STEM: Branching Out

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has awarded $231,000 in grants to support Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) outreach.

Affecting a worryingly reductionist tenor, FAA Deputy Administrator Bradley Mims states: “If kids can dream it, they can do it. It’s up to us to light the path for them.”

Three of the FAA grants are earmarked for university STEM outreach programs whereby students typically under-represented in STEM and aviation fields may be urged beyond alternate aspirations for purpose of contemporaneously filling future high-tech jobs and current progressive quotas. The schools will apply the grant funds to the design and implementation of drone-centered immersion programs, summer camps, after-school programs, and community outreach efforts that will—ostensibly—educate and inspire youth from elementary, middle, and high schools.

The STEM outreach grants are to be awarded to the following universities:

• North Carolina State University $125,000
• Kansas State University $100,000
• Sinclair Community College in Ohio $6,000

 The FAA asserts the grants build on the agency’s efforts to inspire future generations of aviators. Specific initiatives include the FAA’s Adopt-A-School Program; Airport Design Challenge, in which K-12 students design airports using the video game Minecraft; the Aviation Career Education (ACE) Academies; and the Youth in Aviation Task Force. Earlier this the FAA awarded $5-million in grants to fund aviation classes at higher-education institutions, high schools, state and local governments, and flight-schools.

U.S. Department of Labor statistics identify well north of one-million job vacancies across the gamut of STEM industries. As only 16% of contemporary U.S. college students are enrolled in STEM curricula, the likelihood of filling those critically important, high-paying jobs with Americans is slim.

Between 2000 and 2010, demand for STEM professionals increased by a factor of three. Between now and 2025, demand for STEM professionals is expected to grow by almost ten-percent. Year after year, maturing technologies occasion wonders and woes in equal measure. Advances in automation and artificial intelligence have saved lives and enriched living; they’ve also rendered obsolete innumerable jobs upon which the U.S. middle-class formerly subsisted. Millions of good-paying factory, assembly, warehouse, and trucking positions are now gone—vanished like the snows of past winters and Disco.

Only by stoking interest in STEM fields and bettering accessibility to STEM education is the American dream—not to mention the whole of modern, industrialized society—apt to survive the fits and upheavals of a world economy driven more so by silicone and smarts than iron and muscle, and a job-market predicated upon the perpetuation of technology’s advancement.

FMI: www.faa.gov