With both of my parents as graduate-level STEM professors and my brother a civil engineer, I am no stranger to indoctrination into STEM’s superiority. As a junior premedical biology major engaged in biomedical engineering research, I was taught early that exploration of the humanities was a hobby, not a pursuit of equal intellectual weight. In fact, I have spent the majority of my life dying on the hill that STEM preprofessional education is flawless and guarantees success.
Yet success is a subjective term. What strikes me is the way its definition within STEM education has shifted away from the pursuit of knowledge and toward the optimization of return on investment (ROI): salary projections, acceptance rates, and five-year earnings reports.
To appreciate how deeply the preprofessional STEM mindset diverges from the original purpose of higher education, we must look back to the origins of universities and the liberal arts.
The Università di Bologna, founded in the 11th century, grew from a gathering of students and masters into a leading center for law, philosophy, and the arts. Stemming from this tradition, the liberal arts became central to other medieval universities, with grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy forming the backbone of an education devoted to knowledge itself rather than narrow training. The Enlightenment broadened this foundation, with Newton and Locke fostering empirical inquiry, secular thought, and a celebration of knowledge for its own sake, and science began to bear the promise of discovery.
The historical record thus suggests that higher education was not originally designed as a rat race toward the greatest financial return, but as a space to expand the mind. Against that backdrop, consider today’s preprofessional STEM tracks: pathways designed chiefly to secure the next credential, whether graduate school or a professional gateway. In these settings, course sequences and classroom practices often encourage checklists, optimization, and survival rather than curiosity or integrative thinking.
Engineering appears to work; the curriculum is structured with a coherent, cumulative curriculum that allows graduates to apply skills immediately or pursue advanced study and boasts a five-year ROI, standing at an average of 326.6%. However, its very specialization can narrow the educational aperture, leaving little room for ethical and historical inquiry that would situate technical problem-solving in a wider human frame.
Pre-med offers neither the immediate practical payoff of engineering nor a community of students motivated primarily by the intrinsic purpose of learning. It is loosely organized and unspecialized. In my experience, these four years feel like an inefficient MCAT prep course that costs nearly $400,000 and leaves me with a Bachelor of Science in biology, enough of a credential to become a high school science teacher.
It feels like the STEM undergraduate education has little to do with knowledge cultivation. In fact, as most pre-meds know, academics often fall to the wayside when it comes to fulfilling the never-ending resume expectations of research, clinical work, volunteering, shadowing…the list goes on. Academics become boiled down to school name, GPA, and class choices. The return portion of the ROI calculation is now in the form of medical school acceptances, as this degree alone will keep me in the financial negatives until my hair turns gray. And I believe the professors recognize this. They know that none of us are there to become experts on any of the topics and are much more concerned about the letter grade. We’re left with pandemic-era flipped classroom models and mandatory interactive assignments that feel simply like a proof of life.
The humanities provide a useful contrast. I am currently enrolled in an art history class, which I began expecting an easy A. However, when the first class made a reference to an architectural style I recognized from a previous course, my interest was unexpectedly piqued, and that evening I decided to do the readings. The curricular continuity and student effort thoroughly impressed me, particularly their engagement with optional reading and discussion to enhance their experience. These fields more openly protect knowledge as an end in itself. That stance does not negate careers. It simply refuses to subordinate learning to a spreadsheet.
I believe that fostering a similar environment of learning is very possible for STEM classes, including my own premedical journey. I am not against gaining competence across the core scientific fields, but more effort must be made to find the continuity and overlap. In this case, that overlap is so very clear to me: the human body and medical interventions. I ask for the development of a premedical concentration that restores meaning to the sciences by showing their immediate relevance to the lives we hope to save. “Chemistry of Hormones,” for example.
I say this not as an outsider but as a beneficiary of STEM. I want my courses to actually prepare me for medicine, and to form me as a thinker and a citizen. At present, too many STEM classrooms feel like staging grounds for applications rather than communities of learning. The cost is not only boredom or burnout — it is a generation of technical experts who have had neither the time nor space to enjoy the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake as well as engage deeply with the beauty of the human arts and theoretical inquiry –– fields too often eclipsed by the constant preoccupation of monetary success and graduate school fitness.
Artwork by Nicole Mousad