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The Opportunity Costs of STEM Degrees and the Unmet Needs of the Low-Skilled: Two labour market problems explained. CEPS Policy Brief No. 295, 26 June 2013

Maselli, Ilaria and Beblavý, Miroslav (2013) The Opportunity Costs of STEM Degrees and the Unmet Needs of the Low-Skilled: Two labour market problems explained. CEPS Policy Brief No. 295, 26 June 2013. [Policy Paper]

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    Abstract

    There is general consensus that to achieve employment growth, especially for vulnerable groups, it is not sufficient to simply kick-start economic growth: skills among both the high- and low-skilled population need to be improved. In particular, we argue that if the lack of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a true problem, it needs to be tackled via incentives and not simply via public campaigns: students are not enrolling in ‘hard-science’ subjects because the opportunity cost is very high. As far as the low-skilled population is concerned, we encourage EU and national policy-makers to invest in a more comprehensive view of this phenomenon. The ‘low-skilled’ label can hide a number of different scenarios: labour market detachment, migration, and obsolete skills that are the result of macroeconomic structural changes. For this reason lifelong learning is necessary to keep up with new technology and to shield workers from the risk of skills obsolescence and detachment from the labour market.

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    Item Type: Policy Paper
    Subjects for non-EU documents: EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > education policy/vocational training
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > employment/labour market > employment/unemployment
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > employment/labour market > labour/labor
    Subjects for EU documents: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Series and Periodicals: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Annual Reports: UNSPECIFIED
    Series: Series > Centre for European Policy Studies (Brussels) > CEPS Policy Briefs
    Depositing User: Phil Wilkin
    Official EU Document: No
    Language: English
    Date Deposited: 23 Jul 2013 15:37
    Number of Pages: 8
    Last Modified: 23 Jul 2013 15:37
    URI: http://aei.pitt.edu/id/eprint/42911

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