The STEM Bait and Switch

Schools bet big on STEM education during the tech boom. Was it worth it?

On Friday, Google was the latest tech giant to announce a stinging round of layoffs, cutting 12,000 employees, roughly 6% of its workforce. Employees were notified via email that they were getting cut. These come amidst a greater round of layoffs in the tech sector. Spotify announced a 6% reduction in its own workforce (if 6 is anybody’s lucky number, sincerely sorry about that). These companies join the growing list of tech and media conglomerates who are ringing in the New Year by laying off thousands of employees. With many of these jobs in the knowledge and software-as-a-service industry, it’s prudent to ask the question: is the era of big STEM over?

STEM education (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has long been seen as the most sustainable path to post-college success. In the past three decades, employment in STEM has grown over 79 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in 2015-16, 18% of all bachelors degrees awarded were in some sort of STEM field. It’s long been assumed that getting a humanities degree is a waste of time and money, whereas getting a STEM degree, specifically those that will lead to employment in engineering and computer science, has been seen as the path to middle and upper class prosperity. You can find thinkpiece after thinkpiece espousing the uselessness of humanities degrees while extolling the value of a STEM education.Underwater basket weaving has long been a favorite catchall phrase on the right to ridicule any college degree that doesn’t have an obvious pathway to making boatloads of money right out of college.Gender studies is another favorite degree program to bash, most recently when Joe Biden announced he would be forgiving up to $20,000 in student debt for most borrowers. All of this can be summed up in one phrase that I’ve heard time and time again:Learn to Code.

The explosion of big tech jobs and universities’ heavy investment in STEM programs have led to a boom of early childhood education programs focused in programming and engineering. 2010s fourth wave feminism focused a good amount of energy on growing the amount of women, particularly women of color, in STEM fields. The Obama administration called for a $4 billion investment in K-12 computer science programs in 2016, part of a broader push to emphasize job training in primary education. Nonprofit Code.org launched Hour of Code, a public campaign encouraging schools to introduce coding to young kids through various activities. The rationale was simple: in a post-industrial America that had a growing knowledge economy, more and more jobs relied on computational skills to complete everyday tasks. If we were to compete in the 21st-century with growing global powers like China, it only made sense that we needed to start early. None of these goals are misguided or wrong on their own. Addressing racial and gender equity gaps in the workforce is undeniably a good thing, and training students to be prepared for the workforce, whether or not they go to college, makes tons of sense.

There’s just one problem: what if it’s not every kid’s dream to be a code monkey?

I was in late middle school, early high school when the coding-for-kiddos boom started to take off in the mid 2010s. Schools in my district introduced more math and science heavy curriculums and participated in stuff like the aforementioned Hour of Code. The message was clear: the future is STEM. I remember friends participating in all sorts of smart extracurriculars like research symposiums sponsored by Intel and coding bootcamps designed to prepare them for four year computer science degrees. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things inherently, but for me and my peers who excelled in the humanities, it felt a little like being left behind.

When it came time to start touring colleges and make decisions for what my career would be, I picked computer science. I was good with computers and had taken a few online courses on rudimentary Python and Java. I could set up a Minecraft server, so naturally I figured I’d do well in CompSci. Never mind the fact that I was bad at math and science and that I really wanted to be a journalist. I resigned myself to the fact that I had to make money somehow, and that I’d get a minor or something to satiate my love of writing and reading. It didn’t work out; I washed out of my college’s engineering program after one semester and ended up getting a degree in sociology with a minor in communications. The number one thing that people asked me about my humanities degree was “What do you want to do with it?”. After I graduated and looked for jobs, one family member told me that there were no sociology jobs and I had wasted my time in college. Not great! While I ended up gainfully employed, the average starting salary for someone with my degree was in the $43,000 range. By comparison, the average starting salary for someone with a STEM degree starts around $57,000.

However, those starting numbers aren’t evenly distributed throughout the entire STEM field. Looking at the highest and lowest paying college majors, it’s clear that most of the money is focused in the Engineering and Technology areas. Majors like petroleum, computer and nuclear engineering can net you upwards of $70,000 right out of college, while majors like nutrition sciences, biology, and geosciences won’t net you above $40k a year in many cases. On the surface, this might make sense. Fields like pure science and mathematics are much more focused on academia, and may require graduate or postgraduate degrees before they start paying the big bucks. But for those who don’t want to go to grad school, the job prospects are about as good as mine are, which is to say they’re bad. If STEM is supposed to be the only thing worth getting into college debt for, why are three out of four of the letters getting the shaft?

My theory? STEM education is just another component of the tech bubble that’s bursting right now. In the previous decade, tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta borrowed loads of virtually interest free money from banks and venture capital funds who were more than happy to fund tech’s pet projects. The companies could afford to grow at unprecedented rates, buying up their competitors along the way for ludicrously overvalued sums. They could also afford to go on hiring sprees, offering college graduates competitive salaries complete with perks like generous remote work policies, complimentary matcha lattes and mental wellness seminars. The pandemic only made things worse; the easy money policies got even easier and both consumers and businesses relied on tech for their basic needs during lockdowns. It didn’t matter that many of these companies either operated at losses for quarters at a time or never actually turned a profit at all. It seemed like there was no ceiling. As long as the Fed never raised interest rates and everyone continued to stay home, everything would be hunky dory.

STEM education programs played a unsung role in big tech’s growth. Companies like Meta invested in K-12 computer science programs not because they wanted to develop young scientific minds, but because they wanted to develop the next generation of Meta employees. Amazon sponsored engineering and coding bootcamps and put laptops in inner-city school districts, and Google has partnered with school districts around the country to make sure their poorest students have internet access. By playing the role of educators and public service providers, the biggest companies in the world have enshrined themselves in the hearts and minds of young people as scions of opporitunity and pathways to prosperity. The goal of tech companies investment in education programs, primary and secondary, is to create workers and plant the seeds of STEM careers as lucrative pursuits early and often. The investment doesn’t always need to come from outside sources either. Ever aware of changing market needs, college administrators will institute “academic prioritization”, where funding will shift from programs deemed unncessary to those most in demand. As Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt writes in Inside Higher Ed, academic prioritization comes at a high cost:

“Such euphemisms usually mean departments that serve the public good, such as the humanities, social sciences and even some sciences like math and physics, are going to be sacrificed for a robust expansion of other job-oriented programs such as health sciences, business administration, sports management and various pre-professional and polytechnic programs that serve the market-driven, neoliberal interests and profit-driven model of education.”

This shifting can be a death sentence for humanities programs that provide invaluable knowledge and soft skills, but no immediately visible return on investment. During the pandemic, schools facing low enrollment put humanities programs on the chopping block before anything else. Henry Giroux writes that with this mindset, “the dystopian mission of public and higher education is to produce robots, technocrats, and compliant workers.”

The idea that college should give you the necessary skills to succeed in the working world isn’t new and it’s not illogical. College tuiton is incredibly expensive, and more than 40 million Americans, including yours truly, are in debt from student loans. In the minds of parents and prospective college students, a degree in the humanities simply doesn’t seem worth the cost. I can’t tell you how many of my STEM peers, upon hearing that I’d be switching to liberal arts, told me, “I wish I could afford to do that, but I have to be able to pay off my student loans”. College is now a way to climb income brackets, but it shouldn’t have to be that way. We should pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Conservatives love to claim that in commmunist economies, you don’t get a choice of what career you have. Your lot in life is decided by the whims of the government, which assigns you a job based on the needs of the collective. But isn’t that the job market we’ve built? When your career prospects are determined by the needs of the free market, doesn’t that take away your agency, too? It shouldn’t even matter that a liberal arts education can actually have a great return on investment and lead to stable, even profitable careers. We should pursue education because it is meaningful, because it provides perspectives different from our own, because it connects people.

Will the bubble burst we’re seeing now create a radical shift in the kind of education that gets funded? That remains to be seen. Probably not; Google isn’t going bankrupt anytime soon. Still, the money is drying up. The Fed did the one thing it wasn’t supposed to, raise interest rates. The belts will tighten, the fat will be trimmed. By the end of these tech layoffs, thousands will be unemployed, though hopefully they won’t have too hard a time finding a new job in their field. With all of this in mind, it’s time to look again at the STEM vs. humanities debate and remember that no matter what degree we got, we all have one thing in common: we mean nothing to the companies we put ourselves in debt to work for.

If you made it to the end of this screed, congrats! Here’s what’s good this week.

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