Claiming the "STEM" label

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do people with majors such as kinesiology, nursing, psychology etc. want to be considered STEM? What makes STEM "status" superior?

For the same reason there was an effort years ago to add Art to make it STEAM.

Yeah, that was pathetic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People want the STEM label because in common parlance STEM is considered superior to non-STEM.

Ridiculous. STEM was a call for more people with tech skills. That always included nurses. It includes IT, it includes, any number of unglamorous but skilled careers. If you want to be cynical it was also a call for a tech glut so that CS wages could be surprised without offshoring and H-1Bs. It’s working.

So any vocational degree is STEM?

[Anonymous]

I’m confused. I thought STEM stood for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Is biology not a science?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People want the STEM label because in common parlance STEM is considered superior to non-STEM.

Ridiculous. STEM was a call for more people with tech skills. That always included nurses. It includes IT, it includes, any number of unglamorous but skilled careers. If you want to be cynical it was also a call for a tech glut so that CS wages could be surprised without offshoring and H-1Bs. It’s working.

So any vocational degree is STEM?

IT is vocational and is STEM. But I wouldn't say being a mechanic is.

[Anonymous]

The gatekeeping around the STEM label is pretty funny. At one end you have engineers who not only want to exclude the nurses, but even the biologists.

At the other end, you have nursing, kinesiology and psychology majors insisting that their majors are STEM too.

But at the end of the day the extremely broad definition makes STEM a fundamentally meaningless concept. What physics or pure math have in common with nursing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The gatekeeping around the STEM label is pretty funny. At one end you have engineers who not only want to exclude the nurses, but even the biologists.

At the other end, you have nursing, kinesiology and psychology majors insisting that their majors are STEM too.

But at the end of the day the extremely broad definition makes STEM a fundamentally meaningless concept. What physics or pure math have in common with nursing?

Why ignore the obvious connections to STEM with nursing...Chemistry and Biology.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People want the STEM label because in common parlance STEM is considered superior to non-STEM.

Ridiculous. STEM was a call for more people with tech skills. That always included nurses. It includes IT, it includes, any number of unglamorous but skilled careers. If you want to be cynical it was also a call for a tech glut so that CS wages could be surprised without offshoring and H-1Bs. It’s working.

So any vocational degree is STEM?

The STEM push is to have more people who are not limited by their skills in math, science, computers, etc. That absolutely applies to nurses in this day and age.

[Anonymous]

Student visas.

[Anonymous]

There's about 100,000 degrees in psychology awarded every year. Getting them classified as "STEM degrees" isn't going to change anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Student visas.

This. This. This. do your research people.

[Anonymous]

First of all, it is STEAM now, not “stem.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:STEM should really be S'TEM. S' = Physics & Chemistry, and E/T includes Computer Science depending on its flavor. The rest of the domains that fall under S (e.g. Biology) are really people reaching to be part of the STEM umbrella.

No. Wrong.

It’s now STEAM. The “A” is for Arts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why would nursing not be STEM? Also a research-based psych program is a STEM program, and is no less STEM than a biology degree.

Agree on Nursing. Disagree about psychology. Psychology “experiments” are not reproducible most of the time.

What would you say about the biology-based psych programs that overlap with neuro? Are they just social scientists with a lot of knowledge of biological systems or?

To me, a science has a thesis that can be proven or disproven through experiments that have repeatable results. The close you get to psychology, the less true that becomes

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:First of all, it is STEAM now, not “stem.”

STEAM is a liberal arts PR push that most people ignore

[Anonymous]

STEM was a PR push. There never was a shortage of students applying to top programs, and the ones who did were not arriving with deficiencies. The goal was for more students to graduate HS with options, and boost STEM enrollment at lower ranking programs. The shortage was grunts.

The term is being used correctly, there's nothing to lay claim to, the goal was cheaper labor.