The STEManifesto©

A 12-Step Program for Overcoming Academic Addiction

The American Dream has become a nightmare. While the specifics of each person’s American Dream are unique, the one common aspiration we share is the desire for a good-paying job.  Why? Because a good-paying job provides income, which gives you options, which, in turn, gives you hope (not to mention food, water, clothes, shelter, and Netflix). Without a good-paying job, you struggle just to survive, let alone thrive.

According to a March 2015 Talk Markets article by Zero Hedge, 92,898,000 Americans are currently NOT in the labor force (resulting in a labor force participation rate of an anemic 62.8% - matching our nation’s all-time worst number), and there are currently 6.5 million Americans who want a job.  Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Labor reported on May 12, 2015 that there are currently 5 million job openings in America.  While many of these jobs pay low wages, a good number are also middle and high-paying jobs. So the question becomes, “Why are there so many unfilled middle and high-paying jobs at a time when there are more people available than jobs? The answer employers give is that there’s a “Skills Gap.” And why is there a skills gap? Because America’s educational system is toast. What follows is my recipe to fix it.

Part therapy, and part tough love, this “12-Step Program” follows a familiar model for overcoming addiction, but instead of connecting with a “Higher Power,” this STEManifesto focuses on strategies for better connecting “Higher Education with Hire Education.”  Let the intervention begin.

Step 1: Give Up

The first step in fixing America’s dysfunctional educational system is to give up. According to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “Every two days, we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization”…and that was in 2010!  So how does education address this?  By teaching our kids more and more and more, and testing more and more and more, and making school days longer and longer and longer, and starting to educate kids in day care, then pre-school, then pre-kindergarten, then kindergarten, then year-round kindergarten, then school, then longer school years, then college, then college for everyone, then grad school….STOP THE MADNESS!  Folks, students can’t learn everything there is to know – it’s impossible – GIVE UP!

Step 2: Giving Up Brings Peace

There, you GAVE UP – doesn’t that feel better? When you finally give up, there is this amazing FREEING feeling, where you can fully exhale, and for the first time in a while, think clearly about the situation.  Plus, once you give up, you can finally let your guard down and stop being defensive all the time, and realize just how powerful and positive giving up can be.  As an educational administrator, you’ll never have to worry again about being blindsided at a PTA meeting by a frenzied parent demanding, “Why did you cut the French impressionistic interpretation class for our 5^th graders?”  But most importantly, once you give up, you can finally pause, ponder, and then prioritize.

When everyone finally understands “We Can’t Do Everything” it forces clarity and prioritization.

Step 3: Focus on the Most Important Things

While there are many noble goals in education, the most important is preparing kids in their areas of giftedness for lifelong high-quality lives and careers. If you have a high-quality job, I can tell you 10 challenges you won’t face every single day. However, if you don’t, then I can tell you 10 challenges (or more) that you WILL face every single day.  Giving up and prioritizing makes it much easier to demarcate between WANTS and NEEDS - those things that are “Nice to have” and those that you “Need to have.”

Step 4: Reframe STEM as a Horizontal Enabler NOT as a Stand-Alone Vertical

When I was in grade school in the 1980’s, what we would consider “STEM” courses back then were discrete vertical fields of study with names like Physics, Data Processing, Trigonometry, and Engineering.  Since then, however, the exponential explosion of computing power has revolutionized, synthesized, and homogenized these and many other silos of study - resulting in a massive convergence of disparate content and constructs into a unified digital ecosystem.  As a result, instead of separate uncoupled verticals, todays knowledge platforms and educational pathways have become blended, blurred, and forever intertwined into a singular computing continuum, providing the efficient underpinnings and connective tissue for integrating and enabling nearly every area of study. (Examples would include biotech, which combines biology and technology, and even radically changing platforms like music, where producers marry downbeats with downloads to synthesize sounds and launch the careers of aspiring new artists).

Step 5: Stop Re-Manufacturing the Wheel

How many people drove to work today, yet can’t explain how the internal combustion engine works?  How many clicked on this link, yet can’t explain how the content came from the cloud (or even define what “the cloud” means)? Here’s the truth. You don’t need to understand the mechanics of these transactions, you just need to know how to use the machine. The reason there are so few STEM graduates is because academia is fixated on making these courses as complicated and cumbersome as possible - making them ends unto themselves. Schools and colleges are bent on forcing every single class to waste years of time and money effectively reinventing the academic wheel instead of focusing on how to drive the car and using it to build a sustainable ecosystem (or whatever). Professors feel it’s their duty to make STEM classes as hard as possible, spending months on proofs - quixotically solving and resolving millions of equations which have already been solved.

Why do you think so many students give up on STEM and drop out? According to an April 2015 article by University of Wisconsin education researcher Mark Connolly entitled, “Education Experts Point to Inadequacies in STEM Teaching,” “Only 19% of students graduate with a STEM degree” and “Only 40% of intended STEM majors actually graduate with those degrees…and a big part of the problem lies in the quality of the STEM teaching.”

Here’s a bold idea: Gesture at the equations and the underlying science which informs these formulas…then pause… and then look your students in the face and tell them that the computers and machines they will be working with in the REAL WORLD JOB MARKET will already have this functionality built in (whether Big Data platforms at IBM, or Indexing Machines at Swagelok, or Internet of Things software at Amazon, or Automotive Sensor Testing at Honda), and then focus the rest of the semester on mastering the machines (computers, robots, sensors, engines) that incorporate these solutions rather than reinventing them.     

Disagree?  Okay, then tell me how many times over the last 20 years you’ve used pencil and paper to solve a physics equation?  That’s what I thought.  Think of how much more prepared our students will be if we stop reinventing the wheel and prioritized real world APPLICATIONS over theoretical EQUATIONS! (Note: This exhortation is for the 95%, not the 5% MENSA-types destined to actually invent new formulaic equations in science and mathematics).

Still disagree? Then visit Dean Kamen’s FIRST Robotics Competition website (showcasing 2015’s slate of 2,904 teams and 73,000 students competing from 19 nations), or speak with Fredon’s Roger Sustar, founder of the annual AWT RoboBots Competition, both of which feature students who have applied advanced manufacturing technology to design and build working robots BEFORE many of them have ever taken a single course in mechanical engineering, calculus, or physics!

Step 6: Uncle Sam Says: A Case Study

The U.S. Army offers a brilliant organizational model and Case Study for reconciling America’s “Education to Employment” skills gap. If you decide to join the Army, every soldier from Fort Benning to Fort Jackson will start by going through Basic Training – a grueling 9-week introduction and indoctrination into our military system and hierarchy. During this time, every soldier will participate and be observed in a variety of activities. What’s great about the Army, however, is that after the 9-week Boot Camp is over, soldiers will move on to Advanced Individual Training (AIT) to identify and master their job specialty, because Uncle Sam recognizes that it “takes all kinds” to make the Army work, and having soldiers focus in their areas of giftedness results in organizational optimization – matching up the smart skinny soldiers with logistics and supply chain management, and the tough strong soldiers with hand-to-hand combat missions.

Step 7: What the Army Can Teach Academia

In 2013, I published a provocative book entitled, Specialist Nation: A Survival Plan for America in which I asserted that academia is graduating class after class of highly indebted (and increasingly unemployed) generalists, while American industry is clamoring for highly focused and qualified specialists – and pleading for our system to stop trying to “Be all things to all people.”  I believe America could take a GIANT leap forward by following the preparation model used by the U.S. Army – namely, having students go through 9 weeks (okay - 9 years) of “Basic Training” learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, and a cross-section of other coursework – and then actively working to “specialize” in their unique areas of talent and interest.

Call me naïve, but I believe every kid is gifted, but not in the narrow academic interpretation defined as “good at math” or “can write essays with above-grade-level vocabulary.”   For me, gifted could also mean,  “Has perfect pitch and can sing flawlessly” or “Can dunk from the free-throw line” or “Can tell what’s wrong with an engine just by listening to it” or “Can invent a functioning robot out of household silverware and a car battery.”

Nobody cares that Peyton Manning can’t bench press 350 pounds, or run a 4.2 in the 40-yard dash; he’ll be in the Hall of Fame because the pattern recognition hardwired in his brain, combined with a cannon of an arm, allows him to hit an open receiver – in stride – 50 yards down the field. Right now our educational system is wired to hold kids back and slow them down by focusing on their weakest link, rather than driving them forward, pulled by what they do best.

Step 8: The Oprah Effect

Around twenty years ago, Oprah grew frustrated with her health, and embarked on an audacious goal to run the Marine Corps Marathon.  What happened?  Well, she went all out and started exercising rigorously, changed her diet, and sure enough she successfully completed the race in 4 hours and 29 minutes.  But then what happened? After the race, she stopped these habits, and all of the weight returned – plus much more! The point is this – she set the wrong goal. Instead of “Running the marathon,” a far superior goal would have been, “Making healthy lifestyle changes that are sustainable for the rest of her life.”

For the past 20 years, nearly every American kid has been told “You HAVE to go to college.”  Unfortunately, like Oprah, this is the wrong (or at the very least an inferior) goal.  Today there are millions upon millions of millennials that listened, went to college, and are now both unemployed AND drowning in over $1.3 TRILLION in student loan debt.  Like the Oprah analogy, the finish line shouldn’t be simply getting a diploma, but rather students should be focusing on building a foundation that best positions them to secure a good-paying job and advancing over their career in their unique area of passion and giftedness.

Step 9: Making Amends

Step 9 of AA’s famous 12-Step program is “Making Amends” …. So here goes.  I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but STEM is more important. It just IS.  When we “Give Up” and are forced to evaluate how America will invest the precious hours available for educating the next generation of students, prioritizing and showcasing STEM-oriented curricula and specialized skills is more important for the SURVIVAL of our kids in the future job market than other topics.  I know I’m going to receive hate mail for saying this, but instead of requiring high school kids to take two years of a FOREIGN language, we should be requiring high school kids to take two years of a PROGRAMMING language!  In our era of scarcity, spending two years learning French is NOT as important as investing those same two years learning how to leverage the machine (C#, Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, etc.) as THOSE are the skills that will better prepare you for a good-paying job. 

Still don’t believe me?  Then take it directly from AmTrust’s Executive Recruiter Jeff Johnston, who lamented during our meeting last month, “Even though we partner with the Top 5 IT search firms in the area, I can never find enough .NET and C# talent. We fill 20 positions, and immediately have another 20 positions to fill the next month – it’s crazy!”

CAUTION: Don’t confuse “getting devices” with “getting developers.”  Last year, our school system proudly proclaimed the purchase of hundreds of Google Chromebooks to help our students get more prepared to excel in our information economy by having more contemporary technology in the classroom. Okay, so my two high school kids went from using spiral-bound notebooks to a clam-shell notebook…which is heavier, breakable, and hundreds of times more expensive.  You see the point?  Just having a computer so you can type words into Word versus writing words on a worksheet isn’t really that much progress.  What IS progress is teaching kids how to USE and LEVERAGE and HARNESS the power of this machine to make humans more productive and effective. What good is spending a significant amount of money on hardware when we don’t spend a commensurate amount of money teaching students how to optimize the programming power and “intelligence” of this cutting edge device (beyond PowerPoint and YouTube class projects on the Life of Mark Twain).

Here’s how Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s public school system and current head of the NewsCorp-owned Edtech company Amplify put it in Wired.com:

“The biggest failure of technology in schools is people thought there was some inherent value to technology, rather than saying the only value in technology is that it enhances teaching or engages kids.  A lot of people looked at this through the technological lens rather than the teaching lens, and that’s a huge mistake.”   

Step 10:   STEM Supersedes Schooling

Before you hit Send on that flaming comment, don’t blame me – it wasn’t my idea.  The fact is, while you were packing your beach towel for a long holiday weekend last year, a single game-changing article was published in the July 1, 2014 edition of USA Today entitled, “Coast to Coast – STEM Jobs Take Longest to Fill,” and which included this quote:

“Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs take more than twice as long to fill as other openings, according to a new Brookings Institution study that provides the most detailed evidence yet of a skills gap that's slowing payroll growth.  Even more surprising, a high school graduate with a STEM background is in higher demand than a college grad without such skills, the report says.”

So, if I read that right, a college graduate that spent $80,000 on a 4-year degree in Philosophy is LESS marketable than an 18-year-old with a STEM background (and no student loan debt). Yeah, that changes everything!

Step 11: Specialized Skills Trump Degrees       

Tragically, there is even MORE bad news for the status quo of our current educational system – and there are MANY MORE data points where this came from.  On July 2, 2014, CNN featured the following article entitled, “Employers Value Skills Over College Degrees” noting:  

“Forget about your GPA or paying for that graduate degree. What employers really care about are the skills you bring to the table. While the vast majority of employees believe their college education has helped them in their career, 72% said getting trained in a specific skill is more highly valued by their employer, according to a survey of more than 2,000 adults by job listing site Glassdoor. Employees with college degrees believe that their education helped get them through the door, but about half say it has no relevance to the work they're actually doing," said Glassdoor's career and workplace expert.” 

In the May 13, 2015 U.S. News & World Report article entitled, “College Board Launches STEM Credential Initiative,” journalist Alan Neuhauser notes that companies have long lamented how U.S. schools teach (STEM) stating, “Dry coursework disconnected from real-world applications, they argue, has repelled thousands of students and left many others ill-prepared to pursue STEM majors or careers, causing a shortfall of qualified workers.”

Quoted in the same article, Project Lead the Way Senior Vice President Anne Jones outlines her innovative collaboration with Advanced Placement this way:

“Each of the initiative’s three pathways – engineering, biomedical science and computer science – will consist of three parts: an introductory “on-ramp” class produced by Project Lead the Way, an Advanced Placement class the year after, and then a “specialization” class by Project Lead the Way that more deeply explores specific careers or topics, such as electronics engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and aerospace engineering,” with one of the ultimate goals being, “Transforming mind-numbing, theoretical coursework into the types of project-based lessons that clearly demonstrate how STEM knowledge applies in the real world.”

Step 12: Using Big Data to go DEEP not WIDE

It turns out that Big Data is both the problem – and the solution – for transforming education as we know it.   Big Data is the problem because there is now too much granular information for any human to be expected to master in 12 years or 1200 years.  Therefore, our educational philosophy must be one which purposefully and strategically stands on the shoulders of those who went before – and rather than fixating on redoing all of the work that got us as a civilization to this point - we must instead commit to recognizing, honoring, and celebrating their contributions, but then quickly go about advancing their innovations by harnessing the power of what they created to manufacture our own generation of breakthrough discoveries (Invent versus Reinvent).

Big Data is also the solution because by leveraging the ability of computers to efficiently harvest billions of data points, we are able to customize and curate curricula for the unique needs of a nation of unique students, and thereby better identify their areas of giftedness, interest, and talent, to steer them towards optimizing these skills for the benefit of both student and society.  In the May 26, 2015 article entitled, “Technology, Collaboration can Personalize Education for American Students,” James Bashan’s “Technology-Enabled Personalized Learning” report by the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation by NC State University noted that this approach can, “Bring the know-how of the educator and the power of technology together to produce that personalized piece, a plan that focuses on a student’s strengths, how they learn, their motivations, and how best to reach them.”

And lest you be tempted to discard this approach as merely the ramblings of an obscure, statistically insignificant researcher, no less than Udacity’s own founder Sebastian Thrun, (co-founder of Google X) has thrown his weight behind this bleeding edge academic construct.  In the June 2, 2015 article “How Nanodegrees can Democratize Tech Education,” Thrun is quoted as saying, “We asked what the right packaging size is, and it became Nanodegrees because we feel we want to give people a new job, and there has to be a certain amount of depth involved,” and summarized by stating, “I think the ultimate value proposition of a good education is a job.”

I offer the following in conclusion.  The ongoing malaise of our “new normal” job market reinforces the fact that our economy is in the midst of massive structural upheaval, as prevailing employment statistics — unemployment, labor force participation and employment-to-population — all document an ongoing economic weakness far deeper than a simple business cycle downturn. Because of this, Americans are increasingly being thrust into survival mode decisions demanding that we prioritize, which unfortunately means that some “important” things have to be moved to make way for “MORE important” things (just like when you pack for a trip, you can’t take your entire wardrobe – some great outfits have to be left home – there’s just not enough room for everything).

In order for America to continue to successfully compete in a global economy, we need to cultivate and nurture a nation of technologically-fluent students, and the only way to do this is to stop thinking of STEM as a vertical area of study (in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and instead understand what it truly is – a horizontal enabler of nearly every area of study, exploration, interaction, communication, and education. Ultimately, it will be the productivity gains driven by this cohort that maintain America’s quantity of products and quality of life.  And just as the balance of commerce once favored specialized tradesmen, then mass production, and which is now quickly boomeranging back towards highly trained artisan practitioners, it is the focused specialists behind the custom 3-D printers, skilled manufacturers, and curated mobile software applications that will secure and protect our nation’s competitive advantage in the burgeoning knowledge economy going forward.

At the end of the day, this STEM Manifesto is just a plea to prioritize productivity, and by embracing this strategic approach throughout our educational system, as Google X co-founder Thrun concluded, “Instead of preparing students for college, we’re preparing students for a career.”

Game. STEM. Match!

Doug O’Bryon
Managing Director

Briarcliff Capital

443-421-0167

dougobryon@gmail.com

www.dougobryon.com

Author of “Specialist Nation: A Survival Guide for America”

Briarcliff Capital: “Manufacturing the ideas that change individuals, institutions, and industries.”

About Briarcliff Capital:  Briarcliff Capital is an agile research and consulting firm leveraging Big Data expertise within technology, healthcare, education, financial, and economic domains to uncover discrete patterns and manufacture the break-through ideas and investments that change individuals, institutions, and industries.