Teach STEAMpathIE

The US graduate student STEM structure is badly in need of reform. PhDs can't find academic jobs and they are trained for little else, the training takes too long and is too expensive and posts docs in purgatory become indentured scientists with burdensome debt.

One alternative is to train graduate STEAM students in entrepreneurship. No, that does not mean only creating companies, but rather creating user defined value through the discovery and deployment of bioscience and engineering innovation. It also means including arts education along side science education. Connect the dots:

• Arts education is a key to creativity, and
• Creativity is an essential component of, and spurs innovation, and
• Innovation is, agreed to be necessary to create new industries in the future,
• Since entrepreneurs innovate.
• New industries, with their jobs, are the basis of our future economic well being.

But, the pathway to biomedical and clinical entrepreneurship should not start with graduate students or professional schools. It need to start much sooner in p-12 education.

Pioneers make progress possible, but in America, STEM education (science, tech, engineering and math) needs plenty of improvement. In 2015, 15-year-olds across the country ranked 38th in math and 24th in science out of 71 developed countries, according to Pew Research.

China, India, Russia and other developing countries are winning the race to produce future scientists, Nobel Prize winners and manufacturing supervisors. Small businesses create two-thirds of net new jobs. Therefore, entrepreneurship and STEM programs are important to America’s prosperity.

STEM is about teaching tech and getting jobs. Of course employers can hire only from the talent market they’re seeing. That’s where higher ed needs to get a lot more active and creative. While over all, the number of STEM graduates from American colleges has been increasing since 2010, the Pew data show that:

• Black and Hispanic adults are underrepresented among all STEM college graduates compared with their share in the general population.
• Women aren’t earning computing or engineering degrees at anywhere near their levels of participation in higher education.  

Basically, things are out of whack. That these aren’t new phenomena doesn’t make them any less important. If anything, it makes the situation more urgent.

BMETALS is something else but has the same problems.

A program in STEM/BMETALS entrepreneurship should provide:

1. A curriculum and learning objectives that are market defined and that seeks to integrate technical feasibility (STEM) with business model validity (entrepreneurship) with understanding people and their wants and needs (humanities and the arts).

Here are some learning objectives for a STEAMpathie program at an engineering school.

2. Less expensive to learn

3. Part of a platform that includes resources, networks, mentors, experiential learning and access to investors

4. Options for working with industry, for industry or creating a new industry

5. Knowledge exchange programs

6. Integration into regional innovation ecosystems

7. Career development guidance

8. Consistent funding not subject to the winds of politics

9. Integrated into K-12 STEM education

10. User friendly and conforms to the workplace of the future

Graduates also need to be prepared to address age and gender discrimination by using persuasion, negotiation other soft skills and working in virtual, global, high performance teams.

The STEMie coalition is leading the charge. The goal is to unite the “islands of programs out there” and help invention education “talk” to entrepreneurship education and take those inventions to the marketplace, said STEMIE Coalition CEO Danny Briere.

A National Academy of Sciences report concluded:

 "Assessing student learning outcomes across the breadth of American higher education is a daunting task, confounded by the number and types of institutions, the broadly varying backgrounds of the students matriculating, and, importantly, the fact that curricular decisions are—appropriately—in the hands of local faculty members, not subject to any broad, national consensus except in the case of accreditation of specific disciplines. For these reasons, as well as the lack of agreement on the most effective ways to assess student learning outcomes, we found that large, controlled, randomized testing of the hypothesis that integrated education would lead to educational and employment benefits are rare and likely to remain so. Nonetheless, we found abundant narrative and anecdotal evidence, some evidence from research studies, and, very importantly, a broad, national groundswell of interest in developing approaches to integrated education. Though causal evidence on the impact of integration on students is limited, it is this committee’s consensus opinion that further effort be expeditiously exerted to develop and disseminate a variety of approaches to integrated education and that further research on the impact of such programs and courses on students be supported and conducted."

Four processes are part of the learning goals the coalition has outlined for students:

1. Scientific method: Proving hypotheses

2. Engineering design: Being given a problem and solving a problem

3. Invention: Finding the problem (as opposed to being given the problem) and solving it

4. Entrepreneurship: Finding an opportunity to apply the invention

Finally, since the 4th Industrial Revolution will be driven by not just STEM, but those with creativity, communication, collaboration and empathy, we should rethink STEM to STEAMpathie.

On the opposite side of the coin, the humanities are struggling to be relevant in the face of rising student debt and incorporating STEM in to their degree programs.

To be successful, entrepreneurs, regardless of their age, need education, resources, networks, mentors, experience, peer support and career guidance. BiMETALs is the new STEM.

STEAM entrepreneurship, like physician entrepreneurship, is a formula to create innovation and grow economic development. It only happens when edupreneurs adopt an entrepreneurial mindset with the goal of creating entrepreneurial schools and colleges. It should pervade education from k-20.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@SoPEOfficial