America Does Not Need More STEM Education

Pro's R1 argument was "The key to modern prosperity, therefore, is not to increase supply. Raising the supply of STEM in America would only depreciate its value." STEM comprises health care; research scientists; engineers who write software; engineers who design electronics, roads, power plants, automobiles, water supplies, agricultural equipment, new sources of energy; skilled trades like machine tool operators, lab technicians, police and fire fighters, and repair technicians. More STEM education produces more people qualified to do all of these tasks. In the second round, Pro argued, "... Con mischaracterizes what's said about supply, demand, and price by purely focusing on the product market. He doesn't consider the labor market side of the equation which requires sustainability." I used the example of health care, in which limiting the supply of health care professionals keeps them well-paid, but it doesn't meet society's need for health care. He claims that in general, product prices may drop despite limiting the supply of the people who design and produce the products. How will health care costs drop despite shortages of doctors and nurses? One way health care costs might drop is by developing new drugs and medical devices. But to do that, we need more scientists to do the development, but Pro proposes to limit the amount of scientists the education system produces. There are now more bio tech startup companies in Silicon Valley than traditional software and electronics companies. Staffing them is a major problem. I claimed that Democrats are limiting the immigration of skilled professionals. Pro responded with a reference to a left-wing blog post on salon.com. Obama gets a lot of money from hi tech CEOs so he tells them that he wants to expand H!B visas, but he in fact blocks it to please union supporters. If Obama wanted to expand it, and the Republicans want to expand it, then why is the quota under the program still filled in less than three months? The salon.com guy goes on to assert that there are plenty of unemployed engineers, but gives no data to support that claim. In fact " the unemployment rate for biomedical engineers in 2012 is 0.4%." http://bmes.org... The lower limit for unemployment is determined by how often people change jobs, because the time between jobs counts as unemployment even though it's deliberately taken time off. Bio engineers must like to stay put. "... the national average unemployment rate for software developers of application and system software was 4.4 percent." That's full employment because software types choose to change jobs often and take time off between jobs. "Across the STEM fields, job postings outnumbered unemployed people by almost 2-to-1. Even in a tough economy, STEM is where the jobs are." http://www.huffingtonpost.com...The average entry level salary for a software engineer is $59K, and in 8-10 years they are making $117K. This is not a profession with salaries beaten down by oversupply. Many engineers would like to make more by limiting supply, just as unions work to restrict supplies of labor in skilled trades. Pro claims without proof that high tech companies pay immigrant engineers less. In fact companies use standard pay scales for everyone.Pro argues, "because IT consumption discourages long-term thinking, the production of IT becomes unsustainable." Pro cites an opinion by Russell Kirk in 1983 to support his case. IT has done well since then. Pro wrongly equates STEM with IT; even in the abstract, the argument doesn't apply to 90% of STEM fields. Moreover, in any field the number of long term thinkers is tiny compared to the number of practitioners. Apple had Steve Jobs, and got by just fine with that one. There is no evidence that Jobs was impaired by being tech savvy, nor is there any sign of tech running out of ideas or direction as Pro says it should. It evolves nicely.