India's New Caste System - STEM at the Top, Humanities at the Bottom: And the price we pay

In a world where the most urgent challenges; climate change, mass migration, political radicalization, AI ethics; are as much moral and philosophical as they are technical, what does it mean to produce professionals who can calculate everything and contemplate nothing?

In today’s India, there is only one acceptable career path: STEM. Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics - the golden tickets promising legitimacy, economic progress, and measurable outcomes. Choose science as your default option. If you don't get through, there is commerce to become a CA. And if you still don’t find your footing there, then you "settle" for the arts.

This isn't just anecdotal. It's a caste system of knowledge. And no, it's not neutral. It leaves behind more than it carries forward. Even MBAs, supposedly people-centric, are dominated by STEM grads. Their logic prevails: efficient, optimized, and dangerously hollow of cultural and social nuance.

What was once an education system meant to cultivate curiosity has become a pipeline, churning out problem-solvers who are rarely taught to question the frame of the problem itself. Even in managerial or social-facing roles, STEM-trained minds dominate, often lacking grounding in history, culture, or ethics. The result? Intelligence manufactured at scale, but wisdom? Out of stock.

The humanities do not promise to fix things, and perhaps that is their greatest strength. What they offer is a how-to think: to locate problems, to frame them, to understand the assumptions and histories that have shaped them, and then, again, question the solutions to these problems. Humanities don’t provide the answer sheet; they train you to ask better questions.

In a world where the most urgent challenges; climate change, mass migration, political radicalization, AI ethics; are as much moral and philosophical as they are technical, what does it mean to produce professionals who can calculate everything and contemplate nothing?

Engineers today are designing surveillance and security systems with little understanding of privacy history or ethics. Start-up founders build educational tech without ever asking what education is for. And in our polarized societies, we see a growing inability to hold complexity, to sit with contradiction, because STEM, by its very training, often prioritizes certainty over ambiguity, logic over meaning.

Today, the humanities are not just ignored, they’re crowded out of relevance, dismissed as luxuries in a job-obsessed economy engineered by STEM logic.

This is not a critique of STEM. It’s a critique of the monoculture around STEM. The issue is not that STEM exists, but that it dominates. And in doing so, it subjugates the humanities, therefore humans.

The Problem of the Problem-Solver

A STEM-heavy education can train you to become a brilliant problem-solver. But what if you’re solving the wrong problem? What if your very framing of the issue is flawed, culturally tone-deaf, or ethically myopic?

Humanities don’t solve. They contextualize. They historicize. They ask: Who defined the problem? What values are embedded in the proposed solution? What are we assuming, and who gets to decide that and why?

The role of the humanities, scholars write, is to "train the imagination for epistemological performance." Simply put, the humanities teach you to think about how you know what you know, that is, to examine the assumptions embedded in your frameworks. This isn’t just an academic abstraction. It’s essential to navigating a world rife with misinformation, ideological silos, and histories that refuse to stay buried.

Let’s take history as an example. History does not offer absolute truths from the past. It constructs narratives based on available evidence, acknowledging that those narratives will evolve. History, unlike most STEM fields, is a discipline built not on finality but on revision, consensus, and the ethics of interpretation. There is humility in history. A built-in understanding that we are always working with partial truths, seen from particular standpoints.

Contrast that with the rationalist ethos baked into many STEM disciplines, where logic reigns, and anything that cannot be quantified is often dismissed. Over time, this has produced a generation that is often excellent at technical reasoning but lacks the vocabulary to engage with human complexity. Furthermore, this generation then understands the humanities in absolute terms; derived from their STEM thinking; leading to constant socio-cultural disruptions.

This is not just an educational issue. It becomes socio-cultural and, therefore, political.

In a country like India, where cultural memories, caste histories, linguistic identities, and post-colonial legacies deeply shape public life, having people who lack this grounding is dangerous. It creates public discourse that is clever but shallow. It enables polarization by making people technically literate but civically illiterate.

And then we wonder why we are more divided, more volatile, and more incapable of speaking across differences.

The humanities do not guarantee a job. They cultivate a mind. And perhaps we need to shift the question from “What will you do with that degree?” to “What kind of citizern, what kind of human do you want to be?”

We live in a time where speed is valued over depth, clarity over complexity, and answers over inquiry. But life does not come in neat equations, no? The world is messy. Meaning is layered. Power is often invisible. And the ability to navigate all this requires more than code and calculus.

This is why the humanities matter. Not as a nostalgia project. But as a necessary corrective.

Humanities may not launch rockets, but they will ask - Why are we escaping Earth?

The author is an educator and teaches graduate and postgraduate courses to design and business students.