American Students tend to choose STEM courses over humanities
Max Broberg
Staff Writer
At the end of every year, students from 8th to 11th grade participating in course selection have been following a certain trend: prioritizing STEM classes over humanities.
This trend is caused by the growing value placed on more technical careers ranging from engineering to medicine.
“[Students] worry about the payoff from their education in their futures more than anything else,” history teacher Mr. Iglesias said. “Whenever I hear politicians talk, I hear them talk about competition with foreign countries like India and China, and when we compete with them we also aim for the same subjects and encourage the same topics.”
Students worrying more about their future wealth often choose to prioritize classes that lead to professions with larger paychecks. This leads them to focus less on available humanities which emphasize human culture and achievement.
“I think it is a lot more important to take math and science courses because there are a lot more fields offering jobs for those subjects,” junior Justin McMullens said.
Now that students are selecting more and more STEM courses when forming their next year’s schedule. This has led to a significant decrease in the number of students taking humanities courses, although such courses help develop creativity and expand the mind.
“Humanities contribute to partly creativity and innovation and we’re losing that by forcing math and science down people’s throats,” Mr. Iglesias said.
The significant drop in humanities courses chosen by students has led to a massive decrease in the availability of such courses across American (Take, for example, classes such as Literature and Film and Creative Writing; both of which were courses dropped due to low demand). In order to combat this trend, American has been putting up posters across campus advertising humanities to students, often with the slogan “Art is Education”.
However, whether these pushes will really bring about any significant change remains to be seen. For now, the trend remains prevalent across the American educational system.
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