And the reason investors love software is because, from the perspective of investor, that's a fantastic investment. You can easily demonstrate the technology works unlike new battery technologies, unlike...

0:43:14.9 SC: Hardware. Yeah.

0:43:15.0 JS: Things that we badly need like fusion energy. There's some startups doing fusion energy, but boy, when are we going to get that? Can we really demonstrate that that works? With software, you can pretty much show that it works pretty quickly. You don't need a factory to create it, which is a major advantage. If you don't need a factory, you don't need employees. You just need a few people to do the software. And then you can make massive amounts of money. The return on software investments are 10 times, much percentage higher than returns on clean energy, which is what I think we badly need.

0:43:58.0 JS: And so investors, if they just keep blockchain, AI is the new ones that I mentioned, but any software, FinTech, technology related to finance, social media, the surveillance capitalism, which is another very... There's a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff, tracking us on the internet. Wow. We can sell you more things and not necessarily have to produce things. So we don't need factories. We don't have what investors call the valley of death, where you go from the innovation to the actual manufacturing phase, which can take a while, making sure their prototype works and all that stuff. So that's a long way to say capitalism is not the problem. I think it's the version of capitalism that we have right now.

0:44:43.1 SC: Okay. And there's probably a whole 'nother podcast we could devote to how that version of capitalism came to be. But we'll stay a little bit focused here. And I do want to give you a chance to mention that the fear of becoming obsolete and then getting fired is not the only thing that is keeping STEM grads slightly unhappy. There's the overwork aspect. There's other things where the grass isn't quite as green as they hoped it would be once you've gotten your bachelor's in electrical engineering and enter the job market.

0:45:16.1 JS: Yeah. So I tend to think... Again, taking at face value these employers that there are these dire shortages and it's a crisis and those are the words that they use. Take that at face value. But what are they doing? How are they treating these STEM workers? And one of the things that they do is they incentivize movements out of STEM. And they do that by paying their managers more. And I know you're an NBA basketball fan. I know you love the Sixers, you've got your passions there. Do you still love the Sixers?

0:45:50.8 SC: We had Daryl Morey as a guest on the podcast, the GM of the Sixers, yes.

0:45:56.1 JS: So it's interesting because in professional sports, the players who have these scarce skills are paid more than the managers. In STEM, the managers are typically, not always, typically paid more than the folks who have the skills that are supposedly scarce. And employers control wages. They decide how much to pay their workers. This is an area where I think sociologists have done a little bit better than the economists. The economists, they have some theories about wages, but understanding the starting point of the wage, I don't think they've been very good at. And I think sociologists are a little bit better at this. I talked to the COO of a tech company, I'm using an anecdote here, and he was telling me, "We need more user experience designers, the folks who design the interface of the software that we're using right now. And I don't want to pay them what they're demanding."

0:47:00.4 JS: And he showed me there's services that do surveys of how much people are paying people in different fields, including user experience designers. And he's saying, "Look at how much they make. I don't want to pay them more than this." That's a sociological dynamic. Isomorphism is the jargony thing, but we want to look like we're doing what other folks are doing. We don't want to be someone who pays their user experience designer too much. This guy decided, "I can't find people here to do it. I'm going to outsource this job." So he went around the world, Eastern Europe, China, Mexico, India, looking for cheaper user experience designers, until he found some that he thought were competent and he could pay them less. And then the more that kind of thing takes off, the less you incentivize people to move into that field in the United States, the more you become dependent on outsourcing that thing. But a big argument that I make in the book is that there's a lot of self-inflicted wounds here if indeed there is scarcity. And the decision to pay your STEM workers less than their managers and to incentivize movements out of STEM, which not every firm does, but it's very common, it's one of the problems in this area.

0:48:22.0 SC: Well, and there is also the idea that because there truly are so many STEM graduates that these employers can hire, that they can abuse them once they're there. That they can give them overtime. There's these schedules that are invented to hit targets and really crush people. And it can be soul-destroying to just toil away at this job for a few years before you get outdated.

0:48:50.8 JS: I think that that's exactly right, Sean. And I rely pretty heavily on, to explore the detail of this, an ethnography by a sociologist named Ofer Sharone. I want to give him a shout out because I think he did such great work, where he spent some time at a big tech company. He had to keep it anonymous, but it's a major tech company that folks know and that has deep pockets. It has a lot of money. And, boy, they worked their workers really hard. And he captured this thing. And I actually used this in my intro to sociology class, in my sociology of work, to talk about, again, the social scientist making everything seem bad. But even these jobs that are supposedly great, even these jobs that that look fun, and the media image of some of these STEM jobs is people playing foosball, people playing ping pong. There was a STEM employer here in San Diego that had this big swirly slide in the atrium of their workplace.

0:50:00.6 JS: Ofer Sharone went to this company and saw that people didn't really use this stuff. That it looked like a lot of fun stuff was around, but people didn't use it. And that was because for much of the year, these workers were in what they call crunch mode or crunch time. And that is the time when they're racing to deliver a product that has been promised for a delivery date at a particular time, and they've got to make sure that it works and they've started working... He found workers worked an average of 67 hours a week. That's a long time.

0:50:39.5 SC: That's a lot. Yeah.

0:50:39.7 JS: And they did it voluntarily. The managers have these clever ways of managing workers to... If they didn't come with the passion, coax the passion out of them or make them behave as if they're passionate. It's these pretty bruising performance reviews where every worker is ranked. It's called stacked ranking or forced ranking, sometimes it's called, cynically, rank and yank, where you rank of the workers and you yank out the ones that are ranked in a low position. But the workers themselves choose their hours and they choose the hours based on this idea that they want to impress their manager. So the manager might go to them and say, "Hey, we got us this product we want to deliver. We want it to have this and that capability. We need someone to do this particular aspect of this software, for example. And do you think you could do it? And how long do you think it'll take you?" And they want a high ranking, they want a high evaluation for their performance evaluation. So they overpromise, or they certainly promise very ambitiously, because if they say, "That looks hard. Oh, I don't know about that. Maybe you should dial down your expectations," that manager's going to think, "Eh, I don't know if I want this guy at this moment."

0:52:04.6 SC: The obvious analogies to graduate school could not have missed your notice.

0:52:09.3 JS: Yes. Yeah. There's definitely a lot of analogies to graduate school. You were absolutely right. My mind is racing right now with some of them, but trying to stay focused here. So, what you have is workers seemingly voluntarily taking on these excessive hours and then working themselves very, very hard. One software developer compared it to drinking out of a fire hose, just trying to keep up with all the stuff that's going on, and developing the skills that they need. Maybe they promise something that involves a skill that they don't have yet, so they got to work to develop that. And that stuff is very difficult. And one of the things that maybe some of your listeners are familiar with, I know some of the STEM workers with whom I've spoken are familiar with this, it's often a young person's game. And part of that... There's reasons for that. One of them is that some young people realize, "Wow, I'm going to have to keep my skills up to date all the time. That's going to be hard. And I can do this for a little while, but I burn out and then I move on to something else." The other thing is that older workers often have families, and if you have families, they take time unfortunately.

0:53:30.8 SC: Maybe that's fortunate. That's okay.

0:53:36.6 JS: It's a job that you have to do and it doesn't go away. And these workers, they have a second shift at home if they're not shunting that off onto a spouse. And it gets harder and harder to self train in your own time. And, so, it creates more and more stress. So these deadlines happen and it does put a lot of pressure on workers. And again, this might sound very softwarey, very tech-focused, but those are the employers who say there's shortages, those are the employers who often are the richest, those are the employers getting all this investment from investors. And if there's any place where we would expect STEM workers to be treated really great, it should be these employers. And I don't think we see that.

0:54:28.0 SC: And there's a point you make in the book, and I wasn't sure whether this was in your mind more aspirational or factual, but the idea that a lot of... There's some idealism in the young STEM workers. They want to or they should want to, I'm not sure, make the world a better place. And that turns out not to be the most lucrative job opportunity, the making a world a better place fields.

0:54:53.3 JS: Yeah. So this is where I was able to explore some of the issues. I was a double major in sociology and philosophy. And I've always been interested like you in the meaning of life. What is this all for? I don't get much opportunity to really study that. But in the last chapter of the book, I wanted to really explore this question of STEM education for what? What are we, as a society, hoping to get with these innovations that STEM workers are producing? And I think that some STEM workers... And I want to be really clear about this. I'm sure there's some very, very happy STEM workers who are listening to this right now. I hope they're still listening and they're thinking, "I love my job. I'm not working 70 hours a week. This is fantastic. I'm making tons of money. I can retire early." There are those folks. I'm talking about the aggregate.

0:55:49.0 JS: And there are folks who are really excited to be working on interesting STEM problems regardless of what it is. Some STEM workers are... And I admire them. They're pure scientists in a way. They love particular ways of thinking. And so they could move from cosmology or astrophysics into data science and predictive algorithms and things like that thinking... There's a guy, I don't know if he ended up in the book. I may have had him in there, I may have cut him out. But he was an astrophysics major who couldn't get a job or decided not to get a job in academia. And then he worked for a clothing retailer that needed experts in AI and machine learning and that thing, so that they could give customers suggestions of new clothes to buy.

0:56:47.6 SC: Okay. Very different.

0:56:47.7 JS: Now, I would find that to be soul-destroying to go from thinking about general relativity to be thinking about how can I get someone to buy things that they don't need? But from a pure science standpoint, from the pure complexity of problem standpoint, some folks can make that transition, but not everybody. And so there's a literature in sociology and management and psychology about how some jobs can produce moral stresses or even moral injuries. Anyone who's seen at their workplace, workplace bullying, they might have felt a moral stress if they've known that their employer, someone at their job is embezzling, that could create a moral stress. But what I was interested in the last chapter of the book asking STEM education for what, are the STEM workers who are uncomfortable morally with the business model of their firm?

0:57:47.5 JS: And it's easy to pick on social media, but it's easy to pick on social media because there's a lot of evidence that social media produces a lot of social harms. And so I quote some workers at Facebook who've said Facebook is hurting people at scale. Another worker more graphically said, "I feel like I have blood on my hands for Facebook's role in promoting disinformation and promoting political conflict in societies other than the United States." Other people have said, "Well, they actually promote conflict in the United States." There's new research coming out about rises in depression, especially teen depression, especially teen girls.

0:58:38.1 SC: Yeah. They're pretty effective...

0:58:40.5 JS: And there's...

0:58:41.5 SC: The studies are convincing, yeah.

0:58:43.0 JS: There's evidence that suggests, hard to put these things definitively, causal inferences are very difficult in social science, but there's evidence that suggests social media use is part of the reason we're seeing very alarming rises in teen depression. So, some STEM workers can think, "Oh, I'm doing interesting things. Analytically, these are exciting problems to solve. I'm working with people." They can get really jazzed about that. Other workers can think, "When I go home at night, I don't feel good about what I'm doing here." They are even like... I don't know if any of your... You or any of your listeners have gone on these YouTube rabbit holes where you start watching a video and then YouTube saying, "What about this one? What about this one? How about that one? You like that? Check out this one." And they tend to lead you into more extreme content or more shocking or emotionally provocative content. There's a phrase "engagement equals enragement", or maybe you could reverse it, "enragement equals engagement". But the idea is getting this emotional hook into the users by out-raging them is a way to get them to use the app longer.

1:00:06.0 JS: And so Google owns... Alphabet owns Google, Google owns YouTube, they're involved in this stuff as well. Very rich company using different technologies to get people very upset, and you can imagine workers not being happy with this.

1:00:25.6 SC: Well, before you defended capitalism a little bit saying that there's a particular type of capitalism which we've evolved to, and I appreciate the benefits of capitalism in certain circumstances, markets are good at solving certain problems, but a lot of what you're describing really just sounds like capitalism that's gotten better at being efficiently capitalistic because of faster information flows and faster decisions and more scales and wider labor markets and things like that, whereas as a globe, as a species, we produce a lot, we produce abundance, and do we need to think radically? It's late in the podcast. This is where we'd like to get to speculate a little bit. So, do we need to think more radically about the system that lets this all happen?

1:01:15.8 JS: I actually don't think we need to think more radically about it. I think that we have the tools available now to get more out of our investments in STEM education than we are getting now. One of the things we could do is create more incentives for innovators in the fields that we desperately need. I often think if we're all made extinct by climate change or something like that, and an alien civilization comes down and they look at us and they think, "Well, what were you guys investing in when the planet was falling apart and there were pandemics, and the signs were all around you that you were in big trouble?" And if we say cryptocurrency, blockchain, AI, surveillance economy," it's gonna look a little silly.

1:02:04.3 JS: So, I think some intervention is needed, but not a radical change. So, one of the things we could do is create more government incentives in investment in clean energy, better plastics that don't create micro nano plastics that are in our bodies, in human breast milk, incredibly, forever chemicals that we don't know what are doing with us. We can create incentives through tax rebates or tax incentives to make these movements happen. The Inflation Reduction Act, which is a very general name for a very big bill, did create these incentives and it's created stakeholders who are moving into the clean energy space. So one thing you can do is create incentives for more of the investments we need. That'll produce more opportunities for STEM workers to deploy their skills in ways that might feel morally resonant with them.

1:02:58.6 JS: And another thing you can do is simply make illegal some uses of STEM skills. There's a lot of debate among legal experts about whether targeted advertising should just be banned so that you remove the incentive for these companies to endlessly find ways to surveil all of us on the internet, because if they can't do this targeted advertising, then they don't have incentives to do that anymore, so you can legislate things away. And then another thing you can do is just think about moral limits on investors and business models. Cannabis is legal in my state of California, but my understanding is the cannabis business is a little shaky because banks are a little nervous working with those folks, there's this kinda sense that they're cordoned off like, "Well, you guys are a little bit different." I hesitate to use this word, but pornography is a very lucrative field that's also... "Whoa, we don't wanna invest in that. We don't really wanna be a part of that."

1:04:12.8 JS: So, we already have moral limits that shape investor behavior and what people are willing to spend their time on in terms of business practices and investing, but for some reason, it's okay to take away people's privacy, to stoke division in conflict, to encourage disinformation, this bed of disinformation in society, a lot of things that you might argue are more harmful than cannabis are okay for investors to invest in, mass layoffs, which disrupt families. There's a lot of things that investors tolerate right now, which perhaps they shouldn't, perhaps a little more moral education could go aways here as well.

1:05:03.6 SC: I'm not a cannabis guy, but I was an online poker player, and it used to be done by many, many people and the government swooped in one Friday and seized all their assets, and...

1:05:16.0 JS: Really? Interesting.

1:05:17.1 SC: You basically can't poker online now. Certain states you can, but it used to just be all over. And I agree. That's a lot less harmful than some of the things you just mentioned.

1:05:27.2 JS: Yeah, so there's research that suggests that you can tweak capitalism, you can fix it, in ways that will generate the productive energies, the innovation, the riches that capitalism that can produce and minimize some of the harms that we see.

1:05:46.8 SC: Well, I don't quite... So, the thing that I'm still missing though is the innovation disrupting the kinds of jobs that people grew up having, if as is plausible, the rate of innovation and which skills are relevant is increasing the rate and so it's faster now, we're always gonna have an issue where people who hit 50 are no longer valued, and that does seem a bit harder to solve. I'm not quite sure how to do it.

1:06:13.6 JS: Yeah, so, the National Survey of College Graduates, they asked this broad range of college graduates did they take skills-related training in the past year or two, and we looked at the time since their degree, and about 60% have taken skills-related training in STEM up to 30 years after their degree. So we're getting into the 50s, it starts to go down when we're getting into people 60s. So you're absolutely right that that is an issue. So one of the things that we need to do is... I don't like this phrase, Sean, because it sounds so 1970s, the lifelong learning. We had this model of education that you graduate in your early 20s and then you're gone. And I really think we need to change that. We're in a different era now, and we need a model where we think of college as a place you return to periodically for skills updating or re-skilling something in a different area altogether when your skills become obsolete. Maybe something like a subscription model or something where you can go back to your alma mater or a different university, but this expectation that we have of college is something you do when you're young, and then you move on, maybe needs to be changed a little bit.

1:07:45.6 JS: I still think that college education is absolutely essential for creating what I like to think of as foundational skills, the basic skills that a college graduate has, one of the things is to learn how to learn. PhD training really makes you good at that, but even with the bachelors, you kinda learn how to learn. You can discern good knowledge from bad knowledge, you learn how to sort through what's good and bad in trying to find the skills that you might need or the knowledge you might need, but you'll have that core foundation, but then on top of that, the skills that you actually deploy at work might change many times throughout your career. So, I would argue, and I'm working on a book on this with a colleague right now, college education is great for that foundation, but circling back to college to get a skills updating, not for another degree, but a short-term certificate, very specific, narrow kinda skill that can be deployed now, might be something that many people will have to do repeatedly throughout their careers.

1:08:48.3 SC: Of course, I'm very much in favor of lifelong learning. I do wonder though about the model because, one is at a very different life stage at age 40 than age 20. When you're 20, not only you're learning it for the first time, but there's a certain freedom to fail because your obligations are relatively low, but once you have a kid and mortgages and things like that, and also you've been happy for the last 20 years doing some job. I'm in favor of efficiency, but I feel the human cost of having to say, "I need to do something different than what I've been doing before."

1:09:23.6 JS: Yeah, I agree with that, but the reality is upon us. You are gonna have to do something different. There was a great study that was done, social scientists love a natural experiment where something happens and you can... Something happens that's rare, and you could examine how human beings respond to it. So Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone was no longer gonna support Adobe Flash software. He said, "You know what, we're not gonna do Adobe anymore. We're gonna use something else." And there were a lot of software experts on Adobe Flash, not necessarily employed by Adobe, but that was what they did. Suddenly that was gone. They had to respond. So that reality is already there, where a skill that has maybe been developed over a few years, it's just no longer needed. And that reality is already there, so, how are we as a society gonna deal with the regular obsolescing of technical skills? And you're right, it's definitely hard. People's identities get wrapped up in their jobs and their skill sets get more and more fine-tuned, and then to lose that can be really tragic, especially as you say, if they have a family.

1:10:45.6 JS: So that's gonna be difficult. I think, if shareholders don't punish companies for investing in the training of their workers, especially the richest companies, for investing in the workers, that should be something that's encouraged and applauded. I gotta tell you, I don't wanna go off subject too much here, but Google invests a lot of money in schools. They give away Chromebooks to students, they do a lot of things to get to train the next generation of software developers at that stage, but they could do more for their incumbent workers. That's the odd thing. And, so, social scientists, they talk about corporate social responsibility, and some things are done as corporate branding, "Look how good we are. We give away this money." Some of it's done to kinda create market share, "Let's get a bunch of people using Chromebooks and they're gonna love Google." So there's money that's being spent in this area, but I would argue they could do more for their incumbent workers to manage these sometimes very difficult to navigate career changes or job scale changes later in life.

1:11:54.3 SC: Maybe as a final thought, we can be more idealistic ourselves because, of course, we want people to get lucrative, rewarding jobs that they can have and some level of security throughout their career, but that's not the only reason to get an education. When people ask me about applying to graduate school in Physics, my line is typically that you will probably go in hoping to be a professor, you probably will not succeed at being a professor, but getting a PhD in Physics is actually an intrinsically good thing. You'll be able to do something else, you'll learn a lot of skills, et cetera. I don't feel the same way about being a post-doc, but that's a different conversation. But where does that fit in to this conversation? Just the idea that getting a degree in STEM or related fields has some value, whatever your future life trajectory turns out to be.

1:12:46.0 JS: So, I've seen that argument, and I appreciate your honesty when you tell people that the odds are they will end up doing something different, and I think that's an important message to give them. Say, "Yes, this is a great thing to do, you're gonna get some very important skills, but keep an open mind for developing, keep an open mind toward career trajectories that don't look like Physics." So, one of the disturbing findings I had in some research with a colleague when we looked at the National Survey of College Graduates, and we looked at people with STEM degrees who went into non-STEM jobs, is they were significantly less likely to report being satisfied with their jobs, overall. And, interestingly, they were significantly less likely to be satisfied with the intellectual challenge of their jobs.

1:13:41.0 SC: Interesting.

1:13:42.6 JS: So, a little bit less... They're less satisfied, they seem to be a little bit more likely to be bored. I don't feel so great about that. And so being honest with people, and telling them, "Hey, there's a good chance you'll be doing something else." I would encourage folks to develop a broad range of skills. We've got this, I call it STEM mania in the book, at my university, Sean, in UC California, San Diego, it's like a public Caltech, I always thought of it as that. It's really STEM-focused. It is San Diego, 'cause that's where this script in [1:14:22.5] ____ was, and that STEM tone really kinda dominates the university, and the students who major in the humanities and social sciences other than economics, regularly have to defend themselves to the STEM majors who are like, "What are you gonna do with that? What's wrong with you? This is crazy."

1:14:46.3 JS: And so, they'll sound self-serving, but I tell my STEM majors who do take sociology classes, it is important to get a broad range of skills, skills related to communication, written, oral critical thinking, outside of technical skills, because chances are you're gonna move into something outside of STEM or STEM adjacent. And college is a time to really develop that broad range of skills. You always had that, you really always stood out, you've a double major in philosophy and astronomy, as I recall.

1:15:20.0 SC: Yeah.

1:15:20.7 JS: So you always had that message, but that's not typical. And so, you could segue into this whole podcast thing and this whole range of stuff that you do because of that undergraduate training. I'm trying to make a world of little miniature Sean Carrolls so that they will have that flexibility to plug into different places in the economy. STEM expertise is great to have. I would think the best thing that you could have to prepare yourself for the workplace of tomorrow is STEM skills and non-STEM skills, foundational sorts of skills like you have.

1:15:58.4 SC: Yeah, you're not gonna get any argument from me, that the broad base is important. But if it's true that people who get STEM degrees report dissatisfaction with their jobs once they get them, what are the data about humanities degrees or social science degree?

1:16:17.5 JS: No one cares about them. So I didn't have a grant to look at them, I didn't really look at those folks. I initially wanted to explore this. There are a pretty significant percentage, different studies have different percentages, but a good 15% of STEM workers don't have STEM degrees, and so you have folks... Excuse me. You have folks who majored in humanities subjects, and they moved into technical fields. One of the great things about software development is it's a field that's pretty porous. It's not like electrical engineering. It's hard to break into electrical engineering, life sciences without those degrees, but software is wonderfully porous. You can be this kid who worked on a computer in high school, went and got... I actually have a friend of mine who was a creative writing major, but he tinkered with computers in high school, he developed some software, sold it to a major software company, did really well, even though his major was creative writing.

1:17:25.5 JS: So, software is really welcoming to people. You can do these bootcamps where you get your foundational skills in writing and communication, then you do a boot camp in coding or data analytics or something, then you can plug into the STEM economy that way. So, that's definitely something that you can do. So I applaud those folks, but for the most part, people are not worried or valorizing our humanities majors. And I don't wanna say we need to treat our STEM majors or STEM grads better than the other grads, but if we say that there is shortages of STEM grads, if we say that STEM grads are so important for the economy, we should at least treat these folks really well, and hopefully treat everybody really well, but at least these folks who we're constantly saying are so important and in such short supply.

1:18:23.3 SC: Well, okay. I like your final message, which is everyone should major in creative writing. I think that's a very... A wonderful world going forward.

1:18:31.5 JS: That's right.

1:18:32.0 SC: So, John Skrentny, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:18:36.9 JS: Thanks, Sean. It was great to be here. And I just wanna end with one thing. I've listened to podcasts before, where people know the interviewer, the host of the podcast, and the tediously kinda say, "Oh, we had so many great times in the past." You can cut this out, my friend, but probably not many listeners know that you were a double threat on the basketball court.

1:18:58.7 SC: Not enough of them know.

1:19:00.3 JS: That you had a sweet jump shot from the outside., I still remember the sound of the ball going through the net and nothing but the sound of that, and you had a pretty good drive to the hoop as well. If someone covered you too close to the three-point line, you could blow by him.

1:19:16.5 SC: And you...

1:19:16.5 JS: So not many of your listeners may know that about you, but that's definitely, you were a multi-faceted skilled guy, and still are. Sorry to use the past tense.

1:19:24.1 SC: And You must remember that that lefty hook shot was so annoying to everyone else, yours, that so many people complained about it, that you started complaining about them complaining about it, 'cause they weren't used to a lefty.

1:19:37.9 JS: That's right, but if everyone expects a right-handed jump shot, then the left handed hook is gonna keep me going for quite a while.

1:19:47.1 SC: Something to remember. Thanks very much, John.

1:19:49.5 JS: Okay. Thanks, Sean.

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