Why interdisciplinarity matters

According to Martin Buist, Associate Professor and Deputy Dean (Education) at the College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS), major problems are “inherently interdisciplinary in nature”.

“We need STEM to tackle them, but STEM graduates cannot solve these challenges in isolation. In the workplace they will work in multi-disciplinary teams, and we must prepare our graduates for this reality,” he says.

AI is also a major accelerant for institutions to introduce STEM-plus programmes. A report released last month by the Global Consortium on Artificial Intelligence and Higher Education for Workforce Development, comprising the US’ Institute of International Education (IIE) and the Doha-based World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), urges universities to review policies and governance to integrate AI in teaching and learning. The report presents a comparative analysis of seven global case studies examining AI integration in higher education.

Dr Mirka Martel, Head of Research, Evaluation, and Learning at IIE, notes, “Our report showed that AI is raising all types of questions across STEM and the humanities, increasing expectations among employers that recent graduates are not only well-versed in the technical components of using AI, but also the ethical quandaries it raises related to bias, authenticity, validation, privacy and more. All fields utilising AI will have to grapple with these issues, increasing the value of a STEM education that also incorporates lessons from business, policy, humanities, and ethics.” This shift is also driven by strategic governmental interest.

Professor Bashir M Al-Hashimi, Vice President (Research and Innovation) at King’s College London, explains that governments and businesses “are looking for more innovation across more of the economy with more graduates well-equipped with the additional social, economic or business skills, recognising a crucial need for more technological expertise in high-level public and private sector decision making, investment and communications, which also calls for breadth”.

In parallel, student interest is just as important. “The changes here can’t be viewed merely as responding to what employers seem to be looking for. As a bigger cross-section of our school-leavers enter into STEM topics, they bring a wider range of preferences for specialisation and universities need to respond to this. Students are not motivated just by the job market,” he points out.

In Australia, Vicki Thomson, Chief Executive of the Group of Eight (Go8), highlights the great value of the wide range of skills, noting “a growing appreciation of applying STEM skills in traditionally non-STEM occupations and industries and applying non-STEM skills in traditionally STEM occupations and industries.”

In the UK, this mix of skills can directly address some of the workforce challenges. As per the UK Parliament’s STEM Skills Pipeline report 2025, skills shortages across different sub-sectors of STEM and at various levels of education are estimated to cost the UK economy £1.5 billion a year. As many as 49 percent of engineering and technology businesses report difficulties with recruitment because of skills shortages.

As industry expectations shift, business and technology are converging. The most powerful driver for the integration of cross-disciplinary skills with STEM subjects is the changing nature of work itself. As James Bullard, Dr Samuel R Allen Dean of the Mitch Daniels School of Business at Purdue University, emphatically says, “Every business today is a technology company and almost every business function includes a technology component.”

He argues that success is no longer about technical execution alone: “It’s imperative for students to elevate their thought process from just implementing technological solutions to understanding technology’s business and ethical implications.”

Defining the “plus” skills

STEM-plus refers to programmes that retain a technical core while embedding business, design, policy, ethics or communication components.

Technical expertise may be the starting point, now rapidly expanding to include AI, as Buist observes, but what truly defines the new STEM-plus professional is the ability to function across fields. “Whether they need to interface with business, design, policy or investment, we let students choose their own add-ons to shape the careers they want,” he adds.

Bullard details the need for commercial and leadership acumen. Graduates must gain the ability to “evaluate current business models, design new ones, and focus on viability, feasibility and impact.”

Alongside technical expertise, they need to develop “leadership, change management and project management,” and, critically, “possess the communication and persuasive skills to translate difficult concepts into understandable language that employees and stakeholders can understand and support”.

Professor Al-Hashimi says the generic competencies that we can help develop with broader disciplinary education focus on three crucial areas: Perspective - recognising disciplinary strengths and limitations; synthesis - combining insights from different areas to solve novel problems; and adaptability - learning how to learn and explore efficiently in new areas.

For the Go8, these competencies are defined through strong industry collaboration. Thomson highlights attributes like critical thinking, communication, information and digital literacy, inventiveness, cultural competence and blended effectiveness.

The institutional overhaul

Implementing the “plus” factor demands fundamental institutional restructuring, often challenging decades of traditional faculty silos.

These include cross-faculty governance, industry partnerships, flexible curriculum and student support measures. This commitment to collaboration requires hard structural changes. A notable example is at NUS, where Buist recounts the merger of two faculties: “Our Faculty of Engineering and our School of Design and Environment merged in January 2022 to form the College of Design and Engineering, bringing architects, designers and engineers under the same umbrella to boost collaboration across domains.”

This structural shift is often paired with curriculum flexibility. NUS restructured its curriculum to create a “substantial white-space component” for students to select any course on campus. However, this flexibility presents a major challenge: “The flexible curriculum needs to be university-wide. Partner faculties must be willing to offer courses to our students as we offer our courses to theirs,” says Buist.

Further, looking beyond the design and delivery of the “STEM-plus” programme, alignment with broader university strategy can make a huge contribution. “For a multi-faculty university like at our university, widening STEM education at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels gets extra strategic impetus because it fits into a long-term vision for building interdisciplinarity across much more of our teaching, our research, and the innovations we support,” says Professor Al-Hashimi.

However, he refutes the notion that STEM-plus programmes can only be offered in a multi-faculty university. “There are excellent programmes in technical universities in Germany and Singapore providing socio-economic and business education, for example,” he says.

International pathways and student demand

The demand for these versatile degrees is building, since there are a lot of students interested in the core STEM courses itself, particularly among international students.

According to the Open Doors 2024 Report on International Educational Exchange, “more than half (56 percent) of international students across academic levels pursued STEM fields of study.”

For global STEM graduate production: a 2023 analysis by the Centre for Security and Emerging Technology, a US-based policy research organisation, shows a high share of STEM graduates from countries including China, Germany, India and Russia, giving a sense of the global scale of STEM demand.

While global data does not yet distinguish STEM-plus from traditional STEM, the scale of demand for STEM provides good ground for hybrid programmes to grow.

Since STEM remains in high demand, universities have incentive to expand and adapt; that is, to create STEM-plus programmes to meet evolving labour market and employer expectations.

Bullard confirms high enrolment in both their undergraduate Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) degree and their graduate Master of Business and Technology (MBT). The online MBT option, he notes, is “especially beneficial for international students who may have a difficult time entering the US.”

While no single region is identified as the clear leader, Professor Al-Hashimi points to new initiatives like IT:U in Austria and TEDI in London as examples of “pushing the boundaries”.

He also acknowledges the difficulty in marketing these degrees, given that “traditional disciplines have a high brand recognition” in the international market. The university’s role, he states, is to explain how “interdisciplinarity, communication skills and working as a team in the production of new knowledge represents the future of graduate skills”.

Examples of global innovation

Institutional innovation and government policy are together powering STEM-plus, transforming it from concept to global reality.

In the UK, King’s College London is an example of curriculum alignment with national strategy. Professor Al-Hashimi notes the institution’s Master’s in Artificial Intelligence for Science, a multidisciplinary programme that was specifically cited as part of the UK government strategy for AI for Science (Action 11).

At a continental level, the European Commission’s STEM Education Strategic Plan from March 2025 aims to support the development of joint education programmes, including joint degrees in digital technologies (such as AI, quantum, and cybersecurity) and cross-functional degrees.

TUM School of Management at the Technical University Munich in Germany offers a Bachelor’s Programme in Management and Technology. It features courses in management studies as well as in natural sciences or engineering.

In the Americas and Asia, the drive is equally strong. Bullard says that other US institutions like MIT, Stanford and Duke offer similar pathways.

The University of Michigan will offer a new engineering plus business undergraduate dual-degree from 2026.

Universities in Australia are also expanding their offerings. Thomson confirms that “all Go8 universities offer enhanced STEM-plus programs integrating AI, health, defence, environment and data”. Noteworthy examples include the University of New South Wales offering courses in cybersecurity, AI and business analytics and Monash University’s course in applied data science, genomics and sustainability.

The global shift from siloed STEM to contextualised STEM-plus programmes is accelerating. STEM-plus is no longer a niche experiment, but is increasingly being seen as a defining approach that equips graduates with complementary skills beyond their technical training.