What Is ‘STEM’? The Definition Is Evolving

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Mahera Walia pulled off a feat: Shortly after graduating last year with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Northwestern University, she landed a well-paying job at a strategic consulting firm based in Boston. But Walia, who came to the United States from India, has an uncertain future here. Although her employer is sponsoring her, her odds of winning the lottery for an H-1B work visa are about 1 in 3 at best.

That means she has no idea what she’ll be doing, or what country she’ll be in, after this summer. Walia, however, believes that Northwestern has the power to give her an additional two years in the United States. In fact, many other colleges have already done what Walia is seeking, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Yale University.

The institutions have reclassified some programs like economics as STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. While the change sounds like an obscure bureaucratic shuffle — switching the program code number in a taxonomic scheme maintained by the Department of Education — it has major implications for how attractive a program might be to international students at a time when competition for them is heating up.

The change allows such students to remain in America longer after graduation. International students are eligible to work in the United States for a year after graduating, a period called Optional Practical Training, or OPT. Those in fields designated as STEM by the Department of Homeland Security, however, get two years on top of that. That also gives them a couple more cracks at the visa lottery, making them more attractive to employers worried about employee turnover.

While the idea has taken hold especially among economics departments, colleges are also reclassifying other programs not traditionally thought of as STEM disciplines. Some information-science programs have made the switch. At New York University, journalism, classical art and archaeology, and applied psychology all have the designation. The University Assembly at Cornell University has asked administrators to take a comprehensive look at all programs to determine which should receive the STEM designation.

The reclassifications illustrate the fundamental challenge of categorization, especially with a concept like STEM, which has always been tricky to precisely define. In many economics programs, which have become more quantitative over the years, a STEM designation won’t raise eyebrows. But what about a classics course with a strong digital-humanities component, or a journalism program with a heavy emphasis on sophisticated data crunching?

Academe’s ‘Stemification’

The skilled-labor market is undergoing “stemification” — a process of digitization and technological sophistication that naturally also changes the disciplines that prepare students for this new world, says Rahul Choudaha, executive vice president of global engagement and research at Studyportals, a company that recruits international students online.

“Just putting programs in one bracket because they don’t have ‘mathematics’ or ‘engineering’ in their title doesn’t do justice to what STEM fields actually are today,” he said. “The interdisciplinary nature of every field is becoming a lot more dominant now than it was ever before.”

How academe regards STEM is fluid. Programs and disciplines evolve. That’s certainly the case for economics. “Contemporary economics, with its reliance on formal mathematical and computational models, classical statistical techniques, and modern machine learning tools, is clearly a STEM subject,” wrote Lawrence Blume, chair of Cornell’s economics department, in an email. “It just makes sense to have the content of our program accurately classified.”

In a hyper-political environment, there is a danger that higher-education critics might view the reclassifications as cynical attempts by universities to misuse the spirit of the STEM extension for international students. But that’s only by people who don’t really understand how major universities work, said Lawrence J. Christiano, chair of Northwestern’s economics department, which is pushing for the undergraduate program to receive the STEM designation.

The change needs the blessing of layers of bureaucracy, and each level has Javert-types at each corner ready to pounce on rule-breakers, Christiano said. In other words, there’s no danger of a major university designating as STEM, say, a basket-weaving course.

“There’s no opportunity to pull a dollar bill out of the cash register,” Christiano said. “It’s not our provenance at the university to decide what immigration policy is or what these categories are. Our responsibility is to be truthful to one another and to the government, and we go through hell to do that.”

For now, Walia, the Northwestern student, must wait. The change from 45.0601 (“economics, general”) to 45.0603 (“econometrics and quantitative economics”) could mean the difference between having to go back to India or being allowed to continue her blossoming career in the United States. She’s unclear whether a change in classification at Northwestern would apply retroactively to her situation.

When she was applying for colleges, she wasn’t thinking far enough ahead to weigh post-graduation options. But the calculation of high-school students has changed, she says.

“I kick myself for that now,” she said. “I was a proactive high-schooler, but this just wasn’t on my radar. We live in a different geopolitical climate than back in 2013. Everyone I speak to says it was so much easier back then to work in the U.S. Nowadays, 18-year-olds in other countries are thinking differently because they have to.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.