Introduction
From time to time in these pages, I’ve scoffed at the idea
that American students need to focus more on STEM. It’s time I tackled this
topic head-on.
The rhetoric
Perhaps I don’t even need to establish that there’s a huge
push in this country for more students to pursue STEM. I hear it constantly:
from my neighbors, from politicians, from fellow parents, from my employer, and
from the mass media. But just to substantiate the prevalence of this idea, here
are some glib quotes from our nation’s leaders:
- “One of the things that I’ve been focused on as President is how we create an all-hands-on-deck approach to science, technology, engineering, and math… We need to make this a priority.” –President Barack Obama
- “This bipartisan [Building Blocks of STEM] legislation will help ensure that our children are prepared with the education necessary to succeed in a 21st-century economy.” –Senator Jacky Rosen
- “There will be more incentives to electrical engineers than French literature majors. There just will … All the people in the world that want to study French literature can do so, they are just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayer.” –Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin
- “In order to be competitive internationally, we must focus on creating successful schools with an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” –Senator Mark Kirk
- “Our [higher education system] is outdated [and] doesn’t teach 21st century skills … The market for Greek philosophers is tight.” –Senator Marco Rubio
- “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education, then I’m going to take that money to create jobs … Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.” –Florida Governor Rick Scott
The flaw in this STEM-or-else idea is that it simply isn’t
substantiated historically. For most of its history, America has seen most of its
people gainfully employed, and only a minority have worked in tech. According
to this analysis by the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor
Statistics, in 1996 just under 10% of US employment was in high-tech industries. Twenty
years later, in 2016, the percentage of tech jobs was—guess what?—still about 10%.
The BLS’s projection for the tech sector’s percentage of jobs in 2026? Wait for
it … about 10%. Sure, there are spectacular instances of people making a
killing in this realm, but that’s not the same thing as a new status quo.
Meanwhile, plenty of people work in tech who don’t have STEM degrees. (More on
this later.)
So where are these politicians getting their information?
Probably from one another. Or maybe it’s their perception of what the voters
are thinking, and they’re simply pandering. Who knows. The only thing that’s
obvious to me is a serious lack of skepticism about STEM’s applicability to the
majority of our students.
The
earnings myth
A prevalent idea in my community is that unless our kids
study STEM and get the kickass tech jobs, they won’t be able to afford to live
here. True, real estate is famously expensive in the Bay Area, but I object to
this chicken-little thinking. For one thing, my neighbors aren’t all (or even
mostly) STEM types themselves, yet they do manage to afford their mortgages. And when
it comes to their kids, they seem to automatically accept the widespread belief
that STEM fields actually assure higher earnings. In fact they don’t.
I’m basing this bold statement on real data you can see for
yourself here. This website enables you to see earnings over time across a huge spectrum of
college majors. You don’t just see the median income, but how the income range
varies according to how well the worker is doing in his or her field.
At first glance, the graphs generated by this website do
support the idea that STEM fields pay better. Here’s how all the majors play
out over time:
Zoom in. You’ll see that Chemical Engineering clearly pays
better than any of the other majors; the lack of a college degree brings up the
rear in earnings; and the lowest-earning college degree (the grey line) is
Theology. When we use the handy-dandy filtering feature to look at just two
majors, we see an apparently similar story:
I picked Computer Science because it seems to be the darling
of STEM proponents, and I chose English because it’s what I studied in college. It’s plain to see that on average, the middle-of-the-road (50th percentile) Comp
Sci grad does earn more: $3.3 million over his or her career, vs. the roughly
$2.5 million an English grad would earn. But this comparison assumes that all
humans are equally good at everything, which is patently false. Ask yourself: are
you equally good at analyzing literature and programming a computer? Is your
appreciation of fine art equal to your math ability? It seems obvious that when
choosing a major, a person should factor in his or her interests and capabilities.
That’s where the graphs get very interesting. Let’s say
you’re a bookish type and consider yourself smarter than the average bear at appreciating
a work of literature. And let’s say you struggle just a bit with math. Should
you still pursue STEM? Well, let’s ask the
question this way: how much better would you have to be at English to break
even on this presumably less lucrative choice of major?
The answer would probably surprise the STEMsters. An English
lit major at the 70th percentile will make, on average, $3.1 million over his
or her career, which is more than the slightly-below-par Computer Science major;
at the 40th percentile, the Comp Sci major makes only $3 million. In other
words, if liberal arts are your thing, sticking with them will make you more
money than working your ass off trying to fake it in STEM.
Consider now that for the example above, I cherry-picked one
of the most lucrative STEM majors. Consider the spread when we compare English to Chemistry:
In this case, you only have to be slightly better than
average—55th percentile—in English to make more money than a somewhat substandard—40th
percentile—Chem major. (The former would make $2.61 million over his or her
career; the latter, $2.58 million.) Comparing English to Biology, the gap is
even smaller: you’d only have to be at 55th percentile for English to make more
than a 50th-percentile Bio major. To reiterate: the STEM fields are only more
lucrative to those who are particularly suited to them.
(I was turned on to this website by this slide deck, put together by the UC Santa Barbara Associate Vice Chancellor, who is also a
math professor, to promote liberal arts. This same data set is cited by The New York Times in this article, which declares it a myth that “for the big money, STEM always delivers.”)
Job security
Now, the STEM-pushers might naturally reply, “Great, fine,
those who manage to find work in non-STEM fields do okay. But all the modern
jobs are in tech! Do you want to work as a barista because your liberal arts
degree didn’t equip you for the modern workforce?”
The short answer is what I already showed: tech doesn’t actually
employ more of the workforce than it did twenty years ago, and that’s not
expected to change. The long answer, meanwhile, looks even worse for STEM. When
we compare the number of STEM jobs available to the number of students majoring
in STEM subjects, we discover a frightening gap. To put it bluntly, the
widespread promotion of STEM has already produced a glut of majors in those
subjects. Check out this article in The
New York Times, and particularly the graph at the top. It shows that there
were 169,000 Engineering degrees (undergrad & graduate) awarded in
2015-2016, while that field only expects 51,000 job openings for 2014 through 2024.
Life Sciences is even worse, with 183,000 degrees awarded and only 12,000 openings for those grads. Math isn’t
much better, with 7,000 jobs forecast and 33,000 degrees awarded.
With this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that studying
STEM doesn’t guarantee getting a STEM-related job. Far from it, in fact. “Unemployment
rates for STEM majors may be low,” the Times
article states, “but not all of those with undergraduate degrees end up in
their field of study — only 13 percent in life sciences and 17 percent in
physical sciences, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation survey.
Computer Science is the only STEM field where more than half of graduates are
employed in their field.”
According to an expert quoted in the Times article, STEM advocates are “often executives and lobbyists
for technology companies,” which makes sense. I can’t blame a tech company for
wanting to have more graduates to choose from, and for wanting the best and
brightest of our youth to be added to that pool. But this doesn’t mean America’s
tech companies have room for all these people, and they certainly feel no
responsibility to hire all of them. So who’s looking out for all the STEM grads
whose résumés end up in the recycling?
The biggest myth
I hope I’ve helped you realize that a) studying STEM doesn’t
necessarily lead to greater income, and 2) studying STEM doesn’t increase the
likelihood of finding a job. But those are the easier cases to make. I have a
more fundamental bone to pick: even if STEM were
more lucrative and reliable, that doesn’t mean we should push it on our kids.
To me, the greatest myth of all is an implicit one: that job security and
income are the most important factors in a person’s happiness.
I won’t deny that job stability and wealth are great things
to have. Frankly, I love money, and I’d be thrilled if I could relax a bit more
about my own job security. But I naturally bristle at the pressure our kids are
getting—from their peers, their parents, pundits, and the media—to pursue STEM
regardless of their natural inclinations. The FUD being sowed here really bothers me, when you consider how hard it already is
to be a teenager. I’m also irked by the idea that we parents know what’s best
for our youth, when most of us—raised in the “Me Generation” of the ‘70s, with
an abundance of laissez-faire parents—got to chart our own course, and most of
us are doing just fine.
I think the external pressure put on our kids is inherently
malignant. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do as they please? Parents are
saying, “Follow this path” instead of
“Find your own path,” and I take this as a vote of no-confidence.
“Be realistic,” the STEMist might say. “All this
follow-your-dream ideology just isn’t practical.” I beg to differ. How
practical is it to add extra stress to a teenager’s life by saying “You’d
better do X-Y-Z or you’ll never be able to afford to [live here] [buy a home]
[have a family] [pay off your loans] [be financially secure]”? Consider how
rampant mental health issues are across our society: according to this article, more than 44 million American adults (almost one in five) suffer from a
mental health condition. That’s a hell of a lot higher than our nation’s rate of
unemployment.
I read a fascinating but sobering book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage
Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine, a child psychologist in nearby Marin County. She describes
the often disastrous results of affluent parents pressuring their kids to achieve a
certain standard of worldly success:
As long as kids are not afforded the opportunity to craft a sense of self that feels authentic, a sense of self that truly comes from within, psychologists like myself will continue to see more and more youngsters at risk for profound feelings of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and emptiness.
The authentic self
Let’s examine what a truly authentic STEM kid might look
like. A generation ago, only oddball nerds dug computers. Consider my brother
Bryan, for example. He naturally gravitated toward programming and in junior
high spent countless hours in front of a teletype, which was a type of
primitive computer that didn’t even have a monitor: it was connected to a
printer and to a mainframe somewhere. Nobody knows what the hell he and his
rare ilk were actually doing with these machines. Baseline Junior High had
exactly two teletypes, and Bryan didn’t have to compete with very many others for access. (He did, however, have to talk his teachers into letting him cut typing class and study hall to get that precious computer time.) He was a dyed-in-the-wool computer geek, who loved the pure logic of
programming, and that was that.
And now we have politicians, corporate spokespeople, the
media, and parents saying everybody should
be diving into technology, engineering, and such. Sure, everybody uses computers and smartphones now, but does
that mean everyone should be designing, building, or programming them? Does the
idea (however exaggerated) that all the good jobs are in STEM fields suddenly
mean this is what actually ought to interest
your typical kid? Is everybody a tech-geek now, just because society has
decided we need more of them?
Allow me a playful analogy: what if the experts determined
that, as far as pets go, dogs had a brighter future than cats? What if we
decided that it just wasn’t practical, in the 21st century, to behave in a feline
fashion? Would anybody try to teach a housecat to tolerate a leash, to ride in
the car, to bark, and to wag its tail to show happiness? Of course this would
be decried as nonsense: nobody could ask a cat to change its very nature. But
how are humans any different?
And yet, there’s this widespread idea that everybody now ought
to be immersed in this specialized world of bits and bytes, vectors and
trajectories, atoms and angles. The profit motive seems to have warped
everybody’s sensibility here. Let’s face it: kids throughout time have had plenty
of math and science instruction in school … those subjects were never really
neglected. What’s changed is this idea, suddenly, that what schools have been
offering isn’t enough and we should
all have our knickers in a twist about it, with new programs, new legislation, and budget cuts for the liberal arts.
My community’s progressive and well-run school district
provides plenty of opportunities in STEM. A year or so ago, my older daughter
even signed up for a high school Computer Science course, and I was all for
it—because it was her idea. I even offered to help her mess around with our
family’s Arduino programmable microcontroller when the time came. However, a
couple weeks into the term my daughter decided that she just didn’t dig the class,
and ultimately dropped it. (She was sad about this, since she really liked the
teacher, but knew herself well enough to recognize a bad fit. Not that she’s
anti-STEM; she’s in college now, majoring in Psychological & Brain
Sciences.)
Looking at the wider realm of STEM—the non-T, non-E
part—certainly the realms of science and math are capacious enough to
accommodate a wide variety of interests. But the decline in Humanities majors deserves to be wondered about. How much of this can be chalked up to parental
influence around what our kids pursue, and why?
My own story
I couldn’t blame you for assuming
that my skepticism toward STEM is a case of sour grapes, or a defensive crouch
based on my own (supposedly) humble liberal arts education. But in fact, I’ve
worked in STEM for my whole career. (Though I didn’t set out to be an engineer, my
dormant technical ability was discovered when I took a programming aptitude test during recruitment by an Internet company.) I was able to learn Internet
routing, shell scripting, network troubleshooting, traffic shaping, access
control, and network design on the job, but my career growth has been largely based
on so-called “soft skills”—including the ability to communicate, write,
negotiate, and imagine others’ points of view—which all came from my liberal
education. As my work has evolved, what I learned in college has only become
more important. I am truly grateful I didn’t “play it safe” by studying
Computer Science, Engineering, or Math (like my dad, ahead of his time in
Humanities-bashing, exhorted me to).
What employers really want
So your next question might be,
isn’t my case kind of an anomaly? Not necessarily. Certain fields, like Chemical
Engineering, do require specific credentials. But high tech seems to prioritize the
ability to learn above having specific credentials, and employs a wide variety of
people. As described in this article, featured in the UCSB Vice Chancellor’s pro-liberal-arts presentation, Google appreciates many capabilities typically associated with a liberal
education:
In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others’ different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.
This Forbes article, also cited by the UCSB Vice Chancellor, declares that “That ‘useless’ liberal arts
education has become tech’s hottest ticket.” It goes on to say:
Software companies are discovering that liberal arts thinking makes them stronger… At disruptive juggernauts such as Facebook and Uber, the war for talent has moved to nontechnical jobs, particularly sales and marketing. The more that audacious coders dream of changing the world, the more they need to fill their companies with social alchemists who can connect with customers—and make progress seem pleasant.
Conclusion: what is to be done?
I hope that I’ve made a
compelling case here that the widespread effort to push more kids into STEM
is myopic at best. STEM doesn’t guarantee a higher income; doesn’t increase the
likelihood of gainful employment; and, moreover, doesn’t support our kids and
their need for a true sense of self. Ultimately, where a young person lands isn’t
a simple plug-and-play matter of what degree he or she earned. I truly believe
that when it comes to the next generation, all of us—the parents, the
politicians, and the pundits—would do well to just shut up and stand aside.
Let’s let our kids follow their own interests, trusting in themselves, in
higher education, and in the vast and varied job market.
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