More steamed about STEM

A few years ago, I ranted about the STEM movement in education (A Little Steamed About STEM, August 11, 2014). The post cited a very credible article The STEM Crisis is a Myth published IEEE's Spectrum newsletter that concluded the STEM movement was designed to create an overabundance of people trained in technical skills, increasing the talent pool in order to depress wages. This sounded a little conspiracy-theory-ish to me.

But now Miguel Guhlin at Around the Corner shares this graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

This is what I tell my kids. A good technical job will earn you a decent living. But a job in the humanities will get you a job supervising those in technical positions. 

As I concluded in my earlier post about the push for STEM education being disproportionate to the number of jobs in STEM fields:

While it's not as sexy or PC as promoting STEM right now, I'd rather see us do a better job of career counseling, encouraging the exploration of many academic disciplines, and sending a strong message that pursuing training and work in any field can be rewarding. And no matter what your vocational choice, good communications, problem-solving, personal technology skills, critical thinking, and a host of dispositions are needed for success. 

Maybe we just need a catchier acronym.