Science, Technology and Society Reads Tech Through the Lens of Policy and Ethics

Science, Technology and Society sits at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, and the technical disciplines it studies. The CIP definition centers the major on the contemporary social and public-policy ramifications of science and technology, the interplay between science and the policy process, and the ethical dimensions of scientific and technological work. In practice, coursework draws from history of science, philosophy of technology, ethics, sociology, and public policy, with case studies that range across AI, genomics, energy systems, biomedicine, and surveillance. Most departments expect a senior thesis or capstone built around an original argument.

The major fits students who like reading dense technical material and writing about it for a non-technical reader. Comfort with ambiguity helps, because STS rarely produces clean answers — it asks why a particular technology became dominant, who paid the costs, and what alternatives were closed off. Students who pair STS with a STEM major or with strong quantitative coursework tend to come out with the most options; students who treat it as a pure humanities track land in journalism, policy research, or law-school pipelines.

The scale of the major is small. About 565 bachelor’s degrees are awarded each year across 47 institutions, with median earnings of $78,044 five years out for bachelor’s holders. The distribution is uneven: Farmingdale State College alone reports 196 completions, more than a third of the national total, while elite STS programs at Stanford, Georgia Tech, NC State, Wesleyan, and Vassar each graduate fewer than 50 students per year. The packet’s two named career destinations — Natural Sciences Managers (median $161,180, bachelor’s plus experience) and Postsecondary Teachers (median $78,490, doctoral) — under-represent where graduates actually land, because BLS has no occupation that maps cleanly to STS.