Day 322 of 1000

I read an article today from the Washington Post titled U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there.  I know they are not a very credible source–I am kind of embarrassed citing anything from the NYT or the WP, but this one took the cake.  The article is about highly degreed people in scientific fields who do not have jobs.  The problem with the article is that it talks almost exclusively about people working in chemistry, biology, and medical disciplines.  The word math shows up only once in the article while engineer and engineering also only show up once each.  It is especially hilarious that the first person with a “science” degree described in the article got her PhD in neuroscience.

It has been my premise that people who can handle the math (including hard statistics) have plenty of opportunities.  No one capable of doing hard math has lacked for opportunities, even during the persistent and growing under employment and unemployment that is a staple of the Obama recession.  I know this anecdotally from the number of headhunter calls I get asking for help in finding technical programmers.  You will find a list of graphs on the Business Insider website, here, that puts numbers to this phenomenon.

Just another reason to drop your subscription to the Washington Post and get a math, statistics, or engineering degree.