Enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, and math is rising—and has the potential to overshadow interest in the liberal arts. How do schools preserve a balance?

You’ve heard of STEM? Liberal arts are so last century. Fifty years ago, one in five college degrees was in the humanities or social sciences; today, it’s one in 20.

High schools haven’t changed their liberal arts requirements, but the electives that upper-class students rush to take have more to do with robotics and coding than with contemporary fiction or cultural anthropology. So what’s happening to the soft skills—ethics and moral judgment; knowledge of human nature; an ability to write persuasively, tell a good story, ask searching questions, and analyze evidence; an understanding of history and of the values and traditions of other cultures?

Sarah Schmidt chairs the World Languages Department at De Smet Jesuit High School, where, she says, the Jesuits have always maintained that “to work with and for people throughout the world, the best way is to understand them—their history, their language, their culture. They want to make sure that’s never overshadowed.” De Smet has expanded its electives, though, and it’s the STEAM courses (with art added to the mix) that are the draw. As a result, principal Kevin Poelker sees “a bit of a decrease in some of the arts and upper-level humanities classes. We have an increased number of students going on trips, though, and that’s cultural immersion…” Will it provide the same rigor the old humanities electives did? “No. I think it’s going to look different. What’s the impact of that? I don’t know yet.”

Schmidt worries about students so bent on engineering or science careers that they’re heading off to schools that won’t require any liberal arts. “I was a pharmacy student taking Latin for fun,” she says, “and I fell in love with it and wound up teaching it.” That kind of serendipity is fast becoming less possible as colleges drop liberal arts programs and faculty.

“Programmers can do amazing things with robotics and AI, but unless they understand ethics, we’re all in trouble,” says Carla Federman, chair of history and social sciences at MICDS, “and the opposite is also true: Being able to use data sets and statistical analysis is a very important part of what good historians do.” Her class didn’t just talk about the Battle of Gettysburg: “We used an app and VR goggles to actually go to the site, look at the topography, and hypothesize on how it would have affected the battle. We don’t see STEM and the liberal arts as silos. We look for places to make connections.”

That’s why Rockwood School District talks about STEM-Plus. “STEM is more than those four areas. It’s a set of skills that are transferable,” says Bob Deneau, coordinator of K–12 STEM. Students learn to use data and math to think critically, to research a project’s history and societal impact, to understand the people they’re designing for. “We bring STEM into language arts or social studies; we talk about novel engineering, where you take a problem from whatever you’re reading and students have to engineer and design solutions.”

It’s easier to think of clear examples that bring STEM to the liberal arts; the opposite transfer is, by its very nature, a little fuzzier, less obviously relevant. “Before, there was so much exposure, it was happening without question,” Poelker says. “Now we have to articulate the value of the humanities. But that’s fairly easy to do.”