Engineering and the Immigration Crisis

 

As I write this, the U. S. Supreme Court has just issued a temporary order allowing Title 42, a border restriction applied during the Trump administration, to remain in place until the Court makes a later decision.  This may or may not stem the tide of many thousands of immigrants, largely from Central and South America, who are massing at the U. S. - Mexico border in hopes that the end of Title 42 will increase their chances to enter, and remain in, the United States.

 

At first glance, this ongoing crisis seems to have little to do with engineering as a profession.  But engineers are people, and people have to come from somewhere. 

 

The issue of illegal immigration was brought home to me some years ago when I offered a temporary research job to a bright undergraduate in one of my classes.  He asked to speak to me in private, and when I met him in my office he said, "Well, I'd like to take the job but I can't."

 

"Why not?" I asked.

 

"If they search for a Social Security number for me, they won't find one."  It turns out his parents were Mexican immigrants who entered the U. S. illegally when he was only a child—a Dreamer, in other words.  While I couldn't do anything for him after that, another faculty member helped him get a job at a private company upon graduation, apparently together with legal help to deal with his immigration status.  He has done quite well professionally, and while I don't know if he has obtained U. S. citizenship yet, he deserves to as far as I'm concerned.

 

The problem of immigration over and above what is legally allowed is a classical dilemma.  On the one hand, there is the question of respect for the rule of law.  A sovereign nation has a right to regulate the influx of immigrants as it sees fit, and the U. S. has gone through three distinct phases with regard to immigration policy since the 1860s.  From then up to about 1920, basically almost anyone who wanted to come to this country could do so, with some racially-based exceptions that discriminated against groups such as the Chinese.  A chart from the Migration Policy Institute shows that from 1860 to 1920, nearly 15% of U. S. residents were immigrants, meaning they were born outside the U. S. 

 

Following World War I, a nativist tendency in politics led to the enactment of severe restrictions on immigration with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which allowed only a few select (mostly Northern European) countries to send a few people a year here, relatively speaking.  This sent the percentage of immigrant residents into a long decline, which bottomed out at about 5% in 1970, as the absolute number of immigrants entering the country fell from 1930 to 1970. 

 

The attitude toward immigration changed again in the 1960s, and the quota system was repealed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.  As a result, immigration (both legal and the other kind) began a steep increase which has not yet stopped, although COVID-19 slowed it down some.  As a result, the percentage of U. S. residents who are immigrants has now almost returned to its historic level of 15%.

 

The other horn of the immigration dilemma is the morality of the thing.  The Old Testament Hebrew prophet Malachi had hard words for "'. . . those who turn aside the alien, and do not fear Me,' says the Lord of hosts."  There is the admirable sentiment on a bronze plaque displayed at the Statue of Liberty with the words "Give me your tired, your poor . . . " and most of the migrants huddled just south of El Paso as I write qualify as tired and poor. 

 

In the long run, the only national resource that counts is people.  Without people, you don't have a country—you have Antarctica.  In America's annals of racism, different immigrant groups came under the scornful eye of the establishment:  the Irish following the potato famine of the 1840s, the Italians, the Jews from Eastern Europe, the Chinese and Japanese, and most recently, Mexicans and immigrants from Central and South America.  Should we have let them in, those forebears of John F. Kennedy, Frank Capra, Martin Scorsese, Richard Feynman, Jackie Chan, and my own recently deceased Ph. D. advisor, Tatsuo Itoh, who one day in a rare moment of personal revelation, spoke a few words about what it was like growing up as a five-year-old in Tokyo in 1945? 

 

It is impossible to say "no" to that question, but we have the advantage of hindsight in answering it.  Completely unrestricted immigration, with full citizenship granted to everyone who manages to step across the border, is an idealistic dream that could lead to anti-immigration strife and the kinds of social problems that open-arm countries like Germany are presently dealing with.  Massive disobedience of any duly passed law is inimical to good order and public discipline.  Such laws should either be enforced, or if public sentiment is no longer in favor of them, they should be changed legislatively rather than be used as a political football and kicked around by the courts.

 

That being said, America is a nation of immigrants, and in one way or another, immigration has always been a critical ingredient in the nation's success, a source of vitality and energy that we restrict at our peril.  Let immigration be done decently and in order, not by means of mobs and trailer trucks full of suffocating victims.  But anyone who wants to come here pays us a compliment by doing so, and in due time, we should let them, because they or their descendants can be the future's business leaders, artists, scientists, politicians—and maybe even engineers.

 

Sources:  The Migration Policy Institute's graph on which I based my comments can be viewed at https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time

.  I quoted from Malachi 3:15 (New American Standard version).  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles "Immigration policy of the U. S." and "The New Colossus," the poem by Emma Lazarus which is the source of the Statue of Liberty quotation.

The James Webb Space Telescope: Science, Engineering, or Worship?

 

A lot of astronomers, scientists, and engineers got a nice Christmas present when the James Webb Space Telescope was launched successfully from the French Guiana Ariane rocket site on December 25.  A lot could still go wrong with this instrument, which has cost about $8 billion so far—a lot more than the $500 million that was originally planned back in 1996.  But if you ask whether the telescope was worth it, right away you get into imponderables that are hard to quantify.

 

With the possible exception of high-energy physics, astronomy has to be today's most costly pure-science endeavor.  Looking at the stars used to be the purview of professional astrologers, who kings and priests of many religions relied on to forecast auspicious times for major undertakings such as battles.  Ironically, at least up to the Middle Ages, astrology was viewed as a very practical endeavor, much as weather forecasting is viewed today.  Royal personages didn't pay astrologers to study the stars just for the heck of it—they wanted results.  And in the nature of prediction, they got results too—usually wrong ones, but just enough right guesses to keep the astrologers going. 

 

With the Scientific Revolution, astrology gradually gave way to astronomy, the scientific study of the stars for their own sake, so to speak.  Again ironically, one of the founders of modern science, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) wanted to free what we now know as science from its tendency toward idle speculation, and make it more practical "for the relief of man's estate."  Anyone who uses modern engineered technology of any form has realized Bacon's ambition to employ scientific knowledge for practical purposes, and Bacon's dream of relieving man's estate has come to pass in ways that Bacon could not have imagined.

 

The improvement he might be most impressed with is the extended lifespan most of us enjoy compared to Bacon's day, and that is due in no small part to modern medical technology, although things like sanitary water systems and sewers, electric grids, and power machinery have all contributed to extending our lifespans as well. 

 

But the realm of pure knowledge for its own sake has also benefited in countless ways from technology, notably computer technology, which was developed initially for terribly practical reasons having to do with World War II.  Once developed by mathematicians, scientists, and yes, engineers, computers turned out to have applications in both science and engineering, neither of which could do without them today.  In the last few decades, computer software has not only relieved engineers of much tedious grungework with slide rules, tables, and graphs, it has rendered superfluous many kinds of jobs that engineers formerly did.  As technology companies will tell you, they have not yet managed to replace all their engineers with software, but some of them would like to.  Because, as a wise manager once told me, engineers are carried on balance sheets as overhead, like the light bill, and accountants are always on the lookout for ways to lower overhead.

 

From the point of view of gross national product, the James Webb Space Telescope is all overhead.  Yes, a lot of engineering firms got contracts to build components of it.  Yes, a lot of engineers held jobs largely because of it.  So in that respect, it generated economic activity.  But unlike giant tech firms like Google, Apple, or Facebook, NASA's piddly little $8 billion or so spent on the telescope is a small blip on the economic radar.  Yet the public pays a huge amount of attention to it.  Why?

 

Not because of the engineering involved, although that engineering must be the peak of the art in terms of aerospace design—hundreds of square feet of precision reflector mirrors and sheets of thin heat reflectors deployed in the unforgiving vacuum of space where you can't call up the serviceman if something goes wrong, and a coordination among a lot of disparate parts and organizations that makes an automotive company look simple. 

 

No, for most people, the appeal of the telescope isn't the engineering of it, necessary as that was.  It's what the thing may be able to do, which is to look farther and more carefully into the distant past than ever before, and maybe, just maybe, find evidence of living beings outside of our own planet. 

 

With its enhanced infrared imaging capability, the James Webb Space Telescope can potentially image exoplanets beyond our solar system, and who knows what that will tell us?  If we knew, it wouldn't be research.  In an age for which the ideas of God and life beyond the grave are losing their appeal, people need something to hope for.  And for many, astronomy seems to be a kind of substitute religion, an asking of the question, "What else is out there?" in a materialistic way that modern science is more than happy to do, in exchange for a few billion dollars here and there.

 

Feeling wonder at seeing the stars on a cold, clear night was what led the ancient poet, who may have been King David himself, to write in Psalm 8,

 

    When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast   ordained;

    What is man, that thou art mindful of him?  and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

    For thou has made him a little lower than the angels, and has crowned him with glory and honour.

 

That poet did not have the benefit of a telescope to see how many more stars there were than he could see with the unaided eye.  But he saw enough to see evidence of God's handiwork in them, and how small humanity seems in comparison to the vastness of the universe. 

 

Far from the village-atheist view that religion resisted the demotion of man from the center of the universe that the Copernican revolution brought, the Jews at least recognized that, physically speaking, humanity is just a tiny speck on the astronomical map.  What makes humanity worthwhile isn't our size, or our engineering of things like the James Webb Space Telescope, or even the knowledge that we may discover with it.  It's that we are creatures—created ones—of God, who loved us enough to "make us a little lower than the angels," and to come in human form to Earth about two thousand years ago, on a day we traditionally reckon as December 25.

 

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia article on the James Webb Space Telescope.  The quotation from Psalm 8 is from the King James version of the Bible, verses 3-5.

Is Boeing's 737 Max Safe to Fly Again?

 

The U. S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seems to think so.  Last November, the FAA lifted its order that grounded all 737 MAX aircraft for more than a year, after two fatal crashes were traced to faulty software.  While the FAA's order includes mandatory fixes that appear to address most of the issues that led to the crashes, some questions remain unanswered.

 

In October of 2018 and again in March of 2019, 737 MAX planes crashed with the loss of all on board.  As subsequent investigations proved, both disasters happened because a single faulty angle-of-attack sensor confused a piece of software called MCAS (short for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) that most pilots were unaware of.  What the pilots experienced was that the plane kept trying to run itself into the ground, despite repeated attempts to right it.  After the cause was known, the FAA and all other aviation administrations around the world grounded the aircraft until the problem could be fixed.

 

To recap the entire saga would take too long, but basically, the 737 MAX is a redesign of an older airframe with larger engines that unfortunately upset the plane's handling characteristics.  Rather than undertake a complete mechanical redesign, Boeing attempted to patch up the problems with software, including the MCAS feature that was designed to avoid stalling, which the new design was prone to.  But the MCAS relied upon data from small sensors on the plane's sides called angle-of-attack sensors, and wind conditions or other problems occasionally cause these sensors to malfunction.  The flaw in the MCAS design was that it would be thrown off by erroneous data from only one sensor (there are two on the plane), and would then jump to the conclusion that the plane was stalling (pitched up too steeply to fly).  The right thing to do in a stall is to point the nose downward, but only if you're really in a stall.  As long as the sensor was defective, the MCAS kept trying to crash the plane against the pilot's efforts to keep it in the air, and twice, the MCAS won.

 

Operating companies were required to implement several changes before taking their 737 MAX fleets to the air again.  The new MCAS software relies on both sensors, not just one, and a warning light is now required to show when the sensors disagree.  When the MCAS detects a problem, it will try to right the plane only once, instead of however long the sensors tell it to.  And the pilot will now be able to overpower the MCAS's attempts to nose down by pulling back on the control column.  Also, more extensive pilot training in specific 737 MAX simulators is required.  To add to the reassurances the FAA is trying to give that the problem really has been fixed, chief FAA administrator Steve Dickson personally piloted an upgraded 737 MAX to check on the changes himself.

 

What is not so clear is whether Boeing's engineering culture has changed much as a result of the most expensive grounding of a commercial aircraft type in history.  Every airline that owned even one 737 MAX lost tons of money as huge investments sat on the ground, ground that also had to be paid for, because you don't just stick an idle 737 MAX in your back yard till you need it again.  While Boeing has competition—the 737 MAX was designed largely to respond to Airbus's A320 inroads—a wholesale boycott of Boeing by major airlines is unlikely.  However, it is notable that since December, when it became possible to fly upgraded 737 MAX planes and the FAA equivalents in most countries lifted their own grounding bans, China has yet to do so.  Their reasons are unclear, but it sends a signal that carelessness like Boeing manifested in the MCAS fiasco will not be forgotten soon.

 

Sentiment does not come up a lot in discussions of engineering ethics, but there is a type of sentiment that tends to keep problems like Boeing's 737 MAX grounding from happening, if it is cultivated and encouraged to play its proper role.  Loyalty, faithfulness, fidelity to an organization and its reputation, an esprit de corps that embodies what it means to be an engineer who wouldn't do anything to harm the company's ultimate responsibility, namely the safety and well-being of its customers—these are inadequate attempts to describe what I mean, but they approach it.  Free-market absolutism tends to corrode such feelings, as do many manifestations of social media and a kind of cynicism that is easy to acquire in an age that considers four years a long time with one employer.  And such feelings—that's what they are primarily, feelings—are hard to acquire if you are a short-term contract worker, as evidently some of the software engineers were who developed the original MCAS.

 

This is not a call to return to the good old days of lifetime employment by one firm, although other things being equal, reducing the turmoil and churn that job changes and uncertainties entail would probably make the lives of a lot of engineers easier.  Job tenure is not what loyalty is about, not primarily.  But while an engineer is with a particular company, there needs to be a mutual feeling that what the engineer does is the best possible job she or he can do, and what the company does is to support its engineers in doing the right thing—"right" including making enough money to stay in business as well as producing safe and reliable products. 

 

Boeing emails and other information indicates that such feelings and the behavior they engender did not prevail in the case of the original MCAS design and the subsequent efforts to get the 737 MAX approved.  Let's hope that this saga has ended with everyone involved being wiser and more dedicated to the highest ideals of engineering.

 

Sources:  I referred to an extensive article on the 737 MAX saga at https://www.cnet.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-all-about-the-aircraft-flight-ban-and-investigations/, and the Wikipedia article "737 MAX ban." 

Julius Randall's Life Mattered

 

Since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police last May, countless companies and organizations have announced their condemnation of racism and their commitment to its abolishment.  Time will tell how effective these commitments are.  Rather than pen a bland general statement, I would rather tell a story.  It's a true story.

 

There was once a young engineering student named Julius Randall at a small college in South Carolina.  The college was so small that it had no bookstore, and so the engineering students had to go to the nearby Woolworth's to buy their supplies.  Julius was black, and although the Woolworth's would sell him graph paper and pencils, it wouldn't let him sit at the lunch counter.

 

This was the 1960s, and one day Martin Luther King Jr. showed up in the area and found out about the Woolworth's policy of no Blacks at the lunch counter.  Rev. King caused a picket line to be organized, and for the next few weeks no student of any color bought any supplies at that Woolworth's.  The worst violence that resulted was that somebody threw an egg at the store.  Soon the owners capitulated, and now Julius and his friends could sit at the lunch counter in Woolworth's after buying their supplies.

 

Julius went on to graduate and got an engineering job in the New Jersey area.  He then moved into higher education, and at Stevens Institute of Technology, for seven or eight years he ran the co-op program that allowed students to work and get an education at the same time.  Then he was hired by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in their new Minority Engineering Program (MEP), which is where I met him. 

 

Around that time, Julius contracted a kidney disease that prevented him from driving, and so one day he asked us where we went to church, and could he have a ride there?  It was the beginning of a personal as well as a professional relationship that gave me a close-up view of one of the most saintly persons, of any color, that I have ever known.

 

Julius knew that an engineering education could be the path from poverty to success as it had been for him, which was why he left industry to devote his life to bringing the blessings of engineering education to minority students.  But his work was not without obstacles.  One obstacle at the time was our dean of engineering, who barely tolerated the MEP and repeatedly refused Julius opportunities for promotion when they arose.  Another obstacle was his chronic illness, which would attack him with nausea and vomiting, whereupon he would simply excuse himself from a meeting and deal with it without complaining.  He eventually had to begin a type of home-based dialysis that involved hooking himself up to a complicated machine every night. 

 

But he didn't let that slow him down from his professional work, or from volunteering to organize and run worthy events at church.  During a service he would get up and smile a thousand-watt smile and say, "Good morning, saints!" and then encourage us to join the painting crew or the tee-shirt sale or whatever worthy cause was on the menu that day. 

 

He had been married before, but was divorced before we met him.  Around 1997, he fell in love with a woman and they decided to get married.  Julius did me the honor of asking me to be one of his groomsmen, and we went down to New Jersey in July of 1998 and saw him and Lynn tie the knot.  They honeymooned in Hawaii, and after another year or so at UMass, he found a job closer to his new bride's family in New Jersey, and we saw him off from UMass at a going-away party.

 

In 1999, I left UMass myself for Texas, but we kept in touch with people who knew Julius, and soon we heard a sad story.  It seemed that his wife took on the notion that Julius no longer needed his dialysis machine, so somehow she persuaded him to quit using it to see what would happen.  Ever the loving husband, he tried it, and the result was that he landed in a hospital in a coma. 

 

I learned this shortly before I was due to make a trip from Texas to the New York City area on business, so I found out where the hospital was and made a special side trip to see him.  He was in an ICU surrounded by beeping machinery, and while he seemed unresponsive, I knew that sometimes the last sense to go is hearing.  So I told him I was here, and that my wife and I were praying for him.  I'm not sure, but I think I saw his lips move a little in response.  A few weeks later we heard that he had died.

 

God only knows how many lives Julius Randall touched for the better during his relatively brief time on this planet.  He was always finding people who needed help and figuring out how to help them with jobs, money, a place to stay, a way of doing things, a plan, a word of encouragement, or just a listening ear. 

 

But he did all this in a way that let you know he was human, and "holier than thou" never applied to him.  Once in a blue moon, I even heard him complain.  One day I was driving him back to his apartment and we had to drive through the UMass campus.  He was in the front seat beside me, and I was obeying the speed limit.  Suddenly I saw the lights of a campus police car behind me, so I pulled over.  I forget what reason the officer gave for wanting to pull me over, but it didn't make a lot of sense at the time.  The officer finally let us go, and as I was driving away Julius said, "Man, I get tired of that sometimes."  It wasn't the first time he'd been pulled over for DWB:  Driving While Black.  But it was the first time I experienced just a tiny sliver of what it was like to live in supposedly enlightened Massachusetts as a Black man, whose life certainly mattered.

Should Engineers Get Their Fingernails Dirty?

Up the road from me in Austin, Texas, it turns out that Apple has been building Mac Pros, a desktop model, in a Flextronics manufacturing plant since at least 2013.  But a recent news item in the Austin American-Statesman says that the company will soon shut down its manufacturing activity of Mac Pros here in Texas and move it to China.  However, Apple is moving ahead with plans to open a new billion-dollar campus in Austin, which will increase the number of Apple workers there from around its current 7,000 to as many as 15,000.  But you can be pretty sure that most of those workers won't be holding soldering irons or screwdrivers—they'll be sitting at computers typing code.

The image of the engineer has changed radically over the years since the profession first attained significant public recognition, which came about in the late 1800s.  In 1900, artistic portrayals of an engineer would show a rugged, muscular man who might be holding an engineer's hammer in one hand (something halfway between a regular hammer and a sledgehammer), and adjusting a surveyor's transit as he squints through the eyepiece.  Most engineers prior to about 1920 were civil engineers, engaged in laying out railroad tracks or roads, installing water and sewer systems, and making sure bridges and buildings didn't fall down after they were built.

Then the era of scientific engineering came along.  The slide rule replaced the hammer, and now engineers were depicted in hiring ads in the 1950s as lab-coated intellectuals, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and looking through microscopes or fiddling with flasks of chemicals.  The habitat of the 1950s engineer was inside, not outside, but he (always a "he" back then in images of the time) was still engaged in working with exotic equipment or machinery for which special training and even clothing was required.

Then the computer came along, banishing the slide rule.  Companies quickly learned it was cheaper to let engineers try new designs in software models rather than actually building prototypes and finding out that most of them didn't work.  So as much of the engineering knowledge that formerly resided in engineers' brains moved into computer programs, the typical engineer wound up sitting at a desk in front of a computer monitor.  Sometimes she just writes code, and sometimes she works with drawings of actual stuff.  But whatever subject is displayed on the screen, that is often as close as the engineer gets to the actual thing that is built. 

The end product, whether it is a microchip, a car, or an airplane, is often made far away from where the designer sits, possibly in another country.  The people who actually get their hands dirty to make the products know no more about them than they have to in order to do their jobs right.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this—it is one more application of the great economist Adam Smith's principle that each person, organization, or nation should specialize in what they are best at, and swap their products with those who are best at other things.  If engineers are best at designing with software, why, that's what they should do, and not waste their expensive time on a workbench actually building things that lower-paid and less-educated technicians can build. 

I grew up and learned engineering at a time when math and models could get you only so far, and there were imponderable and incalculable factors that had to be worked out on the workbench.  In my specialization of RF engineering, that meant that any engineer worth his salt had to know how to solder and troubleshoot actual hardware, and we did.  And things got built—maybe not the absolutely most optimized designs, but good enough to go out the door and make money for the company (most of the time, anyway). 

But these days, things that had to be figured out on the workbench thirty-five years ago can be modeled in the much more sophisticated software that is available today.  And so almost every kind of engineer these days, whether chemical, electrical, mechanical, civil, or environmental, ends up spending most of their working time in front of a computer.  There are exceptions, of course, but it is in the interests of most firms to see that their engineers spend as little time as possible fiddling with hardware and as much time as possible doing what they are paid the big bucks to do. 

Engineering is an intensely practical business, and if most engineering firms succeed in satisfying their customers with the services of engineers who never touch hardware, I can't see anything to criticize in that.  The lingering suspicion I have that something is missing that may cause trouble down the road may be nothing more than an old guy's prejudice in favor of the way things used to be. 

In my own teaching, I try to make students deal with hardware when it's practical to do so.  This fall I will be teaching a course in analog design.  Software is available that lets you build the whole circuit on the computer screen and test it with software "scopes" and get results that are much more precise than anything you can do in the lab.  But after the students have done that, I will request them to go get real parts, that they really have to read the values of, and put them in a real prototype "breadboard" circuit, and show me that it really works. 

Most students don't complain of this.  In fact, over the years I have had positive comments along the lines of, "I never knew what that oscilloscope was for until I had to use it in this class," and so on.  I'm sure some of them feel that shoving little wires into just the right holes is beneath them, but a little humbling is good for the soul.

Next spring, if all goes according to plan, I will teach the first course in power electronics ever taught on this campus.  Power electronics involves things like controlling giant 1,000-horsepower motors in steel mills.  Much as I would like to have a lab that used a 1,000-horsepower motor, all the labs in this course will use software.  It's much cheaper and safer to have a software 750-kW motor blow up than a real one.  And that's perhaps the way it should be. 

All the same, engineers should never forget that no matter how nice things look on paper or the computer screen, physical reality reigns.  And sometimes, it bites back.

Sources:  The report on Apple's moving production out of Austin appeared at https://www.statesman.com/news/20190628/report-apple-moving-mac-pro-production-out-of-austin.

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The Mythological STEM Crisis

What I'm about to write is considered rank heresy in some circles.  But at least one prominent expert has taken a similar position, and he has backed it up with extensive research.  So here goes.

If you have spent any time in engineering education, either as a student or instructor, you have probably heard about the alleged "STEM crisis."  STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math, and is the umbrella acronym for a range of academic subjects that (a) are obviously essential to the continuation of modern life as we know it and (b) are not mastered by enough students each year to ensure such continuation, at least in the U. S.  That is the story, anyway:  that we are teetering on the edge of a disaster in which our economy will crash and our technology will stagnate for lack of enough young people able to do science, technology, engineering, and math.

In a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the world's largest professional organization for engineers, author Robert Charette took issue with this claim, which he calls a "myth."  Why a myth?

A myth isn't a lie, exactly.  It's a story that may have elements of truth in it, but isn't necessarily wholly and literally true.  Nevertheless, there is usually a group of people who have a strong reason to believe in the myth, and repeat it over and over until belief in the myth spreads among the general population.  

Charette finds that, depending on your definition of what a STEM education or a STEM job is exactly, that many people holding STEM jobs do not have a bachelor's degree in STEM, or necessarily a college degree at all.  On the other hand, if you look at the pool of all graduates of STEM programs, most of them are currently working in fields other than STEM ones.  So it doesn't look like you necessarily need a STEM degree to get a STEM job.  And if you do get a STEM degree, unless you're lucky you are liable to end up in a non-STEM job anyway.

Anecdotes aren't statistics, but they make situations seem more real.  A student of mine graduated from my university a few years ago with a bachelor's degree in manufacturing engineering.  After an unsuccessful spring and summer looking for a technical job, he returned to school, attended another couple of years or so, and obtained his second B. S. degree, this time in electrical engineering.  Even with two STEM B. S. degrees, it took him over a year of looking before he finally found an engineering job last summer. 

If the STEM crisis was as severe as some would have us believe, people like my student would be snapped up before they graduate.  And average starting salaries in engineering would show a steady increase above average wages for as long as the crisis endured.  Neither of these things is the case, however. 

While some engineering students get jobs before they graduate with B. S. degrees, others, like the student I mentioned, have a lot of trouble finding suitable work.  And Charette notes that while average wages of STEM employees have risen faster than those of non-STEM employees over the last 30 years, the increase is not evenly distributed across all fields.  Engineers, it turns out, saw their wages rise slower than those of non-STEM workers. 

Charette suspects, and I agree, that the real reason the myth of a STEM shortage won't go away, is that it is in the best interests of those who employ STEM workers to have an oversupply from which to select the top echelon of graduates, while being able to let them go when business slows without concern that there will be a problem in rehiring when things turn for the better again.  Because the long-term employment model is now long gone, engineers can look forward to a series of short-term jobs with multiple employers anyway, and often the only way to get a raise in such an environment is to quit and join a different firm.  But as an employee, you always take the risk that you'll quit at the wrong time and be out of work for an unknown length of time. 

If the STEM crisis isn't all it's cracked up to be, does this mean that it is perverse and wrong to encourage more students to study STEM subjects?  Not necessarily.  For a variety of cultural and political reasons, K-12 education in the U. S. has fallen on hard times, and one way to help fix it is to encourage a renewed focus on STEM subjects.  There is little actual harm in running pre-engineering programs in high schools, and maybe some good results, although the longitudinal studies to prove whether such programs are really effective are so expensive that they are almost never done.  And other things being equal, providing more resources for students to study STEM subjects in college is a good thing too.  But overall, we might be better off leaving the system to adjust itself, rather than expecting that such programs will permanently put the alleged STEM crisis to rest.

As Charette points out, there is now a sizable educational and governmental establishment that is heavily invested in the STEM myth, and whose existence would be threatened if we all woke up one morning and had a good laugh at their expense by realizing that the STEM crisis is at least partly advertising rather than reality.  And turning such bureaucracies around is a political problem, not just an engineering problem.  But the first step in dealing with such problems is to realize that things aren't necessarily the way they are presented to us.

Politicians and governments can do only so much.  Most of the people I know who are truly content with their role in the engineering profession were not waylaid into it by a government-sponsored program.  Someone close to them, a relative or friend, got them interested in engineering, or perhaps they just discovered on their own that it is fun and (usually) remunerative to make things.  As long as a society allows enough freedom for people to choose their direction in life, and provides enough resources to educate those who can succeed in mastering the technicalities of engineering, there will be enough engineers to go around.  Maybe not as many as companies always want, but enough.  And the next time you read something about the STEM crisis, take what you read with a grain of salt.

Sources:  The article "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" by Robert N. Charette appeared on Aug. 30, 2013 on the IEEE Spectrum website at http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth.