The Marketing of STEM

Elites’ acceptance of the assumption of a perpetually inadequate workforce in science and technology fields is best illustrated by the reflexive expansion of STEM education and the erosion of the liberal arts. STEM has become what political scientists call a valence issue: an issue in which there is universal agreement, such as support for a strong economy or opposition to crime. Anyone seeking elective office—from school board to the presidency—who questions the instinctive push for more STEM education does so at their own peril, as support for STEM approaches the political equivalent of support for our troops. Close examination of U.S. student achievement in math and science or of the realities of the labor market are exercises generally left to a handful of researchers and only make an occasional appearance in mainstream discussion.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (p. 19). Temple University Press.

STEM and the Fantasy Economy

Promoted endlessly by elites, STEM education has become an essential component of the fantasy economy.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (p. 43). Temple University Press.

The fantasy economy is a misleading articulation of the economy and education system rooted in the economic self-interests of corporations and the wealthy.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (p. 2). Temple University Press.

The emphasis on technology is perhaps best illustrated by one of the fantasy economy’s key concepts, STEM, which as a work of public relations is difficult to beat. The noun “stem” refers to the “main body or stalk of a plant,” while the verb “to stem” means, among other things, “to originate from or be caused by.” STEM is seen as the foundation of national prosperity, and advocating for increasing STEM education on the basis of a supposedly boundless supply of high-paying jobs in these fields has become an article of faith for a wide variety of powerful institutions. STEM has penetrated every level of education, from elementary school, where STEM has often been added alongside traditional science instruction, through higher education, where universities increasingly emphasize the expansion of STEM programs during a time of austerity. STEM encapsulates technology and complexity in one concise, extraordinarily marketable term.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (p. 23). Temple University Press.

But no education policies can change the fact that the economy is dominated by low-wage jobs typically requiring little formal education or the fact that the combined number of bachelor’s and advanced degree holders substantially outnumber jobs typically requiring these higher levels of education. Further, no education reform policies can alter the wage stagnation suffered by millions of highly educated Americans working in jobs commensurate with their educational attainment. Nor can channeling students into STEM fields change the number of engineering or technology-related positions in the labor market. Yet low wages for teachers, civil servants, and workers in the nonprofit sector almost certainly decrease interest in these fields among many students. If we were to wave a magic wand and give the roughly 15 percent of Americans who have completed some college but have no degree either associate’s or bachelor’s degrees, what jobs would be available for them? What would these jobs pay? What if every high-poverty school had the college attendance rates of the best charter, wealthy suburban, or private schools? Would that allow every young person to have access to a job with a livable wage one day? These are questions that the fantasy economy campaign does not even want to ask, let alone try to answer, yet they are a prerequisite for a serious discussion of economic opportunity in the United States today.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (pp. 27-28). Temple University Press.

Arguments claiming education and workforce weaknesses, then, are ultimately two sides of the same coin and mutually reinforcing. In a seemingly endless rhetorical loop, a failing education system is cited as the cause of an inferior workforce, which, in turn, is held up as evidence for the necessity of further education reform.

I choose to label this campaign a fantasy because it is a distortion of and distraction from reality.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (p. 3). Temple University Press.

Origins of STEM

While the reports of the 1980s discussed the decline of education generally, many were also part of long-standing campaigns emphasizing the qualifications of workers in math and science fields. Since at least the middle twentieth century, elites have argued that shortcomings in math and science education would lead to a shortage of qualified scientists and engineers, which would imperil the nation’s economy and national security (Teitelbaum 2014a). In turn, federal policy makers increasingly viewed “engineers (and scientists) as essential to the military and economic strength of the nation” (Kuehn and Salzman 2018, 20–21). The political push for increasing math and science education was given a tremendous boost with the creation of the acronym STEM, which stands for “science, technology, engineering, and math.” Originally referred to as SMET, the term was changed in 2001 by Judith Ramaley, a member of the National Science Foundation. When asked in 2011 about changing the name, Ramaley said she “didn’t like the sound” of SMET and thought STEM had a “much better ring to it” (Christenson 2011). The term gained widespread usage, despite inconsistent definitions of the fields included in this category.

The emphasis on STEM education increased significantly in the early years of the twenty-first century. Reports such as Before It’s Too Late (National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century 2000), Innovate America (Council on Competitiveness 2005), Tapping America’s Potential (Education for Innovation Initiative 2005), Rising above the Gathering Storm (National Academy of Sciences et al. 2007), and Tough Choices or Tough Times (National Center on Education and the Economy 2008) stressed increasing STEM education at all levels and thereby increasing the supply of STEM workers. This literature utilized international assessments in math and science showing American students behind many other nations in average test scores. The foreword of Before It’s Too Late, by Commission Chair John Glenn, linked the future of the nation itself to math and science education and sounded strikingly similar to ANAR: “First, at the daybreak of this new century and millennium, the Commission is convinced that the future well-being of our nation and people depends not just on how well we educate our children generally, but on how well we educate them in mathematics and science specifically” (National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century 2000, 4). Tapping America’s Potential was backed by a coalition of many of the nation’s biggest business-interest groups, including the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Council on Competitiveness, and sought to double the number of STEM bachelor’s degree recipients by 2015 (Education for Innovation Initiative 2005). And the lengthy report by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, lent an aura of scientific expertise to the push from the nation’s biggest business interests for increased and improved STEM education.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (pp. 40-42). Temple University Press.

The Myth of the Permanently Deficient Workforce

…the narrative of failing schools had to be explicitly linked to a much more comprehensive account of a chronically deficient workforce.This framing deflects all attention away from public policies and business practices that directly and indirectly affect wage rates and jobs.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (p. 43). Temple University Press.

A political campaign that focuses on failing schools and the qualifications and supply of STEM workers is inherently limited. Depending on the educational and skill levels required by the labor market, the larger significance of an education system thought to be underperforming is not necessarily straightforward. And notwithstanding the constant lobbying of business interests, objective data on STEM job markets is easily accessible through the U.S. Department of Labor. I argue, then, that to justify emerging patterns of wage stagnation and growing inequality, the narrative of failing schools had to be explicitly linked to a much more comprehensive account of a chronically deficient workforce. This framing deflects all attention away from public policies and business practices that directly and indirectly affect wage rates and jobs. While business interests had historically advanced claims of worker shortages, in the 1980s, the rhetoric of workforce inadequacies transformed and expanded. And because of increasing educational attainment levels vis-à-vis the relatively low educational requirements of the labor market revealed in official data, I argue that the fantasy economy’s focus on education and training mandated a rhetorical emphasis on skills—rather than education per se—hence the “skills gap” between the abilities of the workforce and requirements of the labor market. As Ellen Ruppel Shell has argued, the skills gap has been so widely cited in recent years it has become a sort of “cultural meme” (Ruppel Shell 2018, 163). Still, the concept of a skills gap remains central to the language of both K–12 and higher education reform today, decades after its introduction.

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (p. 43). Temple University Press.

The Myth of STEM Shortages

Depending on how broadly one defines STEM, researchers have found that American universities graduate anywhere from two to three times as many graduates in STEM programs as jobs available in these fields (Lowell and Salzman 2007; Salzman 2016; Xie and Killewald 2012). This necessarily results in large numbers of STEM graduates working in non-STEM occupations, a fact confirmed by several sources. For example, according to Daniel Kuehn and Hal Salzman, a 2012 report by the National Research Council on the STEM workforce for the Department of Defense found the “engineering, scientific, and technical workforce supply to be sufficient with the exception of cybersecurity experts, anthropologists, and linguists, for which the Department of Defense had unmet demand and difficulty recruiting” (Kuehn and Salzman 2018, 22). With liberal arts fields under constant attack in higher education, the Defense Department’s need for more anthropologists and linguists is especially noteworthy. In 2014, the Census published survey data showing that 74 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field were not employed in STEM occupations (U.S. Census Bureau 2014). In 2016, labor market scholar Hal Salzman testified to Congress that “only about a third of those with S.T.E.M. degrees are employed in S.T.E.M. jobs” (Salzman 2016, 1).

Kraus, Neil. The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (p. 80). Temple University Press.

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STEM

▶ Table of Contents

Table of Contents

The Marketing of STEM

STEM and the Fantasy Economy

Origins of STEM

The Myth of the Permanently Deficient Workforce

The Myth of STEM Shortages

Further Reading