"paying" daughter to go with STEM - doing the wrong thing?

[ucbalumnus]

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@allgussiedup

United States has a “SERIOUS” lack of people studying STEM disciplines

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<p>This is not true for all STEM disciplines. In particular, there is a huge surplus of biology majors relative to the small number of good (and larger but still not very large number of not so good) jobs where that major is specifically applicable. Biology is probably the most popular STEM major by far.</p>

<p>The situation in chemistry jobs is not very good either. Physics majors tend to do better, but many are not in pure physics jobs (finance, computer software, and engineering take many of the “surplus” physics graduates).</p>

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@allgussiedup

It is almost ones social responsibility to be pursuing a degree that either has a) intrinsic wide reaching benefits to society (engineering, the natural sciences, and you could add some more) or b) wow-ing job prospects (engineering also, economics, most of the natural sciences, computer science, and so on) or preferably both.

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<p>Widespread knowledge of both math and science subjects and humanities and social studies subjects would have “intrinsic wide reaching benefits to society”.</p>

<p>But most of the natural sciences do not have “wow-ing job prospects”, and even those subjects that are good on average for job prospects can have poor job prospects of you graduate at the wrong time (e.g. civil engineering from 2009 to now).</p>