Invest in minds not maths to boost the economy (2024)

WE ARE all becoming used to warnings of a shortage of science, technology, engineering and mathematics recruits – the “STEM crisis”. In a world increasingly dominated by careers that involve these fields, organisations and politicians repeat the mantra that we really must train more of these people to secure our prosperity.

Earlier this month, for example, the UK government announced it will plough an extra £50 million per academic year into teaching STEM subjects. In 2012 the Royal Academy of Engineering warned that the UK needed 10,000 more of those graduates a year. In the same year, Microsoft said the STEM pipeline needed strengthening because 1.2 million US jobs would open up in computing by 2020 – and only 40,000 more Americans would have degrees in those subjects by then.

These arguments are flawed. STEM training is not the only answer: the Microsoft report, for instance, failed to acknowledge that a degree in computing (which Bill Gates doesn’t have as he quit a degree at Harvard to start Microsoft’s forerunner) is only one entry path to the industry. Plus, if there really is a shortage, why aren’t wages rising? If you have a degree and you work in computing or mathematics, your wage is likely to have risen by less than half a per cent per year between 2000 and 2011.

UK Royal Society president Paul Nurse has highlighted a glut of science PhDs, with many relegated to donkey work in the lab. Nobel laureate James Watson also noted a resigned acceptance of unfulfilling labour among trained scientists: “We’re training people who really don’t want to think, they just want to have jobs,” he said in 2010. Watson’s conclusion? “We may be training too many scientists.”

Watson is echoing what many labour market analysts have been saying for years. There is a solution. Instead of looking to produce scientists or engineers, we should focus on simply turning out agile minds.

I recently curated a summit on the future of secondary education. It was convened as a partnership between the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the University of Waterloo, both in Ontario, Canada. What was most striking was that the heads of these two institutions explicitly told me they didn’t want any focus on STEM education. They wanted a future in which students are able to think creatively.

They are not alone. Norman Augustine, a former CEO of aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, declared that the best of his 80,000 employees were those with good communication and thinking skills. “I can testify that most were excellent engineers,” he wrote in the The Wall Street Journal. “But the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.”

The ability to process, synthesise and communicate information efficiently is the premium skill of the future. We shouldn’t be surprised: it was the premium skill of the past too. John Maynard Keynes once stated that what made Isaac Newton great was his ability to focus on a problem until he had thought his way through it. “I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted,” he said.

When he chose to, Newton was also great at communicating ideas. The same can’t be said of most STEM graduates: a 2011 UK government study reported the moans of employers that they often lacked communication and organisational skills as well as the ability to manage their time or work in a team.

The experts in Ontario concluded that creating students who can think broadly will not be easy. It will involve abandoning the culture of grades and exams and moving to assessments centred on a student’s portfolio of projects. That will mean employers and universities will have to be more creative in their selection criteria. It will also mean holding back from trying to skew the labour market and letting students find and study what they are good at, once they have mastered a broad range of basic competencies.

That’s OK: the UK government report already admitted that the expectation that people enter STEM jobs after their studies “may require some rethinking”. The pipeline is proving leaky, and employers are voicing concern over a “lack of high calibre” applicants for STEM jobs. It’s the same in the US, which spends $3 billion a year on luring students into those subjects: 44 per cent of those majoring in a STEM subject shift focus while at college, compared to 30 per cent in the humanities. And that doesn’t include health profession courses, or computer sciences, where the rate is 59.2 per cent.

What is most concerning about the drive is that the fiercest advocates are those who stand to benefit most. As science policy analyst Colin Macilwain argued in Nature this year, increasing the number of STEM undergraduate places “floods the market with STEM graduates, reduces competition for their services and cuts their wages”. In other words, it’s a source of cheap labour for the technology industries.

Pushing more students towards such courses without ensuring they learn more than just fact-farting and number-juggling may fill entry-level jobs. But our best thinkers, looking for interesting, well-paid work, are all too easily tempted away from applying their skills to the big science challenges of the 21st century.

“Our best thinkers are now all too easily tempted away from applying their skills to the big science challenges”

So the STEM mantra won’t create industries and innovations that drive a flourishing economy, and it won’t bring through those who will solve the problems of climate change and energy, food and water scarcity.

It’s time to acknowledge that the rationale for the STEM push has run out of steam.