Educational Leadership - December/January 2015

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.