WSJ: "If you're a high math student in America... it's crazy to go into STEM"

[sakky]

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Since you seem to be obsessed with the finance industry, note that quantitative finance jobs certainly can be STEM jobs.

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<p>Those jobs are essentially unavailable to people with only bachelor’s degrees, even if it comes from a top technical school. You basically need a master’s or PhD to be eligible for quant finance jobs. </p>

<p>But I don’t think we should be hung up on labels. Whether you want to categorize quant finance within STEM, the point is that science and engineering careers don’t pay particularly well, relative to other careers that people with STEM degrees can obtain. </p>

<p>To take an example from academia, why is it that economics and (especially) finance professors are paid significantly more than are STEM professors? Heck, even a newly hired assistant professor of finance is paid more - sometimes by nearly double - that of a tenured full professor of STEM at the same university. It clearly has nothing to do with the scientific predictive success of the various disciplines, as even a casual observer would note that science and engineering have been far more successful enterprises in producing a set of rigorous, precise, non-obvious predictions than is economics/finance, despite the latter’s scientific pretensions. Nor does it seem to have much to do with the overall talent level of the various discipline: a tenured full professor of math is far more likely to be able to match the research of an assistant professor of finance than vice versa. </p>

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Then again, the top paid people in the finance industry may not exactly have “cushy” jobs, at least at first. Could be a high stress job which can draw one into an expensive lifestyle that consumes much of the extra pay.

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<p>I never said that those jobs were cushy. But let’s face it, plenty of engineering jobs are not exactly cushy either. The joke at Microsoft in the old days is that they offered flex-time: you could work any 70 hours of the week that you want. Google today is a notorious grind, despite the fact that you most likely won’t become rich by taking a job at Google today, as the IPO days are long past. </p>

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No doubt, there are lucrative opportunities available. But how many? Are there enough for all of the people studying STEM worldwide?

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<p>I think the real issue is that I still haven’t seen an actionable yet non-obvious pathway for non-CS STEM graduates to utilize to obtain such jobs. Again, that’s not a knock on globaltraveler, as I suspect that such a pathway doesn’t exist. And I do give credit to him for trying to find one.</p>