A new study says North Carolina’s major metropolitan areas are lagging in rankings for STEM professionals.

Despite Charlotte’s designation by CompTIA as the #1 town for IT professionals in the latter half of 2018, the Queen City is ranked as only the 42nd-best city for the entire STEM field in an aggregated ranking that tracked 17 important indicators by WalletHub released this week.

Raleigh, which was listed in the number two spot behind Charlotte in the CompTIA rankings, ranked as the 20th overall city for STEM professionals.  Based on the data, Raleigh ranked in the second spot for the highest level of STEM employment growth and as the city with the fifth-highest percentage of the active labor force working in STEM careers.

“Local authorities have limited ability to influence their local STEM/CTE labor market,” said Martin Storksdieck, the director of the center for research on lifelong STEM learning and professor in the college of education and school of public policy at Oregon State University, “and have limited ability to increase supply of highly qualified STEM/CTE graduates.”

Greensboro and Winston-Salem were ranked among the top 100 cities as well, with Greensboro ranked 68th and Winston-Salem ranked 82nd despite having the third-best ranking for affordable housing among the entire dataset.

Seattle, Boston, Pittsburgh, Austin and San Francisco topped the list.

What’s happening with the STEM workforce?

“The US is neither creating, attracting nor retaining middle-skilled STEM professionals in any competitive fashion,” said Storksdieck, adding that because the United States is weakening its visa system to allow highly skilled foreign STEM workers to pursue careers in the United States “this may, on the margin, make the U.S. less competitive.”

The U.S. Department of Education released a dataset, “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Graduates: Where Are They 4 Years After Receiving a Bachelor’s Degree” compiled from a cohort of 2007 and 2008 graduates that earned their bachelor’s degree. Released in December 2017, the dataset found that engineering and computer science majors were the most likely of any STEM or non-STEM field of study, with more than 76 percent of degree-earners participating in the workforce.  For non-STEM majors, approximately 73 percent of those who elected to pursue studies in healthcare or in business participating in the workforce.

The study found that nearly 61 percent of all STEM graduates were working in a professional capacity closely related to their major, and more than 33 percent were working in a role somewhat related to their course of study, compared to just 34 percent of students who chose to pursue non-STEM related fields that reported working in a professional job closely related to their major.  Forty-one percent of non-STEM majors reported that they were working in a professional capacity that was somewhat related to their major, and nearly 25 percent of non-STEM majors reported working in jobs that were not at all related to their studies.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is projecting that jobs in STEM fields will expand twice as fast than jobs in non-STEM fields, with more than 9 million job openings by 2022.

It’s a competitive market for those with STEM degrees, even in fields that aren’t directly related to a graduate’s degree, said Leonard Annetta, the Taft Distinguished Professor of Science Education at East Carolina University.  “STEM graduates are likely attractive in other fields because these students were trained to think laterally, be creative, and meet difficult challenges head on,” he said.

Ranking methodology: professional opportunities, STEM-friendliness, and quality of life

The study tracked 17 relevant datapoints across three categories, the professional opportunities for STEM-degree earners in each city and metropolitan statistical area; the region’s friendliness to STEM including the performance and quality of engineering programs, research and development companies, and tech meetups; and the region’s overall quality of life, including affordable housing, recreation, and quality of life for both family and singles.

Then, based on the rankings in each metric and each category, a weighted average was taken to calculate a region’s overall score which allowed the study authors to rank-order the sample.

The Durham-Chapel Hill MSA was not included in the rankings of the top 100 cities.

Editor’s note: This story has been revised to note that the study did not include a review of college engineering programs didn’t include a report by US News & World Report which ranked N.C. State’s engineering college as 24th in the nation for graduate students.