There’s been so much hype around STEM education that sometimes people forget what the acronym even stands for. It’s easy to lose sight of what STEM means in practice when school boards and politicians and CEOs describe its economic impact and tout its importance, oftentimes because it’s simply what they think people want to hear. Some economists have even questioned the statistics these STEM advocates cite to validate their programs and actions.

STEM can sometimes be an overused buzzword, the negative impacts of which are felt by students who don’t get a quality, well-rounded education. But in general its hype is justified because students simply need greater scientific and technological literacy than they did before to function in today’s society and economy.

“Anything that gets this kind of buzzword character tends to lose some of its real meaning in the process,” said Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and author of the new book Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.

STEM as an acronym has provided a strong basis for the movement that has grown around it. The history of the term is a little murky, but Judith Ramaley, who was then the Assistant Director of Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation, claims to have first suggested the term in 2001. This was a simple reordering of a previous acronym: SMET. “STEM just sounded better,” Ramaley said in a recent phone call. And while she’s not sure how much of the movement comes down to the acronym itself, she does know that “SMET is hard to rally around.”

The acronym was a timely change for a series of subject areas that were rapidly moving into the national conversation. According to David Drew, an education professor at Claremont Graduate University in California and author of the book STEM the Tide: Reforming Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education In America, three forces sparked the national discussion about STEM education.



The first is a profound shift in the way the country’s economy functions, he said. Since the 1960s the U.S. economy has moved closer to becoming a true service economy, with more members of the workforce devoting their time to customers and less time to the product itself, like they did in the earlier part of the 20th century when the economy was more focused on manufacturing. U.S. technology companies like Apple and IBM have been a big part of this shift, wrote Natalie McCullough, then the chief marketing officer at a renewal-focused firm called ServiceSource, in a 2012 article in Forbes. “There’s a much more interesting domestic phenomenon here: the rise of high growth and high-value technicians who deliver a new world of advanced services for businesses and consumers alike,” she wrote. While some economists and policy makers have predicted a growth in STEM careers by 2018, the notion that the country will experience a shortage of scientists has more recently been discredited by education experts and academics.