Great Commentary on STEM vs. Liberal Arts

There's a ton written about the movement to increase STEM majors and graduates in the country - but not much takes into account the incentives that college kids actually face.

Since the ROI of being a rock star engineer is pretty high (right out of college and otherwise), general economics suggest that there would be a rush on these majors - but there still is not. Smart kids are still taking liberal arts type majors like history, English, etc...

Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy has probably the best explanation I've read:

...if you are a smart but not brilliant student in STEM, you might tell yourself until you are blue in the face that you must study STEM to be employable and have real skills. But the reality is that you will flunk out or come close to it, or be lucky to get by with Cs. Moreover, at that level of performance, it is not clear that you are actually acquiring STEM skills, just at a C level compared to an A level. Pedagogically, it doesn’t work that way. The bottom end students wind up not really learning anything, because the class moves at a pace and in a way that they can’t keep up with, even to get a lesser grounding in it.

From the standpoint of a student who says, I don’t want to be an engineer or research chemist or computer scientist — I want to get a strong grounding in those fields, in a genuinely technical way — but I want to be a manager or someone with a non-technical job that requires interaction with the technical fields — how do I do that? At the top range of universities, the STEM departments simply don’t have a place for you.

The top universities have many reasons for grade inflation in liberal arts, but this fact counts among them. Undergraduates who realize that they cannot compete with global specialists in STEM, particularly at the top universities, opt for liberal arts subjects. They and the universities realize that GPA is all that matters, and unsurprisingly, GPAs rise.

So in other words - if I'm of average intelligence and better in verbal or math grade-wise, the ROI of me dipping my toe in organic chemistry just for kicks is really low - it would create problems when I apply to law or business school. I'm better off taking "History of Plants" for my science credit and getting an A vs. learning some hard science and getting a C-.