What Is STEM and What Is a STEM Degree?

For better or worse, advances in STEM have created the conditions around you. History is riddled with advances in medical science, engineering marvels that became commonplace and then obsolete, and innovative technologies that either made tangible improvements to people's lives or proved destructive. STEM-trained individuals made each of these discoveries, even if some of their education was rudimentary by current standards.

STEM education is any program with an emphasis in one of the four STEM components. STEM students generally take coursework in a variety of science and math subfields, including biology, chemistry, physics, algebra, trigonometry, and calculus.

Most of these disciplines underpin engineering and technological knowledge, so they're useful in all varieties of STEM. For example, most types of engineers need to understand the effects of physical stresses on the structures they design, which calls for knowledge of both physics and calculus.

Most people take STEM degrees to include any program in the natural and physical sciences, computer science and information technology, any variety of engineering, and mathematics. This typically excludes the social sciences, except where psychology overlaps with brain physiology and biology.

One debated topic is whether STEM includes medicine and the health sciences. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) doesn't include doctors and nurses in its list of STEM occupations, and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) doesn't list medicine as a STEM field. But ACT, Inc. — the company behind the ACT college admissions test — classifies medicine and health as STEM majors.

The latest data from the NCES places engineering as the most popular STEM subject for undergraduates, with biology and biomedical science a close second. Men account for 76% of engineering graduates, but women dominate biology at 64%.

STEM careers are as wide-ranging as STEM degrees. For example, a biology major might work as a biological technician in a university laboratory before becoming a food scientist for a food and beverage company. Similarly, a math graduate may analyze numbers as an operations research analyst before deciding to pursue an actuarial certification.

As a group, STEM occupations are growing at a faster than average rate of 10.8%. The BLS projects a total of 10,994,200 STEM jobs nationwide by the end of 2031. The fastest growing job, statistician, might be best suited for math majors with a master's degree. But the second fastest, information security analyst, is attainable with an undergraduate cybersecurity degree.

According to BLS data, the following are the five most popular STEM careers by number of practitioners. Technology and engineering occupations dominate this list.