Arts education is as important as STEM

What's this about?

People disagree about whether arts classes matter as much as science, tech, design, and math.

The key question asks if both groups of subjects work just as well in every place.

What supporters say

• Arts and STEM can work together, not compete, because art builds design, clear speech, and new ideas.
• Arts help students build skills that STEM may not teach as much, such as joy in learning, teamwork, and fresh thinking.
• Arts support many jobs and businesses, including music, film, theater, design, and museums.

What critics say

• STEM has special jobs in public life and the work world, such as health care, building, and computer work.
• Research does not yet show that arts classes work just as well as STEM classes for school or future jobs.

How to read this

The number of points on each side does not show who is right; look at how strong the proof is for each point.

The bottom line

The arts have real value and should stay in school. They can also help students learn STEM, but the proof does not show that arts and STEM matter equally in every setting.

Arts education is often presented as a rival to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The evidence suggests a more qualified conclusion: the arts have important benefits of their own and can strengthen STEM, but research does not show that the two fields are equally effective or equally important in every setting.

The case for

Arts education develops abilities that STEM does not fully target. Reviews have found plausible or positive links between arts learning and motivation, creativity and social development. A lottery-based study also reported gains in students’ social and emotional outcomes, school engagement and some disciplinary measures.1

Visual-arts instruction may help students practise creative habits such as exploring ideas, trying again and finding several possible solutions. But that finding comes from a limited mixed-methods study, so it should not be treated as proof that all arts programs produce the same results.

The arts also matter beyond classroom performance. Government economic data show that arts and cultural production support substantial employment and economic activity. That suggests arts-related skills serve a major social and economic sector, rather than being merely decorative or optional.2

The strongest argument for treating arts and STEM with equal respect is that they can be complementary rather than competing subjects. Reviews of STEAM programs describe ways that communication, design, creativity and interdisciplinary problem-solving can contribute to STEM learning. Other research suggests that students can move from arts-focused study into science education when they receive appropriate support.3

This case supports keeping the arts firmly in the curriculum and recognizing their distinct value. It does not, however, show that arts education delivers the same academic or workforce results as STEM.

The case against

The main problem with the parity claim is that research has not established equal effectiveness on a common scale. OECD and RAND reviews describe positive or promising findings, but also point to limited causal evidence, inconsistent definitions and wide differences among programs. They find weak evidence that arts participation reliably transfers into broad gains in reading, mathematics or general cognitive ability.4

Some long-term studies report better academic, civic and educational outcomes among students involved in the arts. Yet participation is not random. Students who receive more arts education may also differ in family resources, schools or communities, making it difficult to separate the effect of the instruction from the circumstances around it. The randomized study provides stronger evidence for selected social and engagement outcomes, but it does not demonstrate parity with STEM.

STEM also has distinctive public and labor-market roles. National indicators show large-scale STEM degree production, scientific employment, research activity and employer demand, supporting investment aimed at technical capacity, innovation and workforce preparation (see Figure 2).5 These indicators do not mean the arts lack value. But when a government’s goal is economic competitiveness or technical expertise, they make a universal equal-priority policy harder to justify.

The comparison is also partly a matter of values. Studies measure different goals, including test scores, earnings, innovation, well-being, citizenship and cultural expression. No agreed framework currently shows how those outcomes should be weighed against one another. Economic data on the arts cover the wider cultural sector, not only school arts education, while the strongest causal study examines selected outcomes and settings rather than comparing the arts directly with STEM.

The bottom line

The evidence strongly supports the narrower claim that arts education is important. It offers distinctive educational, social, creative, cultural and economic benefits, and it can complement STEM.

But the evidence is much weaker for strict parity. It does not show that arts education is equally effective, or deserves equal priority, across every educational purpose. STEM has better-documented links to technical workforce needs, while arts evidence is stronger for engagement, social-emotional development, creativity and cultural participation (see Figure 3).

The most defensible conclusion is therefore conditional: schools should treat the arts as substantively important and avoid reducing them to an afterthought, while deciding priorities according to local goals, program quality and the outcomes being pursued.