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The National Science Foundation’s Judith Ramaley coined the acronym STEM in 2001. The neologism became a handy new way to mark a dividing line in higher education discourse. Are STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) degrees better than Humanities degrees? Which are harder? Which are more useful? Which bring higher incomes, and which more career satisfaction? Which do we need more of? So thoroughly does this polarity now suffuse the way we talk about college and university that it can be found at every level, from policy statements down to school cafeterias. (“To be a STEM kid or a Humanities kid? That is the question,” announces the Catalyst, student paper of the Ransom Everglades School in Florida. “The rise of STEM, the fall of humanities,” intones a story in Michigan’s Minnehaha Upper Academy’s Redhawks Online.)
In fact, neither one of these labels names a particularly coherent group of fields. STEM covers endeavors as different in their workings and aims as heart surgery is from number theory, while humanities disciplines have little in common beyond an (often) qualitative interest in (usually) human concerns.
Less frequently observed is the asymmetry between the categories themselves. Humanities disciplines claim ancestry from the classical studia humanitatis—the grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy taught by Renaissance humanists—but include definitively 20th– and 21st-century interdisciplinary subjects (cultural, race, and gender studies, for example) and have a complicated and porous relationship with social sciences. Though they appeal to broad ideals of citizenship or critical thinking, further, they are, as professional disciplines, university-bound. (In other words, people who directly practice humanities for a living are mostly professors.)
STEM, on the other hand, when Ramaley coined it, referred not merely to a list of academic fields but more specifically to integrated teaching in the relevant areas, from school onward, with the goal of creating a more competitive, innovative workforce. It was not so much a grouping of inherently similar types of inquiry, then, as an agenda for teaching functionally related subjects together, to achieve a set of national economic and strategic goals.
In other words, though the groups of disciplines are artificial, “humanities” and “STEM” do connote different ideas about the purposes of education and its relationship to the market. And while the labels took hold in universities as administrative shorthand for collections of departments and programs, they now shape how high school students think about their own intellectual capacities and futures. Are you a STEM kid or a Humanities kid?
It is on these linked fronts—student choice and perceptions of market demand—that the “STEM versus Humanities” framing comes closest to describing a real war. As Benjamin Schmidt showed in a much-cited 2018 Atlantic piece, STEM has had the best of it. Between the 2000s and the late 2010s, the share of undergraduates choosing majors in Humanities disciplines dropped across the board, sharply—by as much as 50 percent in disciplines such as history and English. STEM majors rose correspondingly over the same period. Schmidt argued that this was driven by expectations of future earnings, and many others note that it was encouraged by ubiquitous and bipartisan messaging portraying humanities fields as useless, from Barack Obama’s dismissal of art history to then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s derision of anthropology. Cuts and closures have followed, reducing the humanities options available to students and accelerating the downward spiral.
For those in the humanities camp, resistance has sometimes felt futile. But it has come in the form of better-than-imagined employment numbers for humanities majors, surveys of lifetime earnings (the STEM advantage fades over time, as does the relevance of tech skills acquired in college), and critiques of the data. (There’s no such thing as a “STEM” or “humanities” salary, and many in all of those majors wind up in jobs unrelated to their degree.)
Above all, it has come in two claims about what the humanities do. The first is that humanities study teaches values essential to maintaining a patriotic society, a democratic polity, and/or a progressive civilization. The second, less grandiose—and less subject to chauvinistic appropriation—is that humanities disciplines foster “employable” or “transferable” skills: finding sources, weighing evidence, making arguments, writing coherently, and thinking critically and creatively. Humanities education is useful for everyone, and especially for scientists. Though distinct, these arguments often mingle in a conception of national interest tied to innovation.
Indeed, scientists themselves are as likely as anyone to make these points, and a fair amount of criticism of “STEM versus Humanities” as a frame has come from the STEM side in recent years. As sociologist John D. Skrentny’s recent Wasted Education: How We Fail Our Graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math suggests, some frustration may reflect the fact that the STEM agenda, for all its success at capturing a big share of college majors, has not lived up to its strategic promise. “Despite the massive governmental, philanthropic, and personal investment,” he writes, “only a minority of STEM grads are working in STEM jobs.” More commonly, STEM writers lament the lack of “soft” skills and intellectual breadth among students whose time is ever more dominated by courses in their major fields, and whose academic focus is shaped by market demands that don’t last.
Compelling as these arguments may be (and they are the only ones that have made headway), they are measures of how far STEM’s market- and innovation-oriented vision of education has won the day on campus, even as many programs categorized as STEM share the fate of their humanities colleagues. Outside elite institutions catering to students who can afford to follow their interests, humanities programs survive as service departments, supplying writing skills, distribution requirements, and GPA boosts to majors in other fields. Even defenders of the humanities describe their disciplines as offering “skills and habits,” as Stephen Kidd, of the National Humanities Alliance, put it in 2013; STEM, by contrast, gives “knowledge.” Meanwhile, the few new humanities initiatives that do emphasize subject matter are, increasingly, ideological projects coming from the right: centers “for economic freedom,” institutes for celebrating Western “and American” civilization, bills enjoining a canon of approved works. Open-ended critical inquiry, particularly on “divisive” historical or contemporary topics, is derided and defunded as frivolous—or worse.
The politics of curriculum is familiar culture-war fodder. Less known is how far the STEM vision has reframed humanities research within the university. This has reinforced some positive developments. Collaborative, interdisciplinary work, using technology creatively, has brought about some immensely valuable results, creating new tools for research and new ways for scholars and the public alike to access it, from massive, long-term projects such as the Slave Voyages website and database to small digital exhibitions like “The Kitchen in the Cabinet,” exploring the place of food in the history of science, to the Casebooks Project, a digital presentation and analysis of two 17th-century astrologers’ casebooks, with a companion animation and a linked game.
But the adoption of STEM verbiage is often superficial, as in the proliferation of humanities “labs” that often do the kind of work familiar from the classroom, library, or gallery. People can’t be blamed for playing the game: Much as science is synonymous with real knowledge for the much of the public, STEM is synonymous with real research for many academic leaders and legislators—as the North Carolina General Assembly’s 2023 decision to restrict UNC distinguished professorships to academics in STEM fields, for example, made clear. But the game is rigged. The uncritical adoption of Silicon Valley–inflected innovation as a regulating norm for research across the university incentivizes shallow and frequent claims to novelty, at the expense of more considered work. So does the use of metrics such as the Hirsch Index, designed for fields where large numbers of short articles with multiple authors are the norm, to evaluate achievement in disciplines like history, where scholars typically spend years producing a single book. Imposing these metrics puts traditional humanities work at a disadvantage. But more than that, it devalues (and thus, for a precarious professoriate, rules out) slower, less marketable work of all kinds—including the recondite, time-consuming, basic research that underpins the bigger, flashier public-facing projects we are supposed to want.
All this is just the backdrop to what’s happened in the first quarter of 2025. Now, it sounds like ancient history. Since late January, differences between STEM and humanities in higher education have shrunk to arcane insignificance in the face of a thoroughgoing assault on research universities in general, and universities associated with student protests and encampments in support of Palestine in particular. From the obscure but devastating capping of National Institutes of Health overheads in early February to the maximally theatrical humbling of Columbia to the gleefully vindictive suspension of ongoing National Science Foundation and (just this week) National Endowment for the Humanities grants and the destruction of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Trump regime has rendered the old divisions irrelevant. All are in peril. At the same time, it has shown how to exploit the language of both sides in the interest of a profound and violent ignorance, invoking “biological reality” to justify the erasure of trans rights and status one moment, casting doubt on actual deaths from measles the next; playing savior to Western Civilization, then “restoring truth and sanity” to American history by bowdlerizing the Smithsonian. The crusade to save Western Civilization and science from what Elon Musk refers to as “the woke mind virus” and other Trump acolytes call “DEI” or “cultural Marxism” has turned out to be as bad for STEM as it is for the humanities; the target is academia itself.
If a common enemy breeds common cause among scholars from all fields and institutions, that will at least be a silver lining. But it would be a mistake to let the past 12 weeks erase the memory of the several decades preceding. One reason research universities have been such easy prey for political manipulation is the extent of their dependence for day-to-day operations on grants from state agencies and private donors, many with direct influence on governing boards. However wealthy, even elite universities are not—Columbia’s facade notwithstanding—defensible fortresses. Less as a collection of disciplines than as a model tying research and teaching to the market and the state, the STEM vision has deepened this dependence. (For one measure of this, compare the NSF’s budget with the NEH’s.) Given the devastating interference this allows, it is doubtful that a return to the status quo ante Trump is a solution, even were it likely. The hand that feeds you might one day choke you instead; we are feeling that now.
Nor can humanities disciplines continue to stake their legitimacy on teaching the same set of generic, anodyne, “employable” research, reasoning, and communications skills that generative A.I. now purports to automate. (No, ChatGPT doesn’t really work this way. But if we have learned one thing from the collapse of humanities majors and the rise of STEM, it should surely be that perceptions and expectations matter at least as much as facts.) A.I. bogeymen aside, there is little point in stressing humanities’ supporting role in producing creative, communicative, and ethical scientists if the production of scientists itself is no longer considered worthwhile.
Beyond common cause, then, we need a common vision for open-ended learning as a social good that looks beyond short-term competition for vanishing jobs, and beyond what the humanities can do for STEM. It may seem naive, even utopian to hope for such a broad vision. So be it. Everything realistic has failed.
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