Turkey lags behind in STEM policies

The executive board chairman of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD), Erol Bilecik, has drawn attention to slackness in Turkey's STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) system. "We expect that in 2013, employment will reach up to 34 million and 3.5 million of this will be STEM employments. There is a gap in this because intelligent engineers often do not pursue their professions. We must solve this," he said. 

The summer vacation is long and together with the long-lasting festive holidays, "slackness" is a word that is not too foreign to us. Of course, we can also talk about the life-threatening "earthquake slackness" and "flood slackness." Bilecik, with whom we recently had a conversation, draws attention to the "STEM slackness." In our meeting, Bilecik had a report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers in collaboration with TÜSİAD entitled "The necessity of STEM in Turkey toward 2023."

"Between the 2016-2023 period, the necessity of STEM employment will reach around 1 million. But we can foresee that with the prediction of the number of graduates, it will not compensate for 31 percent of this need," said Bilecik.

Currently, there are around 2.5 million STEM graduates. "It looks like we will compensate for the 700,000 people but what will happen to the other 300,000 is unknown," Bilecik said. 

Bilecik emphasized STEM's five primary subjects as the following:

-  The steps that will be taken in developing STEM education and STEM labor must be on a national policy level. 

- STEM education must start before preschool education. (I also want to add to this that let alone STEM education we are far from even reaching the "100 percent goal" in preschool education that we once talked about.)