A STEM-Literate Citizenry
From Richard Larson
What fraction of seats offered for sale each week by your local movie theater are sold to customers? Think for a minute before proceeding. Many people estimate 40% or 50%. In fact, many of you might have been turned away recently from an opening weekend of a blockbuster film, so you might even guess closer to 100%. Well, the typical correct answer across the USA is about 5%. That’s right, about 5% of all movie theater seats offered for sale during a week are actually sold to paying customers. How can this be, when all we see is nearly filled theaters? The answer is that most of us go to see films on Friday and Saturday nights, when the seats are relatively filled, not the Tuesday 11:00 AM showing when you might be the only customer in the theater. Your own appearance during busy times creates a significant selection bias. You as customer experience a busy theater. The owner of the theater sees 95% empty seats. Both are correct.

Why do I speak about such a “non-academic” thing in a STEM newsletter? Because this is an academic issue: Our ability to reason properly with numbers and statistics. We need to be knowledgeable interpreters of data-informed situations. We need to read statistics-laden reports with appropriate skepticism. Recent news articles have created some controversy over the national need for emphasis on STEM education, the reports suggesting that we now have an over-abundance of Ph.D.s’ with science degrees and that graduating engineers do not do actual engineering for very many years during their careers. It is true that some science-trained Ph.D.s are unemployed and that many with degrees in engineering go off and do other things, often within a few years of graduation. It’s also true that we currently have hundreds of thousands of STEM-focused job openings.

But my point is this: Becoming knowledgeable about STEM is not about the 0.01% who might become Ph.D. researchers or the 2% who might become engineers. In this data-informed, technology intensive 21st Century, the entire populace needs to become STEM literate. We all need STEM thinking skills. Many apparently non-STEM jobs have become STEM jobs, especially in the trades. Do you know that the average new car has about 50 microprocessors? Forget about crawling under it with a few of your Dad’s tools to fix it! And Moore’s Law of computers has affected most other trades as well. But perhaps the most important reason for everyone to become STEM literate is to build a more informed citizenry. In that way we individually and collectively become better decision makers about all the options that a democracy faces. STEM is not only for Ph.D. researchers. It’s for all of us!

Richard Larson is the Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He is also the Director of MIT LINC and the Principal Investigator of MIT BLOSSOMS.

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