Hearing about the current demand for science, technology, engineering and mathematics majors is nonstop. From high school onward, the STEM vs. liberal arts dichotomy starts to heat up and continues beyond college. Although it may be true that people with these skills are desperately needed, being a STEM major does not mean you are inherently more hardworking than others, and a liberal arts major is not lazy just because the answers to liberal-arts questions might be more open-ended.
Success is not dependent on being a STEM major. Because STEM majors are inherently considered “smart” — no matter how well they actually do in class — they are often excused for a lack of people skills or being outright rude. “Their classes are harder,” and “they have to study more,” but the truth is everyone has hard and easy classes, and it’s a matter of balancing them out.
For example, for journalism majors, reporting could be considered as tough as physics or calculus for science majors. It’s offensive to assume being a political science or journalism major means I’ve taken the easy route. If a student considers everything he or she does in class to be extraordinarily and inconceivably hard, that person probably chose the wrong major. STEM majors will often say they find writing difficult, which is why they chose STEM — yet some will criticize liberal arts majors for their choice of major when they might find math or science difficult.
People generally accept that a STEM major is the path to employability, but this may not be the case. Like liberal arts, STEM is astoundingly broad. According to Irving Wladawsky-Berger in The Washington Post’s article “Is There a STEM Crisis or a STEM Surplus?” some experts contend that there are more STEM degrees than STEM jobs. Without liberal arts, STEM majors wouldn’t have the writing skills some of them claim are the easiest part for liberal arts majors. So much of liberal arts is learning to think — to piece together a string of words in a unique way to express your views and back them up with facts. It’s what allows an exam to include a question that may have never been directly addressed in class — because you should be able to reason it out.
While STEM and liberal arts may seem like polar opposites, about half of STEM majors end up not finding work in their field, according to an Economic Policy Institute study cited by the New York Daily News. Ultimately, both skills deserve to be valued. Maybe it’s time to stop and think about why these fields are pitted against each other and why one is seen as so superior to the other. Liberal arts majors, such as women’s studies and art history, are heavily targeted as never being employed in a well-paying job.
According to a study by Rong Su and James Rounds in Frontiers in Psychology, “Women are now overrepresented in social sciences, yet only constitute a fraction of the engineering workforce.” Is it possible that the liberal arts have been undervalued because STEM is so male-dominated? When women put other women down for being a liberal arts major, it could just be a product of internalized sexism and devaluing the things that historically concern women.
No matter what, it’s important to respect each person’s choice of career path. Keep in mind that what may come so easily to you might be hard for someone else, and vice versa. Instead of pitting the sciences and humanities against each other, let’s value both for what they are and accept that the world needs both kinds of skills — no matter your major.
Nicole Dan is a UF political science junior. Her column appears on Mondays.
