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The wrong kind of STEM: UK needs fewer psychologists and more physicists
29 October 2009
Additional student places in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects will not address the shortage of STEM skills because candidates are studying the wrong degrees, the Confederation of British Industry has heard.
Addressing the CBI higher education summit, Sir Brian Follett, chair of the STEM Advisory Forum, said that although STEM numbers were strong, the UK produced too many psychologists and not enough physicists.
He said that with almost 100,000 new STEM undergraduates each year, the UK was performing well. But in recent years, the physical sciences had lost 10 per cent of candidates while the biological sciences had seen a 20 per cent increase.
Sir Brian said that this needed to be "rebalanced": "We should make it more attractive to study chemistry, physics or engineering, and less attractive to study psychology. We have many levers in government to do that."
Readers' comments
And I suppose the physical sciences and engineering are going to solve the problem of understanding irrational economic behaviour of the type that recently crashed our economy, determining why people make poor health and lifestyle choices, developing treatments for addiction and dementia, determining the roots of national identity and how it determines attitudes toward immigration, etc.... What we need are fewer ill-informed quangos - the resources would be better spent on scientific and technological research across the breadth of physical, life and behavioural sciences.
And what..are you seriously inferring that psychologists solve irrational behaviour? Its a bit like saying artists build buildings - they don't they just observe them when they are complete. This makes me want to laugh manically until I get sectioned.. and then get told that writing a journal is 'obsessive writing behaviour' sheesh
The sad fact is that we 'produce' far more physical scientists than our collapsed economy can accommodate. Not just that, but they know that they will be the first to go when redundancies come, or the company relocates its R&D facility to Singapore, or its manufacturing centres to Malaysia.
Are you one of those harry potter things that makes people irrationally depressed? We don't have enought good scientists than we need - because we keep employing better ones from overseas. We don't get rid of physical scientists first we get rid of customer services, admin staff and low grades first, and if its R& D going to singapore they will bring scientists woth them (out USP is intelliegence and education - if production moves perhaps.. but qualified physical scientists are not production staff typically. Oh and our economy really isn't that collapsed - stop being so 'daily mail' The sole reason for the incentives and money pumped into the physical sciences is because there ISN't an oversupply - don't you know anything? I wish the ignorant miserablists would just all go out and ruin their own separate miserable economy than trying to do it in one that (broadly) works.
No. I'm a physics graduate. Now a regional sales manager, on account of customer services not being got rid when the scientists were.
Not a physicist who lost his job then.....I can believe a need to take any job because of a need for money and getting stuck in a different career.. but not that if you have a good 1st or 2i physics degree it is because of oversupply you don't have a job.