http://news.sciencemag.org/education/2014/06/data-check-u-s-producing-mo...
So when President Obama was Senator Obama and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress in 2007, they decided to replace plastic spoons with biodegradable spoons made from corn that melted in soup instead of caring about science.
despite the failure of Congress to approve most of the new programs and hefty federal investments recommended by high-profile panels and requested by the White House.
Well, what does that even mean? The president spent the first few years printing money to give away so how can Congress be blamed for what didn't happen? He doesn't need Congress. When the supposedly Republican-caused sequester happened the president kept hundreds of employees at the White House yet only two dozen at the National Science Foundation. NASA was also shut down as was the Panda Cam.
So if there was no funding for something, it can't be blamed on Congress. The president has made Executive Orders his middle name, if he did not fund something while he was funding $72 billion on solar panel companies and Cash For Clunkers, that can't be because of Congress.
National Academies warned Congress that retaining U.S. global competitiveness would require more and better STEM teachers. Its report, called Rising Above the Gathering Storm (RAGS), resulted in a 2007 law that promised to augment STEM teacher training (as well as double research funding in the physical sciences). Congress didn’t keep its promise, however.
That’s a sore point for those who argue that the nation is actually producing too many graduates in many STEM fields, which keeps wages low and creates underemployment.
Leaving aside those points, however,
Well, no, we can't leave aside that point, it is the only point. The number one advocate for increasing STEM graduates is the National Science Foundation, which exists to fund science according to government policy. When they are advocating STEM jobs, they are engaging in framing that says the only real science is government science - that corporations don't do real work and that academics have freedom. Academics spend an alarming amount of time working on raising money - they are salespeople for the research. Meanwhile, there are so many graduates competing for post-doc positions that labs can not only advertise for free positions - which we object to for undergraduates working at Gawker - and even make PhDs pay to work in a lab.
There are 6X as many PhDs each year as there are jobs in academia so
Mervis seems surprised that STEM graduates went up without throwing even more money at a problem we don't have - because the numbers showed we had already spent billions. We didn't need more, we simply had a president who seemed to want to buy friends so he offered to fund everything.
For an article that has Data Check as the first two words in the title, it seems odd not to actually look deeper into the data than the summaries of government claims.
