STEM Graduate Surplus, Infighting Amongst Engineers

So I posted the Atlantic article on Reddit in an engineering sub, and the backlash was palpable. One /u/ in particular went after the data, pointing out that the "53.7% of engineering grads that found a job in the first 12 months after graduation" was from 2009, and "of course things were bad in 2009!"

My response was "I'm not sure what would have occurred economically since 2009 to provide a STEM labor market correction? Unemployment nationwide has only ticked down a bit, it seems logical that other economic indicators would also have remained relatively underwhelming."

In response, this graph was pointed out to me, from a Bay Area Economic Council report published in December 2012.

Given a cursory glance, yes, STEM jobs are doing better than "Total Occupations" in that total unemployment since 2000 is up 10% or so (important note: this is since 2000, not year over year percentage changes). And yes, since 2009 there has been an uptick of STEM hiring and it is more pronounced than the Total Occupations category. And so I was about to concede the point until I actually read the report.
And lo and behold, Figure 8:

They conveniently broke down the Stem Occupations category into sub categories. And wouldn't you know it: engineers are in the shitter. Not only are engineers net negative jobs since 2000, we are actually doing worse than the population at large.


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