Recent data from the National Center
for Education Statistics (2013) and
the National Survey of Student
Engagement (2013) show that attrition
rates for college students majoring in
STEM subjects are not nearly as high
as claimed. Further, the number of students declaring STEM-related majors
has been steadily rising for years
(National Science Foundation, 2014);
many universities are now saying that
they’re having difficulty handling the
“tsunami” of students wanting to study
popular subjects like computer science
(Lazowska, Roberts, & Kurose, 2014).
It’s debatable whether most of those
future STEM graduates will find a job
in their chosen field of study, however.
The Economic Policy Institute indicates that only about 50 percent
of STEM graduates are hired into
a STEM job (Salzman, Kuehn, &
Lowell, 2013), and 350,000 new STEM
graduates are competing for about
275,000 new STEM job openings
each year (Charette, 2013). Even for
students with engineering and computer science degrees, hiring into the
same broad field as their degree rarely
reaches 70 percent.
Moving Away from
STEM Nonsense
Claims of massive STEM worker
shortages are nothing new, of course.
Harvard’s Michael Teitelbaum (2014)
documents five science and engineering talent “alarm–boom–bust”
cycles that the United States has gone
through since the end of World War
II. Each alarm was sparked by fear
that the nation was falling behind a
military or economic competitor and
lacked the skilled citizenry to compete
successfully. And each time, the cries
of crisis turned out to be highly embellished or outright deceitful.
As an unfortunate side effect, each
false alarm, including the one we are
now experiencing, creates an illusory
demand for scientists and engineers.
When the boom turns into a bust, it
ends up discouraging future students
from pursing those careers. The dra-
matic growth in university students
chasing computer science degrees
during the 1990s dot-com boom—and
the equally spectacular drop-off after
the bubble burst in the early 2000s—
is but one recent example (National
Science Foundation, 2012).
We don’t need to raise an army of
STEM saviors to protect the American
way of life from destruction. We
would be much better served by
less hyperventilating about STEM
worker shortages and more focus on
improving overall STEM literacy—by
a commitment to ensuring that all
students have a basic mastery of STEM
subjects blended with the arts and
humanities.
We live in an increasingly complex,
interconnected, technological world.
Successfully navigating this world,
not only today but into the future,
requires understanding the basic
science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics that underpin it. Without
that knowledge, to paraphrase futurist
Arthur C. Clarke (2000), the products
of science and engineering start
to become indistinguishable from
“magic” (p. 2), creating unwarranted
illusions about what these products
can accomplish.
But just as important as a basic
knowledge of STEM is a broad
knowledge of the arts and humanities.
These fields, along with a foundation of STEM disciplines, enable
us to reason thoughtfully about the
risks, opportunities, problems, and
dilemmas that the products of science,
engineering, and technology impose
on society.
For instance, digital technology
allows for widespread sharing and
communication of information, yet
at the risk of the erasure of personal
privacy. Genetic advances promise
early detection of disease, but also
raise the temptation to pursue
eugenics. Robotics can increase
business productivity, but at the cost
of great worker unemployment. How
does one properly balance the rewards
against the risks that new technology
creates without intimately knowing
both the demands of the technology
and the aspirations of humankind?
Without some blended mastery of
STEM with arts and humanities, students will find themselves increasingly
“in over their heads” (Kegan, 1998)
and poorly equipped to deal with the
mental and ethical demands of the
21st century.
Various instructional and curriculum options exist for integrating
STEM with the arts and humanities.
The ideal would be required courses
beginning in middle school and going
into high school that specifically integrate the science, math, history, and
English knowledge currently being
taught separately within a particular
grade.
Technology challenges us to
assert our human values,
which means that first of all, we
have to figure out what they are.
—Sherry Turkle
From PBS’s Frontline, September 2009
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