The STEM Pipeline Will Only Grow Smaller.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Editor's Notes

It has been nearly 20 years since the STEM acronym entered the public consciousness.

Science, technology, engineering and math. The alarm was sounded: the nation was not doing a good enough job producing the expertise needed to fill jobs in these fields.

For the defense industry, which needs a steady stream of young experts to replace the baby boomers, the problem remains particularly acute since it has the added burden of requiring security clearances.

The defense industry stepped up and has donated large sums of money--and something even more valuable: executives' time--to the cause.

There are rocketry challenges, robot competitions, hackathons, space camps and other programs hoping to inspire students to take on these professions. School districts created magnet programs. Daycares, attempting to lure in well-heeled parents, set up STEM education for their pre-schoolers.

Congress regularly passed legislation to tackle the problem. There are currently 163 federally funded STEM programs created by legislation, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Education is a data-driven field and there is little evidence to indicate that any of these initiatives are working. Of those 163 federal programs mentioned, GAO said in a March report that virtually none of them have been studied to see if they are effective.

So, are these programs widening the pipeline of young people going into STEM-related fields? That was a question at a recent STEM conference sponsored by the Air Force Association's D.W. Steele Chapter, where I moderated two panels.

David Clary, a senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, and one of the panelists, said he has at present more than 100 aerospace engineering positions he needs to fill, and can't. This is only anecdotal evidence that more needs to be done, but a surprising number nonetheless.

The nation has always had--and will always have--a certain number of students who have the natural talent and the passion to enter these fields. The problem is that it needs more of them.

And from the looks of the current political climate--namely the anti-immigration policies being propagated by the current administration--the pipeline will only become smaller.

Immigrants have long been the lifeblood of these vitally important fields. There are many examples. Start with the refugee Albert Einstein and work forward to Wernher von Braun and his crew of German rocket scientists. Robert Oppenheimer's father came to America with no...