In the past few years, it seems like every politician wants to make some statement about prioritizing STEM in schools in their district or state. The push toward teaching more kids about STEM subjects seems to imply removing the established subjects of the humanities.

These new policies, if push comes to shove, will make STEM classes be seen as more valuable than what the humanities can offer to students.

When stating the benefits of a STEM education, the point seems to be rather clear. There is a practicality to the STEM discipline that ensures a usefulness in society. You can wake up and help build a house or design a sturdy bridge and provide a material good in a transaction. The other benefit is that after graduation there will most likely be a job waiting for you. As long as you work hard, there will be a good chance of always having a roof over your head, as things will always need to be designed and tweaked and applied to the rest of society.

Also, the negatives for the humanities seem to be simply, "Who cares?" The benefits seem strained from what is learned in a classroom to applications in the real world. You can learn how to process and sort through large amounts of information from a history major, but besides going into academia, there are not any popular, paying jobs that directly deal with that kind of historical information.

In the past, the Ancient Greeks put value on what we would call humanities subjects as the basis for every citizen to act as a good human. However, we are certainly not taught in the same way that the Greeks were taught then, and I can certainly imagine hearing arguments that no one will be considering the human condition when they do not have any income to support themselves.

However, that’s what it is really all about, isn’t it? For one reason or another, people at least want some sort of base needs met and that requires having a job, which usually means a college degree. While that is a basic fact about the job market in the United States right now, I think that there is some confusion with the definitions of what is discussed.

A university is not a job factory, but a place to learn and experience more in an academic environment. In a perfect world, there would be more people that would go to a university only to join the academic field if that is what they want to do. Within all of the fields of academia and their studies, there is some overlap between what is taught to scholars and what happens in real world situations; the whole process would be a bit worthless otherwise.

However, just because there is some overlap does not mean that they equal each other. Any accounting student, I’m sure, at some point will be aware that what is on their CPA exam is not everything that they will need to learn or do as a CPA. The difference has always existed and if colleges are to stay as academic universities, it will remain that way.

Being able to say that you have a college degree on your résumé is one thing, but the correlation between some exact major and some exact job is far from clear. There are some guarantees for jobs, but they don’t appear to be as popular. Trade schools will make you a serviceable worker in that needed field: electrician, plumber, even a garbageman, and those jobs all pay well for it.

Other jobs are more focused on social skills or tangibles that can only be proven by those dedicated outside of the classroom. Think copywriting or sales, or even front-end web development. Just something to think about.

I’m not saying it is all full-proof, but there are some problems that I see between any simple correlation between STEM and jobs, and I certainly see a problem with anyone who feels the need to look down on others because of their own decisions at a higher institution.