 You know, I used to be a big advocate for technical disciplines, but I've gotten grumpier about the distinction over the years. You might say I've gone from stem to stern. Around the beginning of this year, several large tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tesla, and Twitter, announced massive layoffs of staff, each cutting double-digit percentages of their workforce in short order. Other Silicon Valley firms, big and small, have followed suit since that initial volley, dismissing hundreds of thousands of people to date, with the latest cuts announced just a few days ago. It's a surprising development, perhaps most surprising to the analysts, coders, and engineers – myself included – who found themselves out of a job on short notice, in a job market flooded with a mass exodus of other technical experts. The scale and scope of these layoffs has also prompted anxiety among those who find the whole situation confusing. All sorts of things could be blamed for the sudden disappearance of a quarter of a million tech jobs in 2023, but the rolling announcements of new layoffs have been especially troubling for anyone who works in this field, many of whom believe these jobs were safe. One of the reasons I went into engineering in the first place was its purported stability. It takes a lot of time and effort to learn enough about a technology to be able to create, modify, or improve it, and it's generally considered a bad move for a company to dump all those resources into training a new engineer, then tell them to clean out their desk. That's how mechanical engineering was sold to me anyways, but it's not a very convincing story right this second. The mass layoffs are especially confusing in the context of a related story, that the US has an untenable shortage of competent high-tech workers. STEM, or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, is a term that has been cited in educational policy since the 90s, reaching national prominence with Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The Obama administration raised the alarm that the United States was falling behind in these areas, promising to hire an additional 100,000 STEM teachers and push universities to graduate a million new STEM students in the following decade. Science communication celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson have echoed this sentiment, advocating for increased investment in STEM education and after-school programs, encouraging kids to learn skills like robotics or coding to shore up our dwindling national reserves of technical expertise. Despite the apparent consensus that the US is in some sort of STEM crisis and needs some drastic intervention, there's a fair amount of disagreement about which jobs should be labeled STEM. The Department of Commerce published a report in 2010 that there were 7.6 million such positions in the US, while the National Science Foundation claimed a number closer to 12.4 million, asserting that the figure ought to include psychologists and social scientists. Others argue that the technology part of STEM should also encompass trade experts like auto mechanics and plumbers. The disagreements about who's a STEM and who's not might seem pedantic, but if we're contending with a critical shortage of talent, it makes sense to identify specifically which fields are struggling to find qualified candidates, if only to make judicious use of our million fresh graduates. Unfortunately, even those employers that are unambiguously hiring in STEM fields don't seem to be as desperate for those newly-degree workers as you might guess from old HUBBUB. Anyone who works in research or mathematics can likely give you an earful about how cutthroat, underpaid, scarce, and increasingly precarious those positions are, and judging by the tech sector layoffs, the other subcategories of STEM aren't faring any better. According to a 2013 study by Hal Statzman, quote, the nation graduates more than two times as many STEM students each year as find jobs in STEM fields. For the 180,000 or so openings annually, U.S. colleges and universities supply 500,000 graduates. That's surprising, and it leaves us with a couple puzzles to solve. First, if there are twice as many STEM graduates as there are jobs waiting for them on the other side, why is there still such a concerted effort to push kids into STEM fields? Even through the prolific layoffs, the U.S. Department of Education website maintains a landing page dedicated to STEM outreach, very helpfully titled Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, including Computer Science. That last bit suggests a second puzzle. There are some occupations that are inarguably STEM jobs, but there have also been numerous attempts to define, redefine, or revise the category since it was first coined. It's weird that so many resources and so much concern has been expended over a seemingly amorphous moving target. If Computer Science has to be called out explicitly by the Department of Education just so no one's confused, it seems worth asking, why do we decide to split education into STEM and everything else in the first place? Let's put a pin in those questions for now. To help answer them, we're going to take the step back and ask a bigger picture question. What is an education for? Most people agree that formal systems of education are a benefit for both the students and for society at large, but there are wildly different ideas about what the main benefit is or should be. There are economic arguments that a well-educated populace is more productive and efficient, that a workforce with some sort of training, whether that's just reading, writing, and arithmetic or chemical engineering, is better at developing, producing, and distributing goods and services. There are political arguments that in a democratic society, it's essential for voters to have a detailed understanding of the world and how it works. That being able to vote for representatives who promise to achieve your political goals is meaningless if you don't have the education to demand sensible policies and evaluate their success in implementing them. There are humanitarian arguments that people who are educated are better equipped to appreciate and direct their lives in a way that will result in greater satisfaction and flourishing. The production of knowledge, development of curiosity, inculcating a culture's core values, all these different visions for what the ultimate goals of education ought to be prescribe different, often incompatible, strategies to achieve them. And the battle for control over the form education ultimately takes can be vicious. Advocates for the economic approach have the advantage of simple goals that are easily articulated and quantified. We educate people so they can make more money, both for themselves and others. According to this view, education that doesn't result in higher economic productivity is essentially just a form of recreation, otherwise without merit. There are more or less extreme versions of this idea. Some people think that saddling kids with crushing debt in exchange for a degree in a field that doesn't pay well is justly deserved karma. While others go so far as to say that teaching Shakespeare or history in public schools is a waste of time when we could be fast-tracking proficient students in physics or chemistry instead. If we apply this lens, the weirdly vague and sometimes contradictory categorization of STEM starts to make some more sense. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, including computer science, are fields that often pay dividends for industry. Scientists discover new ways to unleash the power of the natural world. Technologists and engineers figure out how to harness that power to make products. Mathematicians discover analytical tools to facilitate that whole process. And efficiencies and computation that make YouTube span with costs less. The thing that really unites this seemingly arbitrary subdivision of fields isn't that they require intense specialized study or mathematics. Psychology certainly qualifies on both counts, as do many decidedly non-STEM fields. It's that they all facilitate an economically oriented agenda. They allow their employers to make more with less. This would explain why STEM doesn't usually include stuff like literary studies or history, but also why there's some disagreement about whether fields like psychology, which is certainly a science, should be included in the S, especially if it might take up resources intended for the STEM-ier STEM fields like electrical engineering. The real question that's being asked isn't is psychology science, but is psychology especially useful for making money? If a person believes that the only valuable output of education is better economic returns, STEM is a useful tool to exclude many disciplines that only have value in ways that are hard to translate into dollars. Studying history can certainly, and rich, our understanding of the world, but it doesn't usually make anyone rich. It's hard not to hear echoes of this attitude when you read the original Obama policy proposals for STEM outreach. The United States is falling behind internationally, ranking 25th in mathematics and 17th in science among industrialized nations. In our competitive global economy, this situation is unacceptable. This economically focused approach also suggests a potential rationale for why there's been a national push to get more kids into STEM, despite an already oversaturated market for jobs that require those degrees. Michael Tidalbaum, science policy fellow at Harvard University, notes that most of the claims of such broad-based shortages in the U.S. STEM workforce come from employers of STEM personnel and from their lobbyists and trade associations. That might seem confusing at first. Surely these organizations would be in the best position to see the overabundance of STEM workers for too few opportunities. Shunting more kids into STEM fields won't somehow create a bunch of new research positions or engineering jobs, but adding a million more fresh-faced grads to those fields will substantially increase competition for the remaining spots, allowing employers to demand even higher standards for performance while maintaining or even decreasing what they have to pay in return for that expertise. If education is about increasing return on investment, pushing kids who would have otherwise gone into music or French literature to fight tooth and nail for a spot in a more lucrative field instead, well, it's a great way for those companies to make more with less. The folks who push for a primarily economic educational agenda also benefit from STEM advocacy in a different way. Non-STEM fields like philosophy, history, and literature aren't just underwhelming with respect to financial returns. They train students to interrogate background assumptions and their own social, political, historical, and cultural context. By encouraging kids to leave those fields and pursue STEM instead, we're also inadvertently starving other disciplines that might offer some critical resistance to more economy-focused agendas. According to the National Science Foundation, the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded annually in the US has more than doubled over the past 35 years, while other fields have seen fewer and fewer applicants for advanced degrees. It's getting harder to find anyone willing to accept the growing risk implicit in pursuing a discipline that won't pull down a big STEM paycheck. And as a result, we're slowly losing the expertise necessary to mount effective critiques at the idea that a big paycheck should be the yardstick for all academic efforts. Now, this certainly isn't the only possible answer to our questions. There are other reasons STEM education might be prioritized despite the seeming lack of applicable positions or why the category is so hard to nail down. But it is one possible answer. And it meshes fairly well with the observation that some folks think education should be primarily about converting bright and curious kids into productive employees. That so long as you can teach a 12-year-old how to code, teaching them art, music, literature, and so on is just cluttering an otherwise productive brain with useless trivia. But this is a show dedicated, at least in part, to the notion that learning new stuff isn't just instrumentally useful for achieving some other productive goal. It's rewarding for its own sake that life is richer when we have more and different ideas to draw from. Different lenses we can use to examine and interpret our experience. I've benefited immensely from my very practical STEM education, but the seeds of thunk weren't sown in my differential equations classes. They came from those courses that many would roll their eyes at. All the stuff intended to make me a well-rounded student. With the spare time I've been granted since being laid off, I'm grateful every day that my education afforded me the knowledge and skills I've needed to find something valuable and meaningful to do with that time. And I pity any of my several hundred thousand colleagues who may have bought the hype that STEM classes were the only ones worth serious attention. Also, I've put like a hundred hours in the Balder Skate. Is the purported STEM shortage just a cynical ploy to divide and conquer education? Are you looking for a mechanical engineer with a decade of R&D experience? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to follow us, subscribe, and share, and don't stop thunk.