Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
It has implications for workforce development, national security concerns (as a shortage of STEM-educated citizens can reduce effectiveness in this area), and immigration policy, with regard to admitting foreign students and tech workers.
[6] Charles E. Vela was the founder and director of the Center for the Advancement of Hispanics in Science and Engineering Education (CAHSEE)[7][8][9] and started a summer program for talented under-represented students in the Washington, D.C. area called the STEM Institute.
One of the first NSF projects to use the acronym was STEMTEC, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Teacher Education Collaborative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which was founded in 1998.
[35] Canada ranks 12th out of 16 peer countries in the percentage of its graduates who studied in STEM programs, with 21.2%, a number higher than the United States, but lower than France, Germany, and Austria.
"In response to encouraging policies by the government, schools in both public and private sectors around the country have begun to carry out STEM education programs.
The SciChallenge[46] project used a social media contest and student-generated content to increase the motivation of pre-university students for STEM education and careers.
The KPITBs Early Age Programming initiative,[57] established in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has been successfully introduced in 225 Elementary and Secondary Schools.
[60] AL-Bairaq makes use of project-based learning, encourages students to solve authentic problems, and inquires them to work with each other as a team to build real solutions.
[63] STEM is part of the Applied Learning Programme (ALP) that the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) has been promoting since 2013, and currently, all secondary schools have such a program.
[67][68] In the United States, the acronym began to be used in education and immigration debates in initiatives to begin to address the perceived lack of qualified candidates for high-tech jobs.
[74] In 2012, DHS or ICE announced an expanded list of STEM-designated degree programs that qualify eligible graduates on student visas for an optional practical training (OPT) extension.
Under the OPT program, international students who graduate from colleges and universities in the United States can stay in the country and receive up to twelve months of training through work experience.
In his 2012 budget, President Barack Obama renamed and broadened the "Mathematics and Science Partnership (MSP)" to award block grants to states for improving teacher education in those subjects.
[85] Individual states, such as California, have run pilot after-school STEM programs to learn what the most promising practices are and how to implement them to increase the chance of student success.
Research suggests that exposing girls to female inventors at a young age has the potential to reduce the gender gap in technical STEM fields by half.
STEM poses unique challenges related to intersectionality due to rigid norms and stereotypes, both in higher education and professional settings.
These norms often prioritize objectivity and meritocracy while overlooking structural inequities, creating environments where individuals with intersecting marginalized identities face compounded barriers.
For instance, individuals from traditionally underrepresented groups may experience a phenomenon known as "chilly climates" which refers to incidents of sexism, isolation, and pressure to prove themselves to peers and high level academics.
Bush proposed the initiative to address shortfalls in federal government support of educational development and progress at all academic levels in the STEM fields.
[104] SAE is an international organization, and provider specializing in supporting education, award, and scholarship programs for STEM matters, from pre-K to college degrees.
In November 2012 the White House announcement before the congressional vote on the STEM Jobs Act put President Obama in opposition to many of the Silicon Valley firms and executives who bankrolled his re-election campaign.
[108] The Department of Labor identified 14 sectors that are "projected to add substantial numbers of new jobs to the economy or affect the growth of other industries or are being transformed by technology and innovation requiring new sets of skills for workers.
"[119] The objective is to propose a federal strategy anchored on a vision for the future so that all Americans are given permanent access to premium-quality education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Few were openly queer in STEM; however, a couple of well-known people are Alan Turing, the father of computer science, and Sara Josephine Baker, an American physician and public-health leader.
[130][131] A recent study has shown that sexual minority students were less likely to have completed a bachelor's degree in a STEM field,[132][133] having opted to switch their major.
[132][131] Another study concluded that queer people are more likely to experience exclusion, harassment, and other negative impacts while in a STEM career while also having fewer opportunities and resources available to them.
Teitelbaum also wrote that the then-current national fixation on increasing STEM participation paralleled previous U.S. government efforts since World War II to increase the number of scientists and engineers, all of which he stated ultimately ended up in "mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and funding cuts"; including one driven by the Space Race of the late 1950s and 1960s, which he wrote led to "a bust of serious magnitude in the 1970s.
"[139] A 2017 article from the University of Leicester concluded, that "maintaining accounts of a ‘crisis’ in the supply of STEM workers has usually been in the interests of industry, the education sector and government, as well as the lobby groups that represent them.
Time and again, serious and empirically grounded studies find little evidence of any systemic failures or an inability of market responses to address whatever supply is required to meet workforce needs.
"[141] A study of the UK job market, published in 2022, found similar problems, which have been reported for the USA earlier: "It is not clear that having a degree in the sciences, rather than in other subjects, provides any sort of advantage in terms of short- or long-term employability...
