My suspicion, and what I'm getting at, is that the people selling "STEM education is vital!" were likely on the payroll of places that mostly just wanted to hav

My suspicion, and what I'm getting at, is that the people selling "STEM education is vital!" were likely on the payroll of places that mostly just wanted to have more workers to sell ads better. They had the money to make the push for that, and the incentive to try to fatten their hiring pipeline, and dragging the other three letters along was just a sales tactic. I don't mean that everyone working on computers works on ads, I mean that, for a lot of the people behind the STEM push in particular, my suspicion is that their main concern was in fact to be able to more-easily hire folks to sell ads slightly better. I think the form of the campaign was to make it look more noble.