Are STEM skills perishing?
· Thoughts
Did you know that NASA is on track to send crewed missions to the moon in the next few years? The Artemis program is gearing up to put boots on lunar soil for the first time since 1972, and I’m not normally a ‘space’ person, but even I think that’s pretty cool. The original moon landings changed everything.
They didn’t just prove we could leave the planet – they sparked an entire generation’s obsession with science, technology, engineering, and maths. Kids who watched Neil Armstrong take that first step grew up wanting to build rockets, design computers, and push the boundaries of what humans could achieve. The Apollo program is, in many ways, the origin story of what we now call ‘STEM’ (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) because it drove demand for talented and qualified people who could work on the complex technology projects.
SMET
In the 1990s, the US’s National Science Foundation wanted to increase focus on Science, Maths, Engineering, and Technology subjects in schools, so they started to group them together and talk about them as a package, rather than individual skillsets. They called it SMET – Science Maths Engineering Technology – which is not something that really rolls off the tongue…
SMET never really took off, and it wasn’t until Dr Judith Ramaley took the helm of the Directorate of Education and Human Resources at the NSF in 2001 that things changed. She realised that SMET was probably doomed to failure so she used her understanding of communication, culture, and society – her skills in humanities, not science – to rearrange the letters into the much more pleasing and science-sounding STEM.
STEM
From that point on, STEM started to gain ground. Governments are always on the look out for catchy phrases and slogans that can capture the attention of the public and convey complex concepts quickly, and that’s exactly what the acronym STEM does.
STEM as a topic has become far more visible than the humanities, you can check the results for yourself on Google Trends – the blue line in the screenshot below is searches for ‘STEM’ and the red line (right at the bottom) is searches for ‘humanities’.
A quick search for ‘funding for STEM’ turns up a range of results, including programs funded to $7m by the federal Department of Education, the Queensland Engaging Science Grants ($3.6m since 2016), $9.77m to fund women in STEM through the WiSE program, and the Snowy Hydro local school STEM fund.
Funding for humanities is more dire. Searching ‘funding for humanities’ shows that the same Department of Education that has allocated millions to STEM says “Support for Humanities and Social Sciences is provided through the Australian Curriculum.” There’s no money, just links to a few other organisations. One of the top results on the first page is for an ABC article talking about how ANU is stepping back from humanities research.
Personally, I find it ironic that it was language and the humanities which activated STEM as a movement in the first place, yet in the intervening 20 years STEM has come to dominate and overshadow other non-science subjects. STEM is now the dominant status, and everything else is positioned in relation to STEM.
But I’m not sure this is how things should be, or even what was originally intended. STEM skills are certainly important, but I don’t think for one second that they are MORE important than other skills, such as critical thinking or communication, and I’m also becoming more and more concerned that STEM skills may be less useful in years to come. There are quite a few signals that STEM skills are no longer in hot demand, and signs that other skills may in fact make someone more desirable in the job market.
FRESH
The skills that I’m talking about are the ones that help us connect and share knowledge, inquire and reason, manage projects and teams, and understand how our society works. I’ve spent ages this week trying to find an existing term which captures all these things I’m talking about – the yin to STEM’s yang – but I haven’t been able to find anything that really works. The British Academy, which is a UK body for humanities and social sciences, came up with SHAPE – Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy which covers some of it but doesn’t explicitly include either of the concepts of English/language/communication or critical thinking/reasoning.
In the end, I played around with the topics and subjects which I think should be included in any counterpoint to STEM and came up with FRESH – Foresight**, Reasoning, English, Society,** and Humanities.
- Foresight – a rapidly growing field, foresight combines logic and insight to help us anticipate future events
- Reasoning – the ability to think critically, ask questions, and evaluate evidence
- English – includes language, literacy, communication, and textual analysis
- Society – how we live together, including civics, economics, and social systems
- Humanities – the human story – history, geography, philosophy, culture
These five areas are commonly taught separately, but FRESH brings them together as a framework for understanding people; how we think, how we communicate, how we’ve lived, and how we’ll navigate what’s ahead. And, just as STEM weaves numeracy through everything it touches, FRESH embeds literacy at every level.
There’s also a lot of alignment between FRESH and what we think of as durable skills. These skills are sometimes called ‘soft’ or ’21st Century’ skills, but I personally like that we’re moving towards calling them durable instead because this really describes how they work – durable skills are the core skills you use across life spaces and work spaces, and you take them with you as you move throughout life. There’s no one official list of durable skills, but they tend to cover things like communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, and cultural competency – check out Skills Builder for an example list – and these are the same things you develop when you focus on the FRESH topics.
STEM skills, on the other hand, sometimes cross over with durable skills (especially around problem solving and innovation) but tend to lean towards technical competencies like coding, flying drones, or analysing data, and these are the skills I was talking about earlier which may be at risk of going stale. Which brings me to the key question:
Are STEM skills actually perishable?
And, if so, should we be focusing on durable FRESH skills alongside STEM skills?
I’m starting to think that the STEM movement may actually have gone far enough – or even too far – and it’s time to right the balance back towards the centre.
Ground rules
I’m going to explain what I mean in a minute, but before we start we need to set a couple of ground rules:
- First, for the purposes of this article, I’m going to position STEM as one half of the coin, with Humanities, English, Communication, Critical Thinking, and Social Studies subjects on the other BUT the binary is just a construct – there are other subjects and skills which don’t fit neatly into either, and there are a plethora of ways you could actually combine subjects into groups or meta-subjects if you wanted. So don’t think that I’m saying the binary is the only way to think about this.
- Also, while we’re going to be interrogating STEM as a concept, and exploring alternatives, I’m not suggesting for one second that STEM is bad, or unnecessary, or that we should stop teaching STEM skills – they are vital and will continue to be incredibly important in the future. So try not to assume I’m being negative, I’m just asking a question.
What makes a skill ‘perish’?
Let’s be honest, perishable is a tough word to swallow. Cambridge Dictionary defines it as:
to die, especially in an accident or by being killed, or to be destroyed
This is not trivial language.
Skills were first described as perishable in the military; some vital skills, such as being able to shoot a weapon, tend to degrade or ‘perish’ if you don’t continue to use or practice them on a regular basis.
Skills that are perishable tend to be technical skills – these relate specifically to one type of system, software, or equipment, and need updating whenever the system changes. I tend to think of these skills in terms of payment processing software – 10 or 20 years ago employers would hire people primarily because they already knew how to use certain payment systems – training someone new would take a long time, and if they could get someone who already knew how to use the equipment they had on site then they would require a lot less training and become productive more quickly. Today, we have User Interface designers and sophisticated onboarding systems which can get new employees up-to-speed quickly, so it’s no longer as important to hire someone based on their technical skills.
In the past, systems, software, and equipment used to hang around in the same format for a lot longer, so the ‘half-life’ of the skills you needed to use those things was longer. If your employer only updated your payments system every 5 years, then your technical skills would remain useful for at least that long.
But now we live in a world where things change much more rapidly. ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Temu, didn’t exist five years ago, and TikTok was where teenagers went to dance.
Students starting a software degree today will be learning coding skills that will be obsolete by the time they graduate – or earlier. In fact, by the time they graduate they may not need to actually code at all.
The CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, recently agreed with this position – watch the video for the full interview. In case you haven’t heard of them, NVIDIA makes GPUs or ‘graphics processing units’, and while once upon a time you might have only really known about them if you played computer games GPUs are now hot property in the age of AI – so much so that NVIDIA is the world’s most valuable company, with a market cap of about $6.5T, and larger than the combined value of Tesla, Netflix, and JP Morgan Chase. It’s about double the size of the Australian sharemarket, and larger than the GDP of Japan.
The CEO of this immensely powerful company, someone who employs almost 18,000 software engineers, recently said this about being able to code:
The purpose of a software engineer is to solve known problems and to find new problems to solve. Coding is one of the tasks. And so if the purpose is not coding, if your purpose literally is coding, somebody tells you what to do, you code it. All right? Maybe you’re going to get replaced by the AI. But most of our software engineers, all of our software, their goal is to solve problems. And it turns out we have so many problems in the company and we have so many undiscovered problems. And so the more time they have to go explore undiscovered problems, the better off we are as a company. Nothing would give me more joy than if none of them are coding at all. They’re just solving problems.
Read that again: “Nothing would give me more joy than if none of them are coding at all.” With that context, it’s hard to see traditional software development skills as anything other than perishable.
Jensen isn’t alone among tech leaders, either. Just last week, Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic (the company behind Claude AI), said something in an ABC News interview that I think is worth quoting in full:
I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever. A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human – understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick – I think that will always be really, really important.
For context, Daniela majored in literature. She’s not a coder or an engineer — she studied books, and then cofounded one of the most influential AI companies in the world. When Anthropic hires, she says they look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious. These are FRESH skills, not STEM.
Interestingly, I couldn’t find a lot within the academic literature on the topic of skill perishability – and almost nothing at all outside of the original military skill context. There was one critical review from the medical field which identified that experts retained their skills for longer than novices, but that was about it. Does this mean that we’re not really worried about how long technical skills will last for? Or is something else at play…
It’s not just the tech bosses
The message that FRESH skills matter, possibly even more than STEM skills, is coming from everywhere. The World Economic Forum has been banging this drum for a while now, and in January they published a piece arguing that in the age of AI, human skills are the new advantage. They make the point that for more than two thousand years, the liberal arts have given people the agency to shape their own futures – the Latin term artes liberales literally means “arts for free people” – and that AI has accelerated a reality that education has been slow to confront: information no longer differentiates people, agency does.
Forbes Australia echoes this, arguing that it’s becoming less important to be able to access data or write code and more important to think deeply about what that data means, and how it will impact us beyond a surface level. In other words, the ability to interrogate, interpret, and communicate is becoming the differentiator.
And from academia, Professor Drew Hemment and Dr Cody Kommers from the Edinburgh Futures Institute put it plainly: “the humanities are more crucial than ever for understanding and shaping the future of AI.” Their Doing AI Differently initiative, run through the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Edinburgh, argues that we need artists, sociologists, historians and poets at the computer terminal, not just engineers, because today’s AI systems are producing outputs more akin to literature than traditional computation, and technical expertise alone cannot address AI’s most critical challenges.
Even Dario Amodei, Daniela’s brother and Anthropic’s CEO, wrote a lengthy essay earlier this year about the risks of powerful AI, and what struck me is that his concerns aren’t about the coding or the technology in-and-of-itself. He’s worried about the potential for economic and societal destruction, power dynamics, governance, and whether humanity has the social and ethical maturity to handle what’s coming. These are all things that fall squarely within FRESH, not STEM. He frames it as humanity’s “technological adolescence” – and the question of whether we survive it isn’t a science question, it’s a humanities question.
So, naturally, we’re defunding the humanities
At the same time that the people building and running these systems are telling us we need more humanities, students are turning away from FRESH disciplines — and in some cases, they’re being actively pushed away.
In Australia, the Job-Ready Graduates scheme (introduced in 2020) sharply increased fees for humanities, law, and social science degrees while lowering them for STEM subjects like nursing, teaching, and engineering. The idea was that pricing would steer students towards “job-ready” fields. The result? Humanities students now pay close to $17,000 per year – a 117% increase – while the Universities Accord (a year-long review of the sector) concluded that the scheme was a failure.
And it’s the students who can least afford it who are hit the hardest. Professor Reuben Bolt, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services) at the University of Sydney, points out that around a third of Indigenous students are enrolled in the humanities and social science disciplines most affected by the fee hikes. He says the scheme has “without question” not narrowed the gap for Indigenous students, and that the high fees may be preventing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students from believing that university can be a place for them. David Pocock has been vocal about this as well, calling the scheme a broken policy that has increased debt, reduced equity, and done nothing to improve workforce planning.
Meanwhile, fewer senior students are choosing creative subjects at school and $50,000 arts degrees are turning people away, so we have less people than ever going into the humanities. It’s a peculiar situation. The people at the very top of the technology industry are saying “we need people who can think critically, communicate effectively, and understand how society works,” while the policy settings are making it harder and more expensive for young people – especially disadvantaged young people – to develop exactly those skills.
If STEM skills are becoming more perishable, and FRESH skills are becoming more valuable, then we’re currently running in the wrong direction.
Moltbook
The reality is that this new world is being shaped minute by minute. Last month, a vibe coded internet chat forum called Moltbook was launched only for AI bots. Humans could observe, but not join in. Personally, it felt to me like a form of live performance art – the bots, having consumed massive amounts of science fiction material during their training, began acting as they thought they should if they could actually coordinate and communicate and said they were going to create a new language to hide their plans from the humans.
It’s since been taken down due to a critical security vulnerability (what a surprise) and the whole thing reminds me of when War of the Worlds was read live on the radio in 1938, causing mass panic and fears of Martian invasions. Moltbook, like other science fiction, fooled just enough people for a short period that we started to question what was true and what was fiction. Prof. Marek Kowalkiewicz, Chair in Digital Economy from QUT (Queensland University of Technology) wrote an excellent review of his own experiments with Moltbook and what I took from it is that we really can’t begin to imagine all of the potential use cases for AI – it could launch new methods of negotiation, new business models, and new cybersecurity nightmares – but what is clear is that we’ll need more than just our tech skills to work through all this.
First Proof
One week ago, ten highly accomplished mathematicians published a paper called First Proof.
Each contributed one of their previously unpublished questions in an attempt to assess AI’s ability to solve novel mathematical problems without any existing data to work from.
While commercial AI systems are undoubtedly already at a level where they are useful tools for mathematicians, it is not yet clear where AI systems stand at solving research-level math questions on their own, without an expert in the loop.
As these ten problems have been solved, but no answers have yet been posted online, the AI must work through them alone. This research is still in the very early stages, but they reported that even the best and most highly regarded AI systems struggled to answer many of their questions.
I mention this to point out that, at this stage at least, it appears that AI needs humans as much as humans need AI to move forward. Likewise, STEM skills can only take us so far; we also need to understand society, be able to think critically and then communicate those thoughts, and be able to apply all this to a range of potential future outcomes. STEM skills should be balanced by FRESH skills – it’s not an either/or situation.
Back to space
I started this article with NASA, and as we come to a close we can return to space to think about what this looks like in practice.
The first AI-planned drive of the Mars Rover that took place last December. There’s a fascinating website which explains what took place and why they conducted this test here.
This was as much a feat of geography, culture, communication, and society as it was about the science. Anthropic and NASA worked together to not only conduct the test, but also to develop shiny websites, draft engaging media releases, and share intriguing visual imagery to capture the attention of society. Graphic designers, copywriters, public relations teams, web developers, and photographers worked alongside scientists to ensure the test was captured and shared as widely as possible. These actions had social consequences, such as engaging the public with Mars and the space program, but they also have economic impacts; new users for Claude and Anthropic, convinced of the safety of the platform after the collaboration with NASA, and more funding for NASA’s JPL from politicians who care more about space science after seeing it on the news.
None of that happens with STEM alone. The science gets the rover to Mars, but it’s the FRESH skills – the communication, the storytelling, the understanding of what makes people care – that bring the rest of us along for the ride.
And that’s really the point of all this. STEM skills aren’t going away, and they shouldn’t. But if we keep treating them as the only skills that matter, the only ones worth funding, or promoting, or celebrating, then we’re going to end up with a generation of young people who can build extraordinary things but can’t explain why they matter, who they’re for, or what happens to society when they go wrong.
If the people building the most powerful technology in human history are telling us they need more people with durable FRESH skills – and they are – then maybe it’s time we listened.
The young people we work with deserve both halves of the coin, not just the shiny one.
What do you think?
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