Humanities Strike Back In The STEM Empire

STEAM is rising and not the kind coming from a train engine or tea pot. In recent weeks, I have seen a plethora of articles discussing the value of arts and humanities backgrounds in the job market. In the past couple of decades, the concept of science, technology, engineering, and math or STEM was augmented in some circles by science, technology, engineering, arts, and math or STEAM. Without any formal training in the humanities, this atmospheric scientist is floating another evolution of the concept called STHEAM. Here’s why.

STHEAM doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way STEM and STEAM do, but humanities play a vital role in our society. In my role as an associate dean in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, the concept of STHEAM plays out before my eyes daily. I am trained as an atmospheric scientist with membership in the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, respectively. It’s my election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that further stimulated my interest in this disciplinary convergence.

Ballet class on the stage of the theater with light and smoke. Children are engaged in classical exercise on stage.

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“By integrating the arts into STEM, STEAM-focused curricula incorporate the study of the humanities, language arts, dance, drama, music, visual arts, design, new media and more,” according to a website at the University of Central Florida. “Students who explore and master any of these subjects can make themselves more marketable in today’s workforce, as 57 percent of senior leaders value soft skills more than hard skills, according to a 2018 LinkedIn report,” the website went on to say.

Before I get on with the discussion of why we want to elevate humanities in the acroynym, I do have a slight bone to pick with the use of “hard” and “soft” skills mentioned in the LinkedIn report. I have opined on this before in a piece entitled, “It’s Time To Retire The Terms ‘Hard’ And ‘Soft’ Science.” While focused on the sciences, framing scholarship as “hard” or “soft” establishes a pecking order or perception of importance. “The generational challenges facing society today like global pandemics, climate change, food insecurity, water supply, and energy generation will not be addressed in narrow disciplines. And they certainly will not be addressed from a position of hubris either,” I wrote then. I went on to say, “Humility will be required as well as a mutual respect for all scholarly disciplines.”

So why should humanities be elevated when it is implicitly captured in the “A” of STEAM? “The humanities explore, interpret, and preserve the diversity of human cultures, ideas, practices and experiences, past and present,” wrote the National Endowment of the Humanities website. “They are the languages, religions, laws, philosophies, and customs that make us distinct. They are our history and our cultures, the ideas and movements that have shaped societies throughout time," It went on to say. These things are essential to current society, and employers increasingly know it.

My colleague Benjamin Wolff wrote an excellent piece at Forbes.com on humanities and the arts in the corporate world. “Surprisingly, one of the most maligned groups, arts and humanities graduates, is well positioned to thrive in this disrupted environment,” he noted in 2025. A more recent analysis by Forbes found that humanities and social sciences graduates were found to be some of the most versatile majors. “According to new LinkedIn data provided exclusively to Forbes, the key to young professionals successfully navigating today’s uneven job market may depend on whether their degree is versatile enough to land a job in several different industries,” wrote Courtney Connley-Hampton.

Writing in Fortune magazine, Jason Ma further explored the value of the humanities in a STEM-saturated marketplace. In fact, he noted that one of the founders of Anthropic believes that studying humanities will be more important going forward as AI continues to be ubiquitous in our world. This narrative is not just coming from the CEOs. Fouzia Munir’s recent scholarly article published in the journal Societies argued that humanities education should be a part of collegiate-level engineering curriculum. Skills developed by the humanities are vital for design, team dynamics, and considering the human perspective. Lord of the Flies and thermodynamics, who knew, right?

Just over a week ago, I wrote and article using historical records from Thomas Jefferson to establish the weather on July 4, 1776. My goal was to compare the weather on that date with July 4, 2026 and discuss climate change. Anna Stenport is a convergent scholar with expertise in Arctic and Nordic cinema, media, and cultural studies at the University of Georgia. As Dean of the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, she often mentions the power of the ampersand. It’s time for STHEAM.