The government is keen on undergraduates studying STEM, the whole STEM and nothing (much) but the STEM, but what do undergraduates think about?

Who knows? As Dawn Bennett and Elizabeth Knight (both Curtin U) with Kenton Bell (Uni Wollongong) point out, “the student perspective is often missing from discussions of employability.”

So they asked 2000 commencing STEM UGs, how long they expected to work in the preferred discipline after graduation.

“Some students shared specific, personally utilitarian career goals. Several students, for example, wrote of personal circumstances such as starting a family. Other students planned to pursue their initial career only until they achieved a specific career or financial goal; after this, they planned to reassess their options,” they report.

But some 40 per cent saw STEM as a working-life’s work, expecting to stay in their discipline of first-choice for 20 years or more.

Overall, the authors found; * some students “were negative about career prospects,” perhaps because they had learned from “dominant discourses” that career are unstable, and * students discipline choice “aligned with a desire to create social change through their work”

But overall, “given the often-negative public discourses, it is compelling that almost half the cohort intended to work within their discipline for their lifetime,” they conclude.