Should We End STEM Degrees?

Okay, so the headline reads as bait, but I am serious about the question.

Story time.

I came to my computer work in rather roundabout way. I was going to be Perry Mason before my undergraduate school made me take a couple of engineering classes. I fell in love — there is little more fun in the world than problem solving. I settled into an EE degree path but taught myself some programming and I solved a couple of things via programming for the job I had at the time, which lead to an internship, which led to a job even before I had my degree.

I am, then, in large part self-taught when it comes to the programming aspect of my job. I learned the basics essentially by myself (though, to be fair, I did take a FORTRAN class as part of the EE requirement. Yes, I am old. Fsck off my lawn) and most of my real learning took place on the job. I have never had difficulty finding a job, though I have tended to come back to the same firm since it’s such a good place to work. I have risen up the ranks, am now a Director of Something or Other (pro tip: never let employees set their own titles) and me and my team are responsible for significant portions of the firm’s profitable business — the kind of things that they advertise about. I eventually did finish my undergrad so I could go onto graduate school, but I did not get a technical degree. My degree is, deep breath, a Bachelor of Sciences in Interdisciplinary Studies with Concentrations in Political Science and Computer Science. (I was one class away form a math minor, but no one told me that until I was ready to graduate.). My point, and I do have one, is that we may be over emphasizing tech in degrees to a harmful extent.

Now, let me hasten to add that the self-taught route has gaps. My poor grasp of algorithmic theory made things harder on me in my work, and I wish I had been exposed to recursion sooner, to name just two. And I would love to go and get a PhD in something along the lines of tech ethics or machine learning domains (not going to happen, unfortunately. My life would not allow me to go off and study as much as I would like to. Too many people depending on me, even assuming I could get into a program) But the minor in my main degree helped fill that gap. And since the skills that have been most valuable to me have been a combination of technical and non-technical skill, I really wonder if we focus too much on the technical skills.

This is not a brief for Humanities Will Save Us. That is a moronic position. Humanities — languages, philosophy, etc. — have always been used for evil and always will. The Dunning School of Civil War history helped entrench racism and Jim Crow in this country. And Matt “It’s Okay For Brown People to Die in Industrial Accidents” Yglesias and Peter “Democracy is Bad” Thiel both have philosophy degrees. Reading Jane Austin won’t save us from bad people. And this country could use a lot more technical understanding — people wouldn’t be attacking radar stations for controlling the weather for one thing, and a better understanding of what imitative AI is doing would help all of us, I think.

What I have in mind, then, is modeling technical degrees on my bachelor’s degree. Have computer science be a concentration and tie it to a humanities style concentration. I do believe, then, that we would get more well-rounded people, better able to apply reasoning and judgement to real problems. Humanities will not save us without a deep understanding of the scientific world that shapes our reality, and STEM cannot save us without a deep understanding of the humans, societies, and politics it moves amongst. By splitting the focus, modern colleges, I think, do a disservice to their students and the societies they are supposed to serve. STEM majors get only a smattering of humanities classes and humanities majors don’t get even a smattering of science education.

Now, this is obviously not a plan in any meaningful sense. I do not know how to reorient existing college degrees toward this outcome. And I fully admit that some degrees — fine arts, math, physics — may require so much work as to make this impractical. Employers would also balk, I am sure, at having grads that think and have to be taught a bit more when they walk into the door. But I do not think this is the case for the majority of degrees. And I do think we would be better off if college degrees were more focused on well-rounded thinkers than mere credentialing machines.