The MASSIVE STEM Graduate Exodus
What's Going Wrong? | John Skrentny

Brian Keating:
You know that most STEM graduates don’t end up working in STEM fields? It’s true and it’s not due to a lack of demand.

John Skrentny:
We hear constantly about the burning hair on fire crisis level shortage of of of STEM grads.

Brian Keating:
Tech companies dominate our landscape, ranging from everything from artificial intelligence to smart phones, searching the web, blockchain and beyond. Despite the fact that these tech companies dominate the environment, the economy, and the looming global cries for scientific solutions from STEM fields, they’re not losing STEM graduates due to a lack of funding. We’ve in fact poured 1,000,000,000 into STEM programs. Yet despite this, up to 70% of STEM graduates choose not to pursue careers in their fields.

John Skrentny:
Some studies show about 50% of engineering grads leave before they’ve even gotten their first job.

Brian Keating:
So why is that? I had the incredible opportunity to communicate to share these ideas with my UCSD colleague who’s a world renowned sociologist, John Scrantney, who recently explored these issues in his wonderful new book, Wasted Education. I know it’s not going to be a waste for you to tune in, So let’s go. Into the Impossible, John Scranton.

Brian Keating:
Welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast where we feature for the very first time a a sociologist who is joining us all the way from the other side of campus. John Scranton. Did I pronounce it correctly, John? Close enough?

John Skrentny:
It’s good enough. It’s good enough. And that was a long walk.

Brian Keating:
It was. Yeah. And I’m I’m proud to introduce you to this building. We’ve never had we’ve had some socialists on. We’ve never had a sociologist on the podcast. And so I wanna start with a semi prerogative question, which is you make the case in the in in this wonderful book, Wasted Education. We’ll describe the the cover art in the book title and the subtitle in just a bit. But you make the convincing case that, you know, we kind of have this, very ambivalent, very ambiguous message that we send to STEM grad.

Brian Keating:
I’m a STEM graduate, and yet I claim

Brian Keating:
that, you know, graduate, and yet I claim that, you know, STEM is sort of our best hope. And I think you agree with it. Do we need more STEM graduates, or do we have enough and we need more sociologist graduates? I mean, where is the lacuna? Where is the gap in what America is churning out versus what we actually need? Is it in the soft sciences, humanities, or really in the step sciences?

John Skrentny:
That’s a great question. And I would say we need more educated people across the board. But I’m with you. We need more scientists and engineers. But the book is about how we need to treat them better. And too many are getting this great education and they’re leaving and they’re going to do other things. And so the book is really it’s kind of a mystery book, really. It starts with a puzzle.

John Skrentny:
Why is that the majority of STEM grads don’t work in STEM jobs when, we hear constantly about the burning hair on fire crisis level shortage of of STEM grads. So that’s the puzzle. More than 2 thirds leave. It depends on the data, but it’s always a majority leave. And I wanted to figure out why. And the big story is they are just not treated that well. And I do think, and I’m with you, even though I’m a sociologist, it’s the scientists and engineers who are going to save the world. Mhmm.

John Skrentny:
And it’s the policymakers who have to develop the right policies to allow them to do that. So that’s why I say across the board. Social scientists, humanities, anyone who can communicate well will help develop the policies to, you know, unchain the scientists and engineers or keep them using their skills so that they can save us.

Brian Keating:
Mhmm. How do you react to this statement? I’ve I’ve noticed and, actually, tonight, I’m going to see the world famous San Diego Padres play at the stadium, down at Petco Parkway and, watch them, you know, flail and struggle to beat the Milwaukee, Brewers. Odds are under 50%.

John Skrentny:
I can’t wait for this question because this was quite a segue. Okay.

Brian Keating:
I claim, we are doing the following. We in academia have set up a system Mhmm. Where to get, from graduate student to post doc Mhmm. Is easier than, you know, me getting on a peewee, you know, football team or a peewee baseball team. Mhmm. Continue the analogy. And it seems actually very easy to even get a postdoc. There’s such a dirt.

Brian Keating:
There’s such a hot market. And then immediately, it flips around to go from postdoc, which I’m gonna use in the analogy of this, into the baseball, of triple a baseball. So imagine, like, you could get into play triple a, which is almost literally it’s it’s almost a major league level caliber. In fact, a lot of major league players get bumped down to get rehabbed and work off their drug addict habits or whatever. I don’t know what they do. But but up in up in Escondido, they have a team up there. But to get from postdoc to faculty, we had a job search not long ago, 400 applicants, one position. Are we not doing a tremendous disservice just within academia by setting up this false narrative that you’re gonna it’s just gonna be the same as making a jump from triple a to the majors, when in fact, it’s more like making the jump from Pee wee to the majors.

Brian Keating:
It’s almost impossible.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. That’s a great question. So just to be clear, the book is mostly about the private sector.

Brian Keating:
Mhmm.

John Skrentny:
And you’re talking about academia, which I’ve We still stand. Yeah, I still research that, and that’s an important part of the story here. I’ve heard debates about this and that there’s some folks who say we should get everyone give everyone a chance. Everyone who loves science has a passion for it, has the skill set, give them a chance. But as you point out, that chance is minuscule. And just this weekend, I met a PhD in life sciences who was a post doc, saw the writing on the wall, and moved to industry, even though this person had a great passion for scientific research and the kind that you do. And so, it’s a tricky situation and part of it is the story of funding and how expensive it is to hire a ladder rank faculty member. So I don’t know what you don’t have to talk about it.

John Skrentny:
But when UCSD or any major research university hires a new professor, especially in the sciences and engineering, they get this massive startup package. They’re going to get a lab. They’re going to get all this stuff. And that stuff is expensive. And and most of the grants are grants to do specific research projects. You have a deliverable at the end. It’s not just grants to keep the lights on and and keep the buildings going. So you’ve got this ladder rank faculty job, make their research happen.

John Skrentny:
Got a ladder rank faculty job make their research happen. And it’s exploitative. There’s no doubt about it. It’s a rough situation. And so a lot of people, after their second or third post doc, they realize their life is slipping away. They’re in their thirties or early forties. They’re still in track. Right.

John Skrentny:
And so they luckily, they can typically move into industry that might not be what they wanna do. Mhmm. But it’s a system that’s it’s I think it’s kind of unsustainable and a little bit exploitative. But, but the re the research universities, it’s just expensive to run these things. And science, you know, I think is getting more expensive. You know, when you have a quantum computer

Brian Keating:
Mhmm.

John Skrentny:
That’s a hell of a lot more expensive than than computers were 20 years ago.

Brian Keating:
Bookshop. Yeah.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. And so anyway.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. No. That’s definitely true. I feel like we’re creating, what our legal friends would call, like, an attractive nuisance, basically. It’s making it seem as if, oh, you’re just gonna follow along this track, and and you’re eventually gonna get the job of your dreams because you are gonna become me. And therefore, what could be better than being a professor just like me? I just had 2 students graduate last week, got their PhDs rather, and one’s leaving, you know, academia forever. The other one may or may not remain for a long time. Short time, she has a postdoc set up, but it’s become it’s become, you know, almost impossible around the start around the same time or or maybe maybe slightly before or after.

Brian Keating:
But, it’s changed a lot dramatic. I don’t think it’s changed for the better. I think we’ve had a lot of bureaucratic overlays and a lot of this apparatus that’s set up is not to support the mission of the university, which is education, research, and so forth. It’s it’s, you know, checking diversity boxes and doing all sorts of other stuff. But since you do focus on industry, I can’t resist again being slightly provocative. Before we’re going into the cover, worry. I know people love the judging books. We have to judge the book.

Brian Keating:
I mean, it’s it’s too beautiful a cover not to judge. But before we get there, I’m there’s a trend on TikTok, which I’m sure you don’t watch. But I know you’re on Twitter, and I will put your handle underneath because everyone should follow you. But the, the the quiet quitting or, you know, a day in my life at, at Google. You know, we start off, I drop off my laundry. I get my my I get my espresso, and then I get my oat milk soy vanilla. Anyway, it’s this whole thing, and it’s and it’s so it’s it’s so, you know, it’s such a trope, but but it really has gotten kinda out of control, especially in in Bay Area companies, and and they’re cutting back. So who’s to blame? Is it the faculty, fellowships and programs and so forth? Or is it the companies that have fellowships and programs and and so forth? Or is it the companies that offer these, you know, seemingly extravagant perks? You know, but then, ultimately, job satisfaction doesn’t correlate with the fact that you can get your laundry done in the in the first floor, you know, laundromat.

Brian Keating:
Right.

John Skrentny:
So, I just wanna go back to the thing. You threw me there for a second, but it works well.

Brian Keating:
Go on back.

John Skrentny:
It works well, but my my favorite analogy, though maybe I’ll use yours in the future, is is Hollywood. There’s so many people who wanna make it big in Hollywood. Yeah. And they all go there, and they put up with all kinds of exploitative jobs and jobs that aren’t that great in the hopes that they’ll they’ll make it big. Yeah. And and similarly, sort of like the postdocs, I have a few friends who’ve gone into acting, and they kind of bubble around, You know, they’ll have a bit part in, Grey’s Anatomy or or something like that. They’ll kinda bubble around, and, you know, it looks like things might be happening. They don’t even have health insurance.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. They don’t they don’t have health insurance and they’re you know, there’s enough hints that they might make it, but then how long do you do that? Right. Just like these postdocs. But so this this other question, there might be a few jobs like this where you hang out in a meditation pod on Google’s dime. But people leave those jobs. They they it’s a young person’s game. There’s so much to say about this. I’m kind of tripping over my words here a little bit.

John Skrentny:
But one of the stories is there’s a there’s a great book, by a sociologist named Ofer Sharon. I dropped his name because I teach it in my intro to sociology class. The question is, why are these tech workers for a big company he had to keep it anonymous, but it’s a big one that everyone knows. Why do they work 60 to 70 hour weeks? And on average, this is across the year. And their work level there there’s, like, an early part of the year, and then there’s kind of trying to make the deliverable, then there’s crunch time. Yeah. And that that’s when they’re working every day of the week. And, and and Sharon has a nice description of these offices where there’s and this is before work from home was a big thing, but there’s a foosball table and, you know, there’s a pogo stick in the corner and there’s all this silly stuff.

John Skrentny:
Segue. And no one’s using it.

Brian Keating:
Mhmm.

John Skrentny:
It’s there. No one’s using it. And they’re in their offices sending each other emails to each other down the hall. Right across

Brian Keating:
the street.

John Skrentny:
To work in their you know, no one had time for that stuff. Mhmm. That was stuff that you used to kinda lure people and make it look glamorous. It’s also very gendered stuff, by the way. Mhmm. We can talk about that later. But, so that stuff is there. But the reality of the work schedule is it can be brutal.

John Skrentny:
And, if you’re a father, if you have a family, you have different kinds of obligations, that work schedule makes it really hard. Yeah. And so it’s a young person’s game. I’m sure these TikTok videos aren’t by people in their fifties. That’s true.

Brian Keating:
Hey there, students of the impossible. It’s your fearless host, Professor Brian Keating. Hope you’re enjoying this conversation with my fellow professor at UCSD, John Scranton. And I wanted to make a small request which is for you to make sure that I’m not wasting my education, wasting my time with these wonderful videos that I know you’re enjoying but I found out only 50% of you are subscribed or following the podcast on audio or video for me. So please make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends. Leave a comment, subscribe, like, do all those things. It really helps me out and makes me sure. It makes me convinced that I’m not wasting my time.

Brian Keating:
You know, I get so little feedback. This is one of the ways that you can give me some free feedback. It doesn’t cost you anything, and I hope it’s part of your continuing education. Now back to the podcast.

Brian Keating:
That is true. And so when we look at the, you know, so called leaky pipeline, I was always told the leaky pipeline leak starts in 8th grade, 7th grade, 6th grade, etcetera. Yearning in the case, it starts basically, you know, I call it I went to 22nd grade, you know, 4 years of undergrad, 6 years of PhD. Where should if you have a limited amount of duct tape, which is how we experiment. Physicists fix everything Mhmm. Where do you apply it? You’re you’re you’re in charge of the NSF or, whatever, NIH budget for Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Stopping the leak in the pipeline.

Brian Keating:
Where do you apply it?

John Skrentny:
That is it’s a great question. And what I wanted to do is I kinda play dumb in the book. And I’m like, all right, people. Let’s see what’s going on. Clay. Right. Right. Yeah.

John Skrentny:
You say there’s a shortage, and let’s see if you’re acting like there is a shortage. Let’s see if you’re saying these STEM grads are so valuable and they’re they’re they’re to be prized and coveted and polished and and put in the meditation pod and and given a catered lunch. And let’s see if, in aggregate, you’re actually acting like you value them. And there’s almost no evidence. I mean, there’s gonna be some sectors that get hot. AI, generative AI, super hot right now. When the price of oil is really high, oil and gas RNA research. Right.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. Some of these things will be yeah. Yeah. RNA research will be really hot. And so you’re gonna get these spikes and you’re gonna hear about, oh, this guy retired in his thirties and all this kind of stuff. We’re talking aggregate on average. We’re trying to understand why 60% or so of STEM grads do something else. And I’m getting excited and forgetting what the question was.

Brian Keating:
Oh, where would you apply the duct tape?

John Skrentny:
Oh, the duct tape. Yeah. So you’ve got to look at the employers. And research shows from economists and sociologists and other social scientists, students pay attention to the market signals. And if the employers are not hiring, they move and do something else. The tricky thing with STEM is often they’ll hire young people, certainly in software developing and areas like that. But then these workers will burn out, and they’ll go do something else. So my argument is, yes, there is a leaky pipeline at 8th grade.

John Skrentny:
Fractions is a big one. A lot kids have trouble with fractions.

Brian Keating:
Mhmm.

John Skrentny:
And, you know, you that’s, like, 3rd grade or 4th grade. So there’s all 6 fourths of people know that. So there’s all these little points where you you might lose some folks. But then you’ve been you’ve got these people who actually graduated from college with a STEM degree. They represent the greatest investment, both personal Yeah. Their family and the government. And then when they go do something else, that I think is the urgent thing. And I argue the employers have to be held accountable.

John Skrentny:
And really, it’s I I sort of make the case that the employers, they have a lot of self inflicted boons if they really believe there’s a shortage. I have no lie detector.

Brian Keating:
Right.

John Skrentny:
But they act like they they believe there’s a shortage. The investors also kinda drive their behavior. Mhmm. So it’s a complicated this is one of the things that reasons I love sociology. You’ve got all these complicated systems sort of working together, and, you know, you’ve got to draw these connections out and and to understand this outcome. And investors drive this behavior that that encourages them to treat workers like they’re expendable. Mhmm. Stock prices go up when a firm announces layoffs.

John Skrentny:
Right. Elon Musk went into Twitter and said, we want hardcore people. Let’s get rid of all these engineers. All these other CEOs applauded. Right. Yeah. Heads are rolling.

Brian Keating:
Stock price has tripled.

John Skrentny:
And the stock price people

Brian Keating:
love it. So We take the multiple and then you just subtract off the, you know, this cost and you multiply now by this huge number on a on a formally even larger number

John Skrentny:
and they get, yeah, stock price go up. Right. So so there it it’s a complicated system there, but but my argument is if we just keep investing in STEM education and do not pay attention to what the employers do I’m trying to maybe you can help me. I’m trying to think of the right metaphor.

Brian Keating:
I took

John Skrentny:
took my kids to a petting zoo over the weekend. Oh, nice. And I imagined moving more animals into a petting zoo, but there’s a back gate open and they’re walking out. Mhmm. Mhmm. Maybe that’s not too flattering for a STEM grad. But when when you’re filling it in with more and more folks and and then huge numbers are leaving. Right.

John Skrentny:
Some of them some studies show about 50 percent of engineering grads leave before they even gotten their first job. They they go through the whole gauntlet and then they say, nah.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

John Skrentny:
I’m gonna go do something else. I know

Brian Keating:
a lot. And it made me think of, well, here’s another alternative. So I had last year this, gentleman. He’s got a name. I’ll I’ll let you guess what what you do if you had a name Hazard. Would you what kind of profession would you take on? You know, would it be poetry laureate or he’s a fighter pilot. Okay. So he flies for the Air Force.

Brian Keating:
I would

John Skrentny:
have thought risk management or insurance.

Brian Keating:
Well, this is a book about risk management. But in here, he goes through the training program that he went through from the Air Force Academy all the way up to and they force you after after graduation. You don’t have a choice. It’s not like they’ve invest they invest something like 5 to $10,000,000 per pilot, and these are the best pilots on Earth. And and so they can’t they don’t have the option. It’s a legal contract. And I’m wondering, you know, just to be provocative again before we get to judging the book. I’ve shown another book before I show this one.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. That’s right. It’s a huge deal. What about, like, some you know, you get this fellowship. You’re you know, we we you know, it was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, 6 years to get a PhD, and then you decide you want to open a coffee shop, you know, in, in Selma up in San Francisco. Yeah. Is that really fair? I mean, have you betrayed some part of the social contract?

John Skrentny:
One of the more interesting findings that I did, doing the research for this with with a colleague is we looked at job satisfaction and we looked at job satisfaction of STEM grads who moved to non STEM jobs. And it was they were statistically significantly less likely to say they were satisfied. And and the thing that stood out was they they asked different things about pay and promotion and stuff. The intellectual challenge of the job, that was the one they were bored. Yeah. And they were trained to love STEM. And now they’re doing non STEM Right. Probably for the money.

John Skrentny:
And one of the arguments I make is you can make a lot more money with STEM skills in in a non STEM job.

Brian Keating:
I went on to work for Amazon and eBay. They make twice what you and I make.

John Skrentny:
Right. Right. Don’t remind me. But, so you’ve you’ve got this yeah. You’ve got this situation where, where they’ll go they’ll go and and chase the money and and do something else. And, you know, that that explains part of the story. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Okay. So let’s do the the judging this book by its cover. So take us through, John. Take us through, if you would. The title, Wasted Education, the subtitle, and then this, magnificent call cover art. I I wanna commend you for you know, it’s the first sociology book I’ve probably ever read in my life. It’s really very interesting. I mean, I had so much fun reading it, and, there’s a lot of hard data in it and hundreds of references at the end of scholastic.

Brian Keating:
But it’s it’s written from the perspective of kind of, you know, a travelogue. Marco Polo is exploring this question that we all take for grant. Oh, we need more STEM. I’ve had on Michael Saylor, who’s, you know, probably the foremost Bitcoin advocate in the world, MicroStrategy. And, you know, he started a whole university, online university, just for STEM. It only does STEM called Sailor Academy. And he says, we need a 1,000,000 STEM graduates, and I’m, like, thinking of forwarding him this book. So take us through the book, the cover title, subtitle, and art, please.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. Okay. So the title, actually comes from a title that was suggested to me by Sean Carroll, who you might know in the podcast.

Brian Keating:
Guest guest many times asking.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. And so one

Brian Keating:
of my official first guests,

John Skrentny:
during COVID. Yep. Mhmm. So Sean and I have known you since graduate school, and and I wanted to write a book a little bit more accessible and to a mainstream audience because I know a lot of students, parents, a lot of folks interested in this, you know, wanted to reach the policymakers. And so and Sean’s great at writing books that reach a mass audience as as is yourself. And so I I asked for a suggestion. I told him what the book was about, and he suggested Wasted Brains. And the the publisher I ended up going with an academic publisher in the end, but, University of Chicago Press is one of the best ones for for my field.

John Skrentny:
They thought that was I think what did the what was the word? I think they said too visceral or something. Or they they didn’t want people to think of, like, a brain in a vat or something. Or, like, the brain right there. That’s right. And it actually made sense to make it about education because that’s where the government’s investing its money. This new CHIPS and Science Act, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars invested in education. So it made sense to make it to switch it to wasted education. And then the subtitle, how we fail, I wanted I had

Brian Keating:
It’s only since 2001. I never knew that.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Until I

John Skrentny:
read this. I thought it was for a long time. I mean, the bomb and sound. Me too. It they they used to be SMET. Oh, right. Isn’t that hilarious?

Brian Keating:
I’m a better fan. You got you in there Like, for undergraduate.

John Skrentny:
And and I I used to do historical there was set, which where they dropped out the t entirely. So there was all these different things, but then STEM just took off. We decided to just spell it all out there, and and then there was a debate with my editor, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, who’s awesome. I I wanted to make it how employers fail, the graduates in science, technology, engineering, and math. And and she thought that sounded too narrow. It it sounded a little too technical. And and let’s let’s think of it as a collective problem, you know, because everyone’s kind of involved in this. This.

John Skrentny:
And so so we went with that. The cover was the second choice. The first cover had a STEM degree going through a paper shredder. And I thought that was a little too strong. Violent. And and I do think move away from my degree of study. I didn’t bring my paper shredder. But, I thought that that was too strong.

John Skrentny:
And I think STEM education is great. I think the people who move out of STEM and do something else, it’s still valuable to have these STEM skills. So I didn’t want to that was too strong. And I didn’t really like the art. So I said, we can have these sort of generic symbols of science Tools. And engineering. Yeah, tools of the trade. But, let’s go with something like that.

John Skrentny:
And I thought, as you can see from my t shirt and your shirt, black made it look kinda cool. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
I think they’re cool. Usually, black is reserved, as Sean Carroll has pointed out, for astronomy books for some reason.

John Skrentny:
Oh, really?

Brian Keating:
They sell better when they’re at work.

Brian Keating:
So a

Brian Keating:
lot of my books are like, oh, I’m trying to break the trade. Question for you, maybe, slightly tongue in cheek, but, like, it is part of the problem the fact that we have a name for STEM? Like, we’re defining it’s like atheism. It’s like defining you by what you’re not. Right? So what do you call it? Like, you don’t think of yourself as a non STEM person. And then the second part would be, you know, a second follow-up to that would be, you know, what what do people that leak out of the pipeline of non stem? What do they do? I mean, they go into politics? Hey. What are they what’s their wasted education version for the non STEM? Right.

John Skrentny:
That could be a project, actually in how putting a name on something catalyzes thinking about it and policy making about it. So I had a research assistant, Natalie Novick, who looked at bills in Congress and she traced how all these bills started to have STEM in the title. And to do it well, you’d have to have a comparison of ones with science and engineering and this sort of thing. But it really did seem to catalyze and kind of crystal category of what we’re talking about here. And so I think there’s a there’s something to be said. Another astrophysicist still inspired

Brian Keating:
me to

John Skrentny:
be for you. Yeah. Yeah. There’s something to

Brian Keating:
be said for that.

John Skrentny:
I wanted to emphasize that the category of STEM is ambiguous, to say the least. Mhmm. And, you know, readers will see this book, and it’s, like, 200 pages or so. I had to take out tens of thousands of words where I did a deep dive on what the hell is STEM. Can I say hell?

Brian Keating:
I just

John Skrentny:
said it. And it’s super complicated. So you said that I’m not STEM.

Brian Keating:
Right.

John Skrentny:
The NSF says I am.

Brian Keating:
Really?

John Skrentny:
So how about

Brian Keating:
that? You have NSF grants and

John Skrentny:
in fact Yes, yes, yes. And they, I think, idiosyncratically include the social sciences in STEM. So, but I think that when most people are talking about why we need STEM, the book starts with this discussion of these rationales for more investments in STEM. The shortage rationale, they’re not talking about a shortage of sociologists or economists or anthropologists. They’re talking they’re not actually talking about cosmologists and astronomers either. Sorry. They’re right. They’re talking about But, you know, there’s sci.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. Yeah. So, that’s I call that the £800 gorilla in STEM. 50% of STEM workers are in computers in some way. So there’s that, and then there’s the question of medicine. I don’t consider it, and the NSF doesn’t consider medicine practicing medicine to be STEM. Right. And you might think that’s odd because how could practice medicine without having STEM knowledge? But that fits this idea of the shortage rationale.

John Skrentny:
There’s a shortage of physicians and, you know, the AMA has the American Medical Association has more to answer for there than the education system. There’s this kind of complicated story there. And then you have there’s this thing called, optional practical training. And all the international students listening this in America will know what that is. I’ve got to. That means that if you get a degree in the United States and you’re foreign, you can you can work in the United States for a year if your job is somehow related to your degree. That’s kind of vague as well. But if you’re in STEM, you can work for 3 years.

John Skrentny:
And that’s because Bill Gates and some other folks lobbied for what’s called the STEM extension. So basically, what they did was create an incentive for international students to major in STEM. And then that created an incentive for universities to lobby to

Brian Keating:
have different fields categorized as STEM.

John Skrentny:
So they would get down so they would get more good international students.

Brian Keating:
And also the international students pay, you know, twice the freight of a local California

John Skrentny:
state. Exactly. So you’ve got then you had first the Economics Department sort of saying, hey, the NSF says we’re STEM, and we want to say we’re STEM. And the Department of Homeland Security didn’t initially include economics. All kinds of fields. I I discussed some of them in my books, Classics. I mean, is there anything NYU, you did a great job lobbying there. If there’s any more, like, the paradigmatic humanities field.

John Skrentny:
Right. Anything more, like, the paradigmatic humanities field Right. Anything more humanities ish

Brian Keating:
than classic. Yeah. Yeah. It’s gonna.

John Skrentny:
So they’ve got, you know, so we created all these incentives to expand the thing. So the definition of what is STEM could be, we could talk about that. We could do a whole podcast on that. And I do use a question. There’s this great survey called the National Survey of College Graduates, which says, are you in a STEM occupation, basically? And that’s the one that shows that about 2 thirds of STEM grads are not about 60 percent are not according to my analysis of the data are not in STEM jobs. But then they can say, does your job require a bachelor’s level of STEM expertise? And then you’ve got a lot more folks. So then you get physicians saying, well, heck, yeah. I’m using science all the time.

John Skrentny:
And you might get some of those folks going in there. So some of the people who leave STEM are going into medicine. Okay? And, and then others go into management. If, you know, if you’re managing a bunch of software developers, it makes sense that you have some software backgrounds or maybe using some stuff there. I talk about some of my, some of my neighbors in the book. You know, this is a big life sciences hub, San Diego. And they get PhDs in the life sciences, and they end up doing stuff helping firms manage, FDA approval or clinical trials, but they’re not actually doing bench science. Right.

John Skrentny:
So are they STEM? And so it gets a little bit tricky. So that’s why I keep focusing on this shortage rationale. But I I should emphasize, the other the other three rationales for more STEM education in the book are national competitiveness, which we heard a lot about with the CHIPS and Science Act, trying to develop a semiconductor industry in the United States, just trying to develop more folks to innovate and develop more jobs and and, you know, grow the economy for all Americans. Another rationale is diversity. If these are great middle class jobs or roads to middle class incomes, then we should open them up to more women and historically underrepresented minorities. And we should utilize all minorities. And we should utilize all the STEM talent available. You know, we shouldn’t make some folks feel unwelcome in science.

John Skrentny:
And then the 4th rationale is the one that I think you and I might share the most, which is save the planet. We’re in trouble. All the data indicates climate change, plastic pollution. There’s microplastics coursing through our bloodstreams right now. We need scientists to come up with better plastics, cleaner energy, better battery storage, better vaccines, all this kind of stuff. So there’s a lot of folks. But, the shortage one I focus on the most, because they’re the ones who do the most lobbying to get more of the, investments in education.

Brian Keating:
Hey there. If you’re watching this, you might be a STEM student yourself. And if so, you’re guaranteed to win one of these beauties, a real life meteorite, a fragment of the 4,300,000,000 year old early solar system. You can get one at brianketing.com/list, but if you have a dotedu email address, go to brianketing.com/edu and you’re guaranteed to win one of these beauties if you live in the United States. So please do go over there, sign up, and I’ll share with you some of the most incredible science findings every single week for free in your inbox. Unsubscribe at Antonio Garcia Martinez, who wrote

Brian Keating:
Chaos Monkeys and is a friend of mine. He said the culture is what kept the 23 year old, who were make 23 year olds were making half a $1,000,000 a year in a city where there are lots of fun to offer if you have the cash, tethered to corporate campuses for 14 hour days. They ate 3 meals a day there. Sometimes they slept there and did nothing but write code. So, that seems like a hellscape. You know? It seems like you’re you’re earning all this money, and, and what what could really be done to do it, to, you know, to differentiate yourself? Antonio actually has a degree in physics from Berkeley or studied physics at Berkeley. So he had a true STEM degree. Uh-huh.

Brian Keating:
He kept going with it. And now he’s not in it. And he’s writing a newsletter or doing a podcast or whatever he’s doing and writing books. But the question of, like, purpose, I mean, a lot of what you and I do is is, you know, we get rewarded not only, you know, in terms of monetary compensation. It’s it’s camaraderie. It’s feeling making a difference. And but are those things, like, incentives lacking from the classic corporate, you know, environment where a STEM, you know, professional or STEM graduate might enter the workforce.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. So I didn’t finish my thought, which is typical, on the over Sharon thing. So he did that. It’s so rare for sociologists to get access to, you know, a big corporation like that. Even to get interview rich people investors, almost impossible. That’s why we study so many poor people. It’s easier to get access to them. They’re happy to tell their story.

John Skrentny:
But he got access to this big company. And one of the things that he found was that the workers are managed in a way, Brian, that keeps them keeps them excited and working so hard. So the the management technique that that was described in that study, it’s called forced ranking or some called rank and yank. But basically, twice a year, these workers are ranked on a bell curve, and there’s no ties. Everyone is ranked on the bell curve, and there’s gonna be some exceptional folks, some middle of the pack folks, and then some folks who are gonna be sent packing. And, I was pleased with that middle of the pack, and I was like, oh, he could sell my amusement. But what he found when he interviewed he said he basically I love it when sociologists do this. Why do you do what you do? And they have to explain it to what’s basically like an extraterrestrial, someone who’s a total outsider.

John Skrentny:
And the the these were mainly people in computers that he was talking to. They had trouble explaining why they work so hard. But, basically, what what was teased out was that they wanted to be in the top ranking. I mean So it’s great. Through their whole lives, they wanted to be in the top ranking. Creating helicopter parents. Yes. And and now they still wanna be in the top ranking.

John Skrentny:
It’s it’s it’s not just humiliating. It’s intolerable even to be mediocre. So you’re gonna be working hard. You’re gonna have a lot of anxiety. The more you can be ranked in that top 20% or so, the more likely it is that your manager is gonna give you interesting work to do. And, and so you wanna impress your managers. And the other interesting was these workers had they didn’t they weren’t forced to be in there for that time, but they wanted to impress their managers. And so they wanted to impress their managers, not just with being there a long time, but when the manager comes and says, hey, Brian, we need this software to do this kind of thing.

John Skrentny:
It’s gotta have this functionality. How soon could you get that done? You’d be like, oh, 2 months, 3 months, 3 months tops. Wow. That sounds great because, you know, Tim down the hall, he said a year. So we’re gonna give you that interesting project. And you’re then you’re gonna think, oh, man, how am I gonna do that in 3 months? You’re gonna do it by working every day? Yeah. For hours. Yeah.

John Skrentny:
And so but it’s kind of being manipulated, really. So I have a good I I I use that reading in my intro to sociology class. I talk to the students, which has a lot of intro, so it’s got a lot of STEM majors in there. And we talk about, is this really autonomy? Are they really choosing to work that hard? When the manager is kind of arguably manipulating them, that’s where it gets a little tricky to think like that.

Brian Keating:
Right.

John Skrentny:
So there’s different ways of doing this now and some a lot of firms are moving away from this 4th ranking. But there’s other ways of of coaxing this what looks like passion. They hire on passion. Right. You know, are you passionate about that? And if you’re not, we’re gonna manage you so you look to be passionate. Mhmm. There’s other ways of kind of doing this, And and so it keeps them working so hard. And that was kind of built into the culture.

John Skrentny:
Do you remember it came out of Silicon Valley, some, entrepreneur came up with some kind of protein vitamin fiber drink called Soylent. Soylent. Yeah. Mhmm. That was because you’re too busy to eat. Right? You mean a complete meal or a place where

Brian Keating:
you don’t

John Skrentny:
just drink that?

Brian Keating:
Just take it from the Soylent Green. Exactly.

John Skrentny:
Exactly. It’s a little tongue in cheek comedy.

Brian Keating:
Spoil spoil

John Skrentny:
a 50 year old movie. And so the whole premise of that is it’s kinda built into the culture now Right. To work like crazy.

Brian Keating:
And that also attracts more men, I think, to the workforce and then and and the machismo culture

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
Who can sleep under their desk longer.

Brian Keating:
Right.

John Skrentny:
It makes it harder for if you have a family, if you have other obligations to stick with that stuff.

Brian Keating:
I’m thinking about the chapter on training in the STEM skills, treadmill that you call it. The notion of science to me is one of, what’s called an infinite game by, you know, game theorist, sociologists as well, where it’s something that you, you know, the object object is to keep playing, not to necessarily to win it, unlike chess or, you know,

Brian Keating:
Battleship, which I always lose that somehow to my kids. But but the

Brian Keating:
point is, at least I don’t lose in solitaire that often. But but, you know, but I would say science is true. It’s an you can’t win science. Like, there’s no like, oh, you got to the end of science. Congratulations. Even you win a Nobel Prize, all of 20 of my guests have been Nobel Prize winners. They’re all to a person, man and woman, working continuously on their craft of science. They never are satisfied with it.

Brian Keating:
So what to what extent does the treadmill kind of you know, you go to the gym sometimes in in you pull the emergency, I have to do it probably more than you. You know, pull the emergency, stop. The treadmill just stops. Right? And I feel like, you know, you get these kids who are interested in science, and I call them kids, but, you know, some of them are twenties or whatever, but they love science. They’re passionate about mother nature and understanding the world around in the scholar. It’s a very abrupt transition. Right? You’re going from the life of the mind and and, like, studying classics, to sociology, to astrophysics. Every day is a new adventure.

Brian Keating:
You’re looking up to your professors who are so wise, the sages, and then you’re slammed into a you know, where it’s like just you’re learning from a project manager who’s 2 years older than you

Brian Keating:
who went to

Brian Keating:
the school. Or younger. Yeah. Or younger. Yeah. And, or maybe from another country and can’t relate to this person and you’re not gonna learn from you you might learn to teach the test of, you know, passing your next, prod you know, 6 month annual review or whatever. Talk about that. Is there kind of a, a a dissatisfaction for the intellectuals that that come out? And I graduate all my students are brilliant, and they’re they’re super curious and, you know, and the ones that go and work for Amazon or eBay or whatever.

Brian Keating:
Just a smart, curious, and and interest in nature. Yeah. Now they hit this wall where it’s just like, okay. So I’ve got to prepare a 5 page, document on why I’m having this meeting. It has nothing do with the life of the mind. Isn’t that transition abrupt and sort of unfair? And might that explain why there’s some leakage?

John Skrentny:
Yeah. That’s a great question. I ended up cutting this out of the book, but to me, it was such a interesting and kind of poignant story. So, basically, it was there was a profile in one of these business magazines like Fast Company or something like that. And it was a company that was trying to sell you fashion, and trying to get you to buy more clothes basically from this website. So they needed scientists to develop algorithms to figure out what you, Brian Keating, are interested in and, like, oh, you don’t want that? Sure. How about this one? And keep you on the on the app and and hopefully, opening up your wallet or tapping on your credit card. They hired a PhD in astrophysics.

John Skrentny:
And I thought, oh, man. Just like you were thinking, like, the life of the mind, it was much more magisterial than thinking about the cosmos. Right. And now you’re trying to get people to buy clothes. And this guy, he I I admire this to some extent. He thought it was like a cool game. Like, how do we develop this? Like, it was a it was a scientific puzzle to figure out how to keep people on this website and buying stuff and guessing what they like and all that sort of stuff based on their past their past clicks. And and and he even used the analogy.

John Skrentny:
He said, just like cosmology, this is something I’ll think about while taking a shower. And I thought that was sad. That was where he’s pointing to me that, like, he’s spending his time off hours thinking about how to get people to buy that they don’t need. That tells you the story. Or one one thing that’s going on here is some people do make this transition. Some people say, hey, I’m still using my mind. I’m still using computational skills. It’s just different subject matter.

John Skrentny:
Other folks, they have trouble with that. And I I included in the book some folks who wrote on Reddit or some of these other sorts of, websites where people kinda post their thoughts and questions, where they move from real I call it real science, but you know what I mean, to this data analytics kind of stuff. And and they felt a little sad about it. And one of them, I I thought this was a really another poignant way of thinking about it. He said, I used to do, you know, physics or astronomy. And at a dinner party, I was really proud to say what I did, and now I’m not anymore. And and there’s a kind of there was a sadness, and then people comment and said, I feel the same way and and this sort of thing. Right.

John Skrentny:
Right. Very good. So, so some people do make that transition. I I admire them who can see the puzzle. Other people can’t. And then another, theme in the book is that some people feel the moral I call it STEM education for what? What are we using these these talents for? And investors love there’s a whole section in here. Investors love software. They which they love they love things that can make a lot of money with no factory.

John Skrentny:
You’ve got you can show Available. Yeah. You can show the product works. The only so you don’t have product uncertainty. You have market uncertainty. And you can do some research and figure out the market, but you don’t have to worry about the product that, oh, man, this battery doesn’t actually store energy the way we thought it did. Oh, man. We’ve got to find a factory.

Brian Keating:
We’ve got to redo this whole setup. Yeah. Yeah. One solder joint.

John Skrentny:
They call that the valley of death, in investing where it takes years to make money Yeah. Where you’re not making money and you’re bleeding money. The software doesn’t really have a value value of death. And so they love to put money in that. And so that’s why so much money goes into stuff that is arguably not helpful or even pernicious. So I talk a lot about social media. I’m very skeptical of social media, and I talk about workers at Facebook who resigned. One of them memorably said she had blood on her hands because they were using algorithms that increased conflict and polarization in society.

John Skrentny:
And

Brian Keating:
t depression.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. Someone yeah. Someone else said we’re we’re harming people at scale. Mhmm. And so, you know, there’s some problematic things there that, some folks with great skills might might not feel comfortable doing.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. I remember, you know, just in terms of, you know, like, odd applications. I mean, Antonio told me that, you know, one of the projects he worked on, it involved, like, looking at different types of glass for fiber optics such that you can shave off a microsecond from the digital fetch times that they preload the advertisers bid to this bidding war on an advertiser. So if you could save a millisecond or whatever, that’s a huge amount, but even microseconds, he so he’s applying like optics and laws. And it seemed like he was really interested in that. And then they just got him, you know, literally, like, how many lines of code can you, you know, generate to do this, other grading him on these objective metrics rather than creative, you know, generative new ideas. Right. And speaking of, you know, of, you know, kind of software eating the world as Andreessen would say.

Brian Keating:
Although, I point out most of the the biggest top five companies in the world right now, you know, NVIDIA now, Apple, even Microsoft, they’re all hardware companies. Software that, you know, it’s easy to make thousands of lines of code or come up with ideas that could never be tested, but building an experiment with a Webb telescope, you know, $10,000,000,000, you know, thousands of of human life times to build it. Sorry, Rena.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. I was just gonna say, I would say Microsoft is a software company. Yeah. And NVIDIA, I think, is I saw those same headlines as you. I think just it’s because of the money going into software and generative AI. Yeah. Like, that is just massive now, and they make the chip that makes that possible. So there’s a ton of other generative AI companies that are sucking in huge amounts of investment dollars while clean energy companies and stuff that I I argue that we badly need are are losing money right now.

Brian Keating:
Do we really need, like, a STEM graduate to do a lot? I mean, the core of these things is called large language models. Right? So to what extent do we really need, you know, computer scientists to develop or to what extent are we on you know, fairly excluding people from the workspace that could actually bring some novel new approaches to to a long standing, and financially lucrative problem like a generative AI?

John Skrentny:
That’s a great question. And I ended up taking this another thing that ended up on the cutting room floor, of the book was some research I did on folks who did not have STEM degrees who ended up in STEM jobs. And and computers and soft software specifically really is a I use the word porous. It’s unlike engineering and and life sciences, people can enter that field without a formally technical background a formal technical background, I should say. And, certainly, in the early days of the of the development of the software technology, there’s a lot of folks who don’t know how to do it and smart people who, sometimes I think even having an education in a different field can be helpful. You think differently than other folks. You can enter that field. And so there’s different estimates of this.

John Skrentny:
But in computers and software, some people say anywhere from 10% to 20% of the workers don’t have computer science or computer engineering degrees, and they can be successful. So I don’t know enough about generative AI and and how that actually is done, but there’s enough going on that your hypothesis is a good one.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking about it like, you know, I got this new, advertisement on Facebook, you know, probably from Antonio’s, you know, old team, and and it was all, you know, like, something like AI. We use AI, you know, to to fit to your needs, and then at the bottom, it’s like, Nespresso. I’m, like, what? Like, you know exactly, like, the coffee pod that we, you know, come out of it. And, I mean, certainly, there’s a lot of, you know, shenanigans that go on behind the phone of these. You know, I had a spy famous spy, Andrew Bustamante, here last week. And, yeah, this stuff that they do and that’s totally legal. And and Apple, you know, sells your data to all these places, and they claim that privacy is a human right.

Brian Keating:
But I mean, they’re spending all their time to get these incremental advantages and having some of the most brilliant, hardworking people that are, working on it. But staying on the theme of AI, I mean, will this lead to more or fewer, STEM graduates and the necessity for them in the workplace? I mean, is this gonna, you know, be the ax that opens up the, the flood the pipeline forever.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. You know, there’s because the software rights itself. I mean, it can be used to write. Right. So it it seems that people keep predicting that technology is gonna eliminate jobs. And and there’s all these case studies where it does not. And one of the more famous ones was on ATMs. That they thought ATM was gonna kill the bank teller.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. And and one of the things that they found was that banks kept bank tellers. They just had them do other things. So they had them selling other kinds of services. Banks started to expand more into credit cards, do other sorts of stuff. And so these predictions of cataclysmic declines of certain job sectors have not happened. Brian, I got to tell you, 20 years ago when the MOOC was coming, that maybe that was a little bit less than 20 that was more like 10 years ago. When the MOOC was coming, I thought I got to I’m going to be selling used cars here in a little bit.

John Skrentny:
And here we are. And so, you know, like This is a massive. Yeah, massive open online course. So online education, basically. So, but who knows? I mean, this seems to be a bit of a game changer. I’m I’m watching this really, with with with great interest. I did see a study that showed that AI can now write code, but it seems to it it seems to be more of a tool that helps people, and it helps especially the mediocre coders

Brian Keating:
Mhmm.

John Skrentny:
The really excellent coders. It’s not really helping that much. So who knows? I’ve been reading these stories about, is AI overhyped, and is it is the innovation kind of tapering off? And, you know, I I don’t know. I I keep I keep waiting for the whole world to completely change, and, and it’s just not it’s just not happening yet. It certainly changed the way I I teach. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Hey. There’s a good chance you might be a scientist or an engineer aspiring to be. Maybe going to school, graduate school or after school, or maybe you’re a professor like me. If you’re wanting to learn the greatest tips and ways to become your best scientist, you might want to get my book Into the Think Like a Nobel Prize winner with a forward by my friend Nobel laureate Barry Barish. In it, we describe an incredible series of tips on how to collaborate better, unlock your creative genius, and get over common pitfalls like the imposter syndrome. I hope you’ll take a deep dive into it, and I know you’ll enjoy it. You can read

Brian Keating:
a free chapter at my website, briancating.com/books,

Brian Keating:
and you can buy it at amazon.com in ebook, audiobook, or in physical hard copy or paperback form. Thanks a lot.

Brian Keating:
How do you use it? How

John Skrentny:
So I employ. Well, I used to do some, you know, take home exams. And now what is the point? A friend of mine said, you should have AI grade the students’ AI generated exams, and you all go out for a beer. Exactly. Or go to the beach in San Diego. Yeah. That’s right. And so, I go back to the way I did exams, which is the blue book exam, where you wrote with a pen and this thing called a blue book.

John Skrentny:
They still sell them on Canvas. They look exactly like they did when I was in college decades ago. And but I I have to say, I wonder, like, what what should people know? When you have access to so much information so easily, what should people know? And I I’ve kind of gone to the idea that you need to know a lot in order to ask the right questions. So I do think that people taking my courses should know a lot about society and how it works. And I also think that part of our job is to generate, I call them foundational skills. I hate the term soft skills. It seems pejorative or kind of insulting. Foundational skills, critical thinking, communication, that’s usually a soft skill.

John Skrentny:
You’re not going to survive long in the work world if you can’t communicate well. Writing well, teamwork, collaboration, building a little more of that into my teaching so that, students can have long careers relearning everyone’s gonna be on a STEM skills treadmill or at least a skills treadmill, and it’s gonna go faster and faster, and you’re gonna need to reboot. And people are gonna need that kind of be able to pivot and learn things quickly on a on a foundation of of solid skills that I hope they pick up in college. So, yeah, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen with AI to bring back to your original question, but we I think we need to prepare people for a world of constant change and more rapid change. If you could go back

Brian Keating:
in time and, you know, change from your STEM profession, which I now know as a STEM profession.

John Skrentny:
I I would never I I I presented and I kind of roll my eyes as I say today.

Brian Keating:
What would you do differently? Would you would you still wanna, you know, be an academic? Would you has has things, you know, align more with what your core, you know, desires and competency are, or have they changed maybe for the worse on your tenure, so you can speak freely?

John Skrentny:
We have great jobs. You know that. I’ve heard you say that. We have great jobs.

Brian Keating:
It’s the hardest 3 hour week job in the world.

John Skrentny:
It’s great to be able to learn about the world. I often think of it as like exploring where I’m planting. There’s an area I don’t know. And now I’m gonna learn about it. And then I’m planting a flag. And now I know this area.

Brian Keating:
That’s what this book is.

John Skrentny:
It’s just travel along. Yeah. It’s I I honestly, one of my favorite parts was learning investing. I’m not here to give investment advice, but learning how investors think. And and I’m kind of a cultural sociologist, and, you know, economists hate culture that you can’t study it. It’s so vague. Quantify. Yeah.

John Skrentny:
You want quantifiable stocks. What you can manage. Culture mat it matters massively. And I highlight in the book when these when these investor these management professors talk about the norms of investing. It’s kind of governed by norms of different kinds. And so I love what I do. And so it’s hard to tell people not to try to do this. I have students come to me just like they come to you.

John Skrentny:
Should I try to be a professor? I say, you know, shoot for the stars, but have a have an exit plan Mhmm. Is is basically what I say. So, yeah, it’s it’s fun to be able to do this. It’s fun to be able to talk to, talk to you about this and, and try to share these ideas. And hopefully, these ideas get out there. And students who are STEM majors, I’m not saying don’t be a STEM major. I’m saying have an exit strategy. Pick up these other skills.

John Skrentny:
Learn to learn to write, learn to think critically, learn to communicate to people outside of your technical field. That is gonna serve you well for a long term career.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. I mean, there are very few actual honest to goodness real professors that have podcasts. And, you know, sometimes I’m I’m, you know, kind of asked, well, you know, UCSD must give you a lot of resources and money, and I’m like, no. Actually, I bought all this stuff from my own dime. And they said they wouldn’t, you know, can me for doing it, but they’re not gonna, like, support even for my books. In physics, it wasn’t like it’s part of a academic discipline that we’re supposed to write a book. So I was told I asked for a sabbatical, and they said, no. We won’t, deny you, you know, promotion.

John Skrentny:
That’s as good as it’s

Brian Keating:
gonna get. So it’s different in your field. I know it’s very important to write to write in your field to write academics, but not academic.

Brian Keating:
Go ahead.

John Skrentny:
This is what I mean by culture. Yeah. Like, your field can’t exist without donors and taxpayers.

Brian Keating:
That’s

John Skrentny:
And if there aren’t people communicating why what you’re doing is significant, it’s going to dry up. It’s like, why why should we let these people gaze at their navels on our dime? Screw that. Let’s let’s create money.

Brian Keating:
Oh, you

Brian Keating:
know, big NASA’s got all this money. And, you know, I see Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s very popular. He’s very rich. You know, it must be that you guys are pretty well funded. And I say, no. Actually, I believe, and I say this and I get a lot of grief online, but but I think it’s our moral obligation as scientists to explain to the public in terms they can understand what it is that we do. I mean, imagine we work for, you know, the chancellor or whatever, and they say, hey, John.

Brian Keating:
What are you working on? Oh, what I’m doing is very specialized. You can’t possibly understand it.

John Skrentny:
You’re pretty

Brian Keating:
and and there’s no way because I’m using equipment that no. You’d be gone.

John Skrentny:
Oh, I mean, in our

Brian Keating:
field, you would be gone. But if you work for Google or and you try to do that, oh, what what are you working on this, you know, the recent Slack Sprint that I said, no. You can’t understand. You’d be gone. Right? Exactly. It’s part of its communication, but it that’s also the the resistance that I get is no. Actually, STEM people shouldn’t be doing that because they should be doing the stuff that uniquely the only they can do, which is STEM stuff in the lab or and I say also, well, why is that? Well, why is it? Well, it’s also hard for me to learn the soft skills. Like, I’m not good at it.

Brian Keating:
And I say, oh, yeah. I know. You know, quantum mechanics, you were born learning it out of the womb, like, it’s so easy for you. You got it in 3rd grade. No. You had to study things that were valuable to you and that were meaningful to you that you derive value from. So why is it different with presentation? I don’t think everyone should do it, but but the the point is we should we should teach it. That should be part of our of our discipline, at least, that these are critical skills.

Brian Keating:
They’re not even, like, you know, soft or unimportant. They’re critical for everything that’s that’s meaningful and important. You know, it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s vastly important. I think it’s underrated.

John Skrentny:
I agree a 100%. A lot of what you say translates to the social sciences as well. You could be a you could be a social scientist where your whole life is consumed with arguing with other people about which theory is better to explain something. And what is the point? Yeah. And, and it’s, I mean, we do I agree with you 100%. We do have a moral obligation to use this knowledge to, in your case, I think advance civilization. I think you and Sean do stuff to advance civilization or understanding of the cosmos. For other folks, to improve society, to make society function better, to work better, that’s what we that’s what we should be doing.

John Skrentny:
But, yeah, you could you could spend your time just arguing with with, like, 10 other people about some very narrow thing that only that’s what 10 people care about. Exactly.

Brian Keating:
And and and sometimes, you know, know, my paper, like my median paper cited 12 times, you know, maybe 20 people have read it. You have books 15,000 people allegedly bought it. Right. So it’s it’s, you know, it’s the it’s decent kind of leverage. And in these YouTube videos, I mean, the Franks tend to, you know, 1000 people might watch this video. Right. As as we wrap up,

John Skrentny:
I wanted to ask you

Brian Keating:
about your other research. So you conduct something called the, Center For Comparative Immigration Studies, and you’re the director you’re the co director of that, and you’re the director of the Yankelovich Center For Social Science Research. What are these things on campus?

John Skrentny:
I didn’t

Brian Keating:
know about them. Yeah. You said you’ve never been to this building. Well, I’ve never been to or heard

John Skrentny:
of these institutions. It’s funny. So there’s these the university tries to create interdisciplinary work. The disciplines are still these siloed powerhouses that really kinda run the show, but the university knows that and not just ours, but a lot of others know that a lot of the more interesting work gets done when you bring people across fields. And so these these research centers, they’re called organized research units. And I actually when I was I’m no longer directing these things. But, when I was directing the Center For Comparative Immigration Studies, I would meet with the folks who who run most of them are in the hard sciences and engineering. Research.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. Yeah. NASA Department. Yeah. So there was someone I remember because I we would come together and we’d ask each other questions. I asked why they’re still building these land based telescopes when you have these these ones in outer space. And they told me, and maybe you can confirm this, that now computers can correct for all the distortions that the atmosphere Not

Brian Keating:
not just the computer, but, yeah, it’s critical that you build basically these wobbly mirrors that do what’s called adaptive optics.

John Skrentny:
So

Brian Keating:
you correct for the fact that we look through this dirty window called the atmosphere, and it’s turbulent and fluctuating. And you basically make a mirror that compensates for that exact equal and opposite fluctuations. Yeah. It was invented by Claire Max, who’s a professor up at UC Santa Cruz.

John Skrentny:
She was. Yeah. So the Center For Comparative Immigration Studies was was a center created years ago, and it was designed basically to look at how immigration works in different places, and it does work very differently. And one of the things that interested me, this is one of these puzzles that I had to know the answer to. Mhmm. We always hear about how great immigration is and how immigrants are necessary to build the economy and all this.

Brian Keating:
The jobs we don’t wanna do.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. And, and I was interested in how Japan, which up until recently was the 2nd largest economy in the world, had the 2nd largest economy in the world with a third as many people as us and almost no immigrants. And so I got some money from the Japan Foundation. They had this thing called the Center For Global Partnership to do a conference where we asked that question, is immigration necessary? And we compared Japan and the US. And that’s what got me on the road to about low skilled immigration and high skilled immigration. And, about low skilled immigration and high skilled immigration. And some of the folks talking about the US blew my mind with this statistic that only a third of STEM grads worked in STEM jobs. And I was like, woah,

Brian Keating:
what?

John Skrentny:
And, you know, I’m scribbling down. I’m like, what? And I and that was years ago. And I was like, I gotta find the answer to that. So, and then the Yankalovich Center, there was a donor, who lived in San Diego, Dan Yankalovich, wonderful guy. I had the pleasure of knowing him, who who basically gave some money to UCSD to catalyze research to make the world better in any

Brian Keating:
kind of

John Skrentny:
any kind of area. Not hard sciences. Sorry. We’re starved for money. You guys are swimming in money for us. So different kinds of social science projects to improve education, to improve employment outcomes and all sort of stuff like that. So that’s kind of a job that eats your whole life, though, and it takes away from writing books like this. And so I’m not doing that anymore.

John Skrentny:
I’m working on this and I’m doing another project. I’m really interested in this idea of the STEM skills treadmill and the way that these workers have to constantly rebuild. And and a lot of folks leave because of that, by the way. The whole chapter on training is about how a lot of the workers, they get tired of having to be on this treadmill, just moving to keep in place, to keep their job. And a lot of the better ones leave. They say, screw this. I can make more money doing something where I’m not constantly having to learn the next software that comes down the pike. So so I’m really interested in how adults, mid career adults, retool and rebuild their university or rebuild their sort of skill portfolio and how research universities like ours can help them.

John Skrentny:
And so do you teach undergrads?

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. So so teaching undergrads, there’s a lot of folks, a lot of Republicans especially want these kind of work ready, you know, bachelor they get a bachelor’s and you’re ready to be plug and play and go into the workforce. I think if you do that, the skills are going to change and then they’re lost. They’re very fragile. And so if we focus on what we’re doing with the undergraduate stuff is prepare them for a lifetime of skills changes. And then mid career, you can come back. You don’t need a whole degree. You can just get a certificate of some kind in in generative AI kinds of things, some kind of software and cybersecurity.

John Skrentny::
Cybersecurity, huge one. And, and so I’m working on a book on that and how these different kind of regionally focused universities. I was talking with the University of Texas. They do a lot of stuff on oil and gas and data analytics and that and clean energy over there. University of Michigan, they have a whole segment on mobility and electric cars, self driving cars, battery storage for cars for mid career engineers to learn about these new technologies. Right? So that’s what I’m trying that’s that’s the book I’m working on right now, and I’m super excited about it as you can see.

Brian Keating:
Well, you are the epitome, as I used to, the epitome of a scholar, in my opinion. You’re doing research cross disciplinary, interdisciplinary, following your curiosity leads, and it’s actually incredibly valuable work. I mean, just as you’re saying it, we hear a lot about, like, oh, we need all these STEM skills, but but also we need, you know, tradesmen and women and doing stuff, you know, plumbing. You ever try to get your, you know, your faucet fixed?

Brian Keating:
You know,

Brian Keating:
there’s a joke that my, late great mentor, Jim Simons, used say. He was a hedge fund manager, billionaire, you know, and he said once he hired somebody, came over, a plumber, in the middle of the night to fix something, and, and the plumber said that after 10 seconds, that’ll be, you know, that’ll be $600.

John Skrentny:
Right. And Jim said, what are you talking about? 

Brian Keating:
I I don’t I don’t even make $600. And the plumber, per per per second or whatever you make. And the plumber said, what do you do? And he goes, well, I’m a hedge fund manager. I manage Renaissance Technologies. And, and, the plumber said, oh, well, yeah. I guess I used to make that when I was a hedge fund manager too. So, which is one of the professions that STEM graduates leak out of. And I even know some professors.

Brian Keating:
We have professors that have left our field of astronomy and gone to work for so we have to stem the stem flow, but, but it’s thanks to

John Skrentny:
the Nicely done. You were

Brian Keating:
singing this book. I love it. Yeah. I didn’t bring up steam. I mean,

John Skrentny:
I Oh, yeah.

Brian Keating:
Artist friends always wanted to throw in an a there. Now you got your own things.

John Skrentny:
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Let let let leave us alone with your

John Skrentny:
I applaud their effort, but but the investment is yeah. I I think that actually helps a lot, but, yeah, Congress isn’t, like,

Brian Keating:
trying to put my

John Skrentny:
put my

Brian Keating:
a future book maybe. Yeah. Then the astrophysicist can inspire. John Scranton, thank you so much for the wonderful conversation. This incredibly enthralling book. Everyone should go out and get a copy. People can find you on Twitter at gosh. At at John Screntny.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

John Skrentny:
At John Screntny. But I don’t tweet that often. I know. But, but yeah. Stop by. Please stop by. It’s great

Brian Keating:
to have you on this campus.

John Skrentny:
Thanks so much, man. This is fun. Yeah. Really enjoyed it. Thanks.

Brian Keating:
If you watched all the way to the end, I know you’re gonna love this interview with visionary genius, Peter Diamandis, who’s thought a lot about STEM and its impact on society. And click here for a playlist of my greatest episodes in the past few weeks.