In a 2012 post, I wrote about a request from Silicon Valley entrepreneur Santosh Jayaram for more English majors.1 Resources like reusable code are simplifying the engineering portion of new product introductions. The challenge, he said, lies in encouraging investment in your idea and in marketing the resulting product to prospective customers—efforts that require storytelling skills. More recently, Charles Duhigg in The New Yorker points out that product proposals at Amazon must be written out as six-page narratives, because CEO Jeff Bezos believes storytelling encourages critical thinking.2
And now, Heather Long at The Washington Post addresses the issue.3 She cites Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller’s new book Narrative Economics, which contends that the stories people tell each other have profound implications for the economy.
Should students be advised to major in English and the humanities rather than STEM subjects? Not necessarily. In 2014, Laszlo Bock, at the time in charge of hiring at Google, said he preferred a B student in computer science to an A+ student in English.4 And Long in her Washington Post story acknowledges that entry-level STEM graduates command higher salaries than recent graduates with English degrees.
However, Long cites research by David J. Deming and Kadeem L. Noray of Harvard showing that the STEM pay premium fades quickly. “We find that the initially high economic return to applied STEM degrees declines by more than 50% in the first decade of working life,” they write.5
And Long points out a surprising statistic: “Contrary to popular belief, English majors ages 25 to 29 had a lower unemployment rate in 2017 than math and computer science majors,” she writes.
Perhaps that’s because the percentage of the number of majors in English has declined by 25.5% from 2009 to 2017, she says, citing data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Over that same period, the number of math, engineering, and computer-science majors increased by 55.2%, 67.8%, and 88%, respectively. English majors may be filling an underserved niche, whereas STEM majors may face a glut of competition at home and abroad.
Of course, STEM subjects and the humanities aren’t mutually exclusive. STEAM, for example, ads an A for Art. Going a step further, STREAM ads an R for wRiting. Many colleges and universities, including the Rhode Island School of Design, support STEAM initiatives with interesting results. An article from earlier this year describes the efforts of a Brown/RISD Dual Degree student majoring in industrial design who created Musical Prosthetics, wearable sculptures infused with sensors that create sounds in response to body movement.6
STEAM initiatives can begin early in life. The Boston Children’s Museum, for example, offers programs that let children tinker with circuits and art materials.
Not everyone supports STEAM. A blog post at the National Inventors Hall of Fame cites some critics claiming that art detracts from the core STEM subject matter. The organization itself says it avoids the debate—what’s important is giving children hands-on experiences that let them learn important concepts.7
REFERENCES
1. “Got English majors?” EE-Evaluation Engineering Online, Nov. 1, 2012.
2. Duhigg, Charles, “Is Amazon Unstoppable?” The New Yorker, October 10, 2019.
3. Long, Heather, “The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors,” The Washington Post, Oct. 19, 2019.
4. “Google's Bock advises B in computer science beats A+ in English,” EE-Evaluation Engineering Online, April 21, 2014.
5. Deming, David J., and Noray, Kadeem L., “STEM Careers and the Changing Skill Requirements of Work,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Issued September 2018, Revised June 2019.
6. Albanese, Robert, “Invested in Design for the Greater Good,” Rohde Island School of Design, March 5, 2019.
7. “The STEM vs. STEAM Debate,” Blog Post, National Inventors Hall of Fame.