We don't need more STEM graduates, we need economic incentives for STEM graduates including companies actually willing to take on and train green grads (everything requries a few years of very specific experience these days), willing to pay them good wages for part time work, willing to pay them good wages at all... etc. etc.
The problem is managers aren't scientists, few companies care about pure research and long term benefits coming from it, and nobody is willing to spend effort and resources training inexperienced average graduates any more.
It is also, in many ways, too easy to get a STEM degree by learning how to be a good University student as opposed to learning your subject well.
The core problem is university needs to be something special and uncommon, not something necessary. Most jobs have little to do with the University training that comes with them and there's not the budget for 1/3 of the population to do science.
Nowadays the economic incentives are the other way around. It used to be that pharmaceutical companies did everything in-house, from early discovery to clinical testing, and Central Research did discovery and lead optimization. That system provided stability for the employees.
Compare that to the pharmco carousel that you can see in action today in Boston and San Diego. The major players are IP brokers that buy startups with promising compounds (good if you are a lawyer or in marketing), but the science is done by university startups which are either bought out or fail, and the number of very capable people on postdocs (because they are between startups) is plain staggering. Try putting your kids through college doing that.
Is anyone surprised that I'm very suspicious of anyone preaching the startup gospel? They are inevitably venture capitalists or marketeers, or fresh out of college and still very green.
Add to that companies like Valeant whose business model is to buy companies that already have drugs on the market and fire most of the research staff. This is predicated on the belief that in-house R&D is nearly always a long term money loser. Better to crowdsource R&D and only pay for the winners.
"the number of very capable people on postdocs ... is plain staggering"
What's wrong with doing a postdoc? I'm in the UK, but here a postdoc is a normal part of the science career path. It pays reasonably well for academia and is a first step towards being a lecturer (assistant professor).
We are not talking about the academic career ladder, we are talking about the career path of med. chemists in general. To an increasing level, early discovery happens at academic startups, and when the company fails (because their two or three compounds fell through) all the scientists are out of work. The fastest new gig available is a postdoc, and the salary is a real problem when you try to put kids through college on that.
This model takes the "scientists are cogs in a machine" paradigm to a new level. Of course med. chemists are cogs in machines, lead discovery is nothing but finding ligands for targets (perhaps it's also finding the proper target), and your scientific training hopefully equipped you for that. If one project fails, there will be others, and it's management that chooses those that will go forward. But it used to be that you didn't change your employer with your project, Big Pharmco always had plenty of projects going. Nowadays it's the employee that bears all the risks, and that includes the risk of poor management. It's no longer cogs in machines, it's cogs with legs.
Have you heard of the postdoctoral treadmill? That's what happens in the states. Postdoc treadmill is another source of cheap labor for labs, without any stability and job prospects.
> there's not the budget for 1/3 of the population to do science
Then what should they do? There is no industrial demand. We could theoretically replace almost the entire service industry overnight with autonomous vehicles and online ordering.
Sounds like a record on repeat nowadays but labor is dying. It takes one person to feed a thousand, and if you average all the labors required to supply ones needs it comes out to less than a whole person by a lot. IE, the sum of plumbing, electrical, power production, road maintenance, car construction, furniture building, home building, medical, agricultural, etc production necessary per person is less than a whole person, and thus you have an excess of people who have no real value add labor to do.
Science is really the only thing you can propose in a labor vacuum - well, we don't need welders or farmers or auto mechanics or factory workers or people digging holes, so why not go figure out the next big thing? Too bad, one, not everyone can do that, and two, research has to be paid for by someone, and considering the gross wealth concentration in the US, its either philanthropy or the government paying for it. And as can be evidenced by real demand for science, nobody is.
We need new industries to come up. New industries which tend to hire lots of scientists come from big government spending initiatives. The ramp up in research during ww2, moon race, etc. Plenty of industries came from that.
We need to push into space further, attack cancer, deal with antibiotic resistance, dig into groundbreaking physics, etc. R and D is only 3% of US government budget.
The problem is managers aren't scientists, few companies care about pure research and long term benefits coming from it, and nobody is willing to spend effort and resources training inexperienced average graduates any more.
It is also, in many ways, too easy to get a STEM degree by learning how to be a good University student as opposed to learning your subject well.
The core problem is university needs to be something special and uncommon, not something necessary. Most jobs have little to do with the University training that comes with them and there's not the budget for 1/3 of the population to do science.