Focus on STEM education only, good or bad?

[brrian27]

I think FIRST is the perfect example of STEM education done right. In my experience during high school, FRC obviously taught me a lot about engineering and technology. I've always been interested in engineering, and FRC reinforced that. But beyond that, FRC got me hooked on business and other aspects of the competition. Now, as a college freshman, I am trying to somehow balance STEM and other interests, but finding it more difficult. But, my university does a pretty good job actually at mixing entrepreneurship and engineering.

Education needs to be less compartmentalized. As others have said, STEM majors should learn business, literature, philosophy, etc. and vice versa. I would love to see more combined majors, such as a business/engineering combo, but I don't know if that is practical or useful.

In the end, we need to be educated in more than STEM. We should be building robots, not becoming one.

[cxcad]

How is this modified STEM education different than a liberal arts education? It seems that the more we extend the acronym, the closer we come to the liberal arts ideal. There's nothing wrong with that as I personally think that a liberal arts education with a strong technical focus is great for aspiring engineers and scientists.