E-Campus News – Nicholas Waite
“At first glance, arguing that we urgently need to pay more attention to STEM subjects seems alarmist. It’s a well-funded area, almost universally acknowledged to be essential to our social and economic development, and it’s more popular than ever. I live in the UK, and here alone 27 universities recently received over £200m in STEM funding, and more than 98,000 students were accepted on science courses (an increase of 18 percent) at the start of the 2014/2015 academic year. And these figures pale in comparison to the extent of STEM funding and enrollment in the U.S. So what’s there to complain about? Unfortunately, whilst such figures are undoubtedly promising, they don’t mean that we can relax, confident that future generations will possess the skills they need to thrive in a digital society. In 1990, Carl Sagan said “we live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology”, and sadly this still largely holds true today.”(more)