Re-examining STEM and technical education
Was the "STEM shortage" grounded in reality?
STEM has been a national priority in education over the last fifteen years with the goal of increasing the number and diversity of students who choose careers in STEM. While I see a strong connection between making and science and engineering, the push for STEM, which became a U.S. policy, didn’t always feel like a good fit for maker education. For me, there was something true in this policy — that students should develop technical skills, which could lead to good careers in technical fields. But there was also something false because the need seemed manufactured — it wasn’t necessarily about what students wanted for themselves or a reflection of their own interests and skills. It was all top-down policy-making and the maker movement was more grassroots, bottom-up.
I also recall asking whether welding was considered a STEM career. Was the goal to get more PhD students in science or was it to build a broader more technical workforce? Was it to fill jobs in industry or was it to find out all the things you could do if you have technical knowledge and skills? Creativity isn’t always valued in STEM but it is increasingly valued in our society. One of the biggest criticisms I had was that STEM initiatives were not changing how science and engineering were taught — still largely through textbooks.
I was reminded of my own issues with STEM in reading James McPherson’s interesting article questioning the efforts in American education to put more students into the STEM pipeline. You should read his article but I’ll address some of the key points below.
During this 2010’s, corporations aligned with the government to argue that there was a “STEM shortage.” McPherson writes:
We were being told America desperately needed more STEM graduates. Yet when I was researching … whether there really was a STEM shortage, my research showed at the time (2010), that about 50% of the hard science and engineering graduates were not becoming scientists or engineers at all. They were becoming consultants, bankers, and managers because there were not enough positions in science and engineering for bachelor’s degree holders. We didn’t make things here anymore.
What had been presented as a national competitiveness strategy often functioned as a labor-supply strategy.
McPherson says that a focus on STEM wasn’t a mistake. “Americans should have more technical competence. What America does not need is confusion about why.” He asks what should the goals of a technical education be.
One vision sees technical education as human formation, the other sees technical education as labor-force management.
The first asks:
How do we prepare young people to become capable adults?
The second asks:
How do we increase the supply of labor?
These questions can produce similar policies while serving very different ends.
If the goal is human formation, then technical education increases the dignity and bargaining power of workers. It creates craftsmen, technicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs capable of supporting families and exercising independence.
If the goal is labor-force management, technical education serves a different purpose. It expands the labor pool. Increased supply lowers costs. Lower costs improve margins. Workers become inputs in an optimization model.
McPherson believes that the STEM shortage was really about labor-force management. I’d argue that the U.S. policy provided a bit of cover for what was really happening — technical jobs were shipped overseas and more H1-B visas were used to fill talent gaps (at lower wages) in American technical companies. One might regard the STEM policy as a superficial response, lacking a deeper grounding in what technical education should be.
McPherson writes:
American education had drifted away from reality. Too many students graduated without basic quantitative literacy. Too many schools treated mathematics as an abstract hurdle rather than a practical language. Too many young people reached adulthood without ever building, repairing, measuring, or making anything.
McPherson cites Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soul Class: An Inquiry into the Value of Work,” which makes the argument for an education grounded in reality.
Crawford’s argument was not that every student should become a mechanic. His argument was deeper. Human beings need contact with reality. They need work that produces visible consequences. They need to encounter limits that cannot be negotiated away by rhetoric.
The bolt either fits or it does not. The engine either starts or it does not. Reality renders judgment.
This is what working with electronics or 3D printing or coding offers you. You think you understand how to do something and you are tested by doing it — and finding out there’s a problem and trying to fix it yourself.
In school, students don’t feel like they are in the “real-world.” It’s a simulacrum, a poor copy of the real world that feels artificial. Maker education offers materials, tools and processes that can be mastered through practice. Students get to ask themselves what they can do and then produce real results that they can show to others as proof of what they can do. It’s not asking what they are going to do in the future or determining whether the right path is college or career. Maker education is the process of developing capable humans who can be productive today and explore the future on their own terms.
What does this mean for maker education?
I asked ChatGPT to compare the views of STEM education ten years ago to today. and what this means for maker education. Here’s the response:
One notable change has been renewed appreciation for experiential learning.
Employers increasingly value graduates who have:
built physical products
completed internships
participated in apprenticeships
worked in makerspaces
contributed to research labs
completed capstone projects
This represents a move away from viewing STEM education primarily as classroom instruction.
One of the most striking developments is that many federal and state workforce priorities now align more closely with practices that makerspaces have championed for years. Skills such as prototyping, fabrication, interdisciplinary problem-solving, teamwork, and learning through building are increasingly valued by employers in advanced manufacturing, robotics, and hardware innovation.
At the same time, there is a gap between workforce policy and classroom practice. Many STEM initiatives still measure success through credentials, certifications, or enrollment numbers, while employers consistently emphasize practical experience with real tools, collaborative projects, and iterative design. This creates an opportunity for maker education to position itself not simply as an enrichment activity, but as a foundational approach to preparing people for the kinds of technical and adaptive work that emerging industries require.
Obviously, this is framed by what industry needs rather than what young people choose to do but there’s a need to think about the future from both perspectives. I like the word “adaptive” because that’s going to be important for businesses, schools and individuals.
Earlier this week, I talked to James McPherson about his article and STEM. Afterwards, he wrote me an email that said:
I suspect that your work is in a prime position to have an important impact on our young people over the next crucial decade. Your preparation and the crisis/opportunity will meet where you have created the space to do and make.
Dale. glad the conversation sparked this, and I appreciate the generous read. One thing jumped out on a second pass: the ChatGPT section frames maker education's value almost entirely in terms of "what employers value" and "workforce priorities" — that's labor-force-management language, the exact frame the rest of the piece is pushing back against. You flag the tension yourself ("framed by what industry needs rather than what young people choose"), but I think it's worth naming directly: even a sympathetic, AI-generated summary defaults to pipeline vocabulary, because that's still the only vocabulary policy and funders currently have for this. The vocabulary problem may be as stubborn as the policy problem.
Dale, thank you for sharing this article. I appreciate that you move the conversation beyond STEM (& STEAM) and technology alone by questioning the assumptions that shape how we talk about education.
For me, the question isn’t whether Maker Education belongs within STEM. It’s about the purpose of education. In my practice, making is a way for students to develop curiosity, ownership, creativity and responsibility. Technical skills and innovative thinking can grow from that, although they are not the starting point. What stands out to me is how quickly AI defaults to language about workforce needs, employers, and economic value. That says a great deal about the dominant discourse surrounding education today. Maker Education deserves a broader vocabulary, one that places human development at the center and sees technology as a means, not an end.