WaPo: For Innovative Talent, It’s Both Art and Science

This from yesterday’s Washington Post:

We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.

The debate about art vs. science in hiring is an interesting one.   This is one person’s take on why the artificial boundary between the two may hold us back when it comes to innovation.

Citing some of the world’s renown innovators as interdisciplinarians, the author takes on a real issue.

Namely, we lament the number of liberal arts degrees vs. the STEM degrees, but miss the point that for STEM trained leaders to be effective, they have to be liberal arts thinkers.

An operative passage:

Many in government and business publicly question the value of such an education [liberal arts]. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but they’re also nimble thinkers who know to consider chemistry’s impact on society and the environment.

Enjoy!