STEM topics and recruiting

There has been a significant effort over many years to get more students into STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and math) majors. There has been a lot of money thrown at it.

Honestly, most of the STEM proposals that I’ve seen are totally boring – and if I'm bored (a person who likes STEM subjects), I can only imagine what potential students think. Many proposals aimed at STEM recruiting, focus on recruiting students into STEM majors. However, what about developing STEM courses with that appeal to non-STEM students?

I did this with a keyword advertising course where the student utilized a search engine advertising technology (Google Adwords) to manage an online advertising campaign for local firms, while competing with other students in the Google Online Marketing Challenge. The Google Online Marketing Challenge (the Challenge) is an educational innovation for students to learn the complexities associated with online marketing while simultaneously helping students develop insights about working with real business clients. In the inaugural 2008 competition, over 8,000 students in 1,620 teams from 47 countries across six continents competed.

In Spring 2008, I attempted to recruit 5 students for one team to compete in the 2008 Challenge and to run the course as an independent study. Via just viral marketing among students, I had 25 students enroll, and this was for a course that never was listed on the university course schedule. Also, the make-up of the student was about half and half from my college (technology) and half from the business college, with one student from the advertising (communications).

For Spring 2009, I offered the course again. When registration opened, the course quickly filled up (actually overfilled) with 50 students from 5 colleges (IST – 22; Business – 8, Communications – 18, Liberal Arts – 1; DUS – 1).

In both semesters, it was amazing that a technology-based course was so attractive to supposedly non-technology students. Search engine marketing is very technology focused (e.g., online auctions, geo-targeting, traffic estimation, cost-benefit analysis, etc.). However, although the course was technology-based, the students did not view the course as such because the STEM aspects were imbued within the overall domain of online marketing.

As outlined in Driving Change through Diversity and Globalization, Transformative Leadership in the Academy by John Anderson (2004), a foundational assumption of incorporating diversity into the college classroom is that positive intellectual and social outcomes will occur. The key outcome that we in academia aim for is intellectual diversity. Therefore, courses like one here offer significant progress for increasing enrollments and also diverse enrollments in the STEM area.

I am really thinking that STEM topics integrated with other non-STEM topics is way to go address the shortfall of STEM expertise in the current student population.