When Every Kid is a Coder — Creating a Brighter STEM Future for America
By: Alliantgroup Lp
Tags: STEM, Software Development, Manufacturing, Education

By Dhaval Jadav, Chief Executive Officer at alliantgroup

The current international battle for a high-tech future has the U.S. out of the lead. In fact, we aren’t even in close. A lack of American STEM graduates has resulted in a gargantuan skills gap that leaves the country’s economy and history as a nation of innovation at stake.

Luckily, there’s a way for the U.S. to change the tide through revolutionizing curriculums, providing financial resources and engaging students in new ways to drive them toward STEM fields.

Steve Jobs once profoundly said that “innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity — not a threat.”

It turns out that STEM in the U.S., the very fields that birthed Jobs’ revolutionary computer company, are facing a dramatic change in landscape.

This dynamic shift certainly does pose a threat to our country, but it should be viewed as an opportunity to showcase a core tenet of Americanism to the world: our ability to rally for a common goal. And this goal is to stay on top of the global innovation game.

The issue our country faces is a severe lack of STEM graduates that has created an urgent situation that can only be fixed through systemic changes to the way our country approaches education.

A lack of STEM talent is a threat to our national security, as well as our ability to continue producing some of the world’s greatest tech companies. It has created an economic quagmire that, if left unaddressed, could eventually leave billions of dollars on the table that should be directed at strengthening our economy.

The Severity of the Problem

The World Economic Forum has reported that in recent years, China and India have produced STEM graduates at a pace that dwarfs our own.

STEM graduates as of 2017: China - 4.7M India - 2.6M U.S. - 568,000

It’s clear that American students are not finding STEM degrees appealing and that our education system needs to be retooled. There are empty desks at our colleges and universities that should be filled with students being trained to become our next engineers, software developers and coders.

A recent survey of American teachers found that 30 percent of educators don’t have the necessary resources to provide their students with a proper STEM education, and a Randstad North America survey found that more than half of students aged 11 to 17 couldn’t name a single person with a job in STEM.

Adding insult to injury, half of the students surveyed said they didn’t know what kinds of math jobs were available for those who majored in the field and 76 percent said they didn’t know what engineers do. These statistics are unacceptable and are telling of just how dire the situation has become.

Our lack of STEM graduates is exacerbated by the fact that American businesses are using tech at an unprecedented level but can’t find qualified candidates to handle that tech, and there’s no sign of this trend slowing. According to Forbes, 70 percent of surveyed organizations say that “capability gaps” is one of their top challenges at the moment.

Seeing the Issue Take Its Toll

As the founder of a business that works with mid-market companies across every industry every day, I’ve seen firsthand how a lack of technical talent is impacting our country’s economy.

Business owners have repeatedly told my colleagues and I that they simply can’t find candidates who are qualified to handle the technical jobs they have open, and that this is stifling their ability to drive revenue and innovate at the level they know they can.

A lack of technical talent isn’t just the problem of the software and tech industry, which has cited that computing jobs alone make up more than 600,000 current open jobs within their sector. The U.S. manufacturing industry, as an example, has predicted that they will need approximately 3.5 million tech jobs filled by 2025, with estimates showing that nearly 2 million will go unfilled based on a lacking workforce.

Regardless of whether the situation we find ourselves is a result of lacking resources or a branding problem with America’s younger generation, the reality is that the issue is real and won’t go away until we take action.

An Opportunity for Change

So how do we tackle the problem? Let’s start with the good news.

That same Randstad survey found a significant interest from the students in science and technology-based activities. For instance, 64 percent of students ranked “creating video games” as a potential career as high and more than half said it would be “very fun” to have a career that involved marine life.

What this shows is that the interest is there, opening an opportunity for those teachers at the helm to inspire their students by showing the amazing potential behind a STEM education and the well-paying and rewarding jobs that can follow — a notion that since the American space race seems to have steadily been on the decline.

To start, our schools need to work to place a higher priority on STEM curriculums, and this starts with engaging students at a young age. It’s crucial that educators stay ahead of the curve with new technologies and lesson plans that will keep students interested and spark their imagination.

Schools around the country are starting to integrate new and innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning into their curriculums. Some communities have even founded schools that center specifically around a STEM education.

Hiring instructors that are qualified to teach young students the basics of coding or the core principles of engineering in a fun, unique way will only serve to drive students toward STEM degrees, whether at a technical school or university, once they graduate high school.

However, in order to show our nation’s students that they too could invent the next wave of technology that propels us into space, cure the incurable or develop the next national security shield, our educators need our help. That’s where financing comes into play.

Whether it’s government at a state or federal level distributing grants or financial resources to public schools, or companies stepping up to the plate in a charitable way to give back to their own communities, it’s vital that these schools and their students have the funding they need to remain on the cutting edge.

Witnessing Change Firsthand

At alliantgroup, we’ve given out more than $200,000 in scholarships every year in order to encourage local Houston students to pursue a STEM education–an imperative that every American company should rally behind within their own community and beyond.

Last, students need to find their spark outside of the confines of an hour-long lesson during the school day. Schools should collaborate with organizations within their own community for after-school activities such as robotics leagues, coding clubs and chemistry showcases.

These are the experiences that will birth the next innovators for our country and that will provide chances for students who, at times, wouldn’t choose a STEM path if not for these sorts of opportunities.

It’s Not Too Late to Act

A lack of technical talent in our country is a problem that has the potential to decimate our economy’s standing as a worldwide powerhouse and could very well push our nation’s prominence as a leader in innovation down the rungs.

Experts have found that, if done correctly, a strong STEM education system in the U.S. could yield more than $1 trillion in annual GDP driven by millions of well-paying jobs in the software sector alone.

The evidence is clear that ignoring this problem will not only be to the detriment of U.S. students, some of whom have a unique opportunity to escape vicious cycles of poverty, but to our national prosperity as well.

Innovation has always been a core tenet of American culture. We need to act now to preserve that precious facet of our nation’s strength, so let’s take this threat and change it into an opportunity for our country to thrive.