Many parents like to tell their children, “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up.” That’s empowering, but in many cases, it turns out to be inaccurate. One adult friend of ours, for example, decided when he was five that he wanted to be a jockey when he grew up. But by the time he was in sixth grade, he was already too tall and heavy. (He decided to be an astronaut instead.) Read more
How have recent changes in U.S. immigration policy affected the number of non-U.S. students who are applying to study at American universities? Read more
Do STEM Studies Prepare Students to Excel in the Humanities . . . Or Is It the Other Way Around?
“The more our labs and engineers innovate, the more jobs we create for people who can make the human dimension work. Technology may be a job killer in warehouses or on the factory floor. There’s no denying robots excel at predictable chores, carrying them out faster, cheaper, and more reliably than we can. Yet in so many other aspects of life, the machines (and even software-based artificial intelligence) are clumsy intruders. They don’t know how to handle subtler situations, where feelings matter and the rules haven’t been written. We do.”
– George Anders writing in his book You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education (Little, Brown and Company) 2017
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If you were a college student 10 years ago and you wanted to work in medicine or healthcare, you majored in nursing or pre-med. Those were your two basic options to start a career in healthcare . . . you either exercised them or pursued a career in another field.
Today, that situation has changed dramatically. If you want to work in healthcare technologies, a whole new range of options is available to you. You can now make an important contribution by following paths like these instead . . .
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With more and more high schools emphasizing the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education for all of their students, an important issue has been raised. How does one effectively recognize those students who are excelling in STEM?
In Colorado and elsewhere, that question has been answered with an effort to add a STEM designation to high school diplomas. There, teachers came together to help better recognize those students who were meeting state benchmarks when it came to workforce readiness in technology and computing. So STEM seals were born.
But the idea comes with some controversy. As Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week recently reported:
STEM endorsements are still so new overall that there are few insights on how they will play out on the ground for students—and whether the new credentials will come to signify anything of value to employers or colleges.