Careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields tend to pay well, offering about double the average wages of non-STEM jobs. But even with that pay advantage, several STEM careers rank among the anticipated workforce shortage areas. How can we improve the STEM pipeline, both to strengthen young people’s economic opportunities and for our broader economic and societal well-being? To help answer this question, a new study by researchers from Saint Louis University and the University of Missouri-Columbia explores the effects of a STEM career and technical education program that’s now reached millions of students in all fifty states.
Project Lead the Way (PLTW) offers rigorous pre-K–12, project-based STEM courses, including three pathways at the high school level: engineering, computer science, and biomedical science. Since its inception in the late 1990s, the program has been studied numerous times. Now, in a follow-up to their own previous work on the effects of introducing PLTW in high schools, the researchers have now analyzed what happened when the program expanded within high schools where it was already offered.
They compiled data for 68,000 students who began ninth grade in one of 501 Missouri public schools between 2010–11 and 2014–15, during which time PLTW saw rapid growth across the Show-Me State. Within the study’s 225 “treatment” schools, the number of courses available more than doubled, as biomedical science and computer science newly became available alongside the engineering pathway. Using linked data from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the National Student Clearinghouse, the researchers evaluated the impact of PLTW course expansion on students overall, by gender, and by “STEM readiness” (STEM skills upon high school entry).
Among all students, PLTW expansion correlated with statistically significant changes to postsecondary outcomes. For every additional course per 100 students, college enrollment increased by 0.3 percentage points (pp), and STEM major declaration within five years of enrollment also rose by 0.3 pp. These results are more substantial than they may initially sound, given that these are pp increases among all students in the “treatment” schools, not just those who took PLTW courses.
For male and female students, the impact of PTLW was more nuanced. With college enrollment, the effect size for male students was statistically significant and larger (0.5 pp) than for their female counterparts (0.3 pp, not statistically significant). This difference could be at least partly attributable to the fact that women already tend to enroll in college at higher rates than men. For STEM major selection, different PLTW pathways had different effects. Engineering and computer science expansion was associated with a statistically significant, 0.7 pp increase in STEM majors among male students, whereas biomedical science expansion correlated with a statistically significant 1 percent increase in STEM majors among female students.
PLTW’s effects also differed among students of different STEM readiness levels. Those who started high school in the top quartile were nearly three times as likely to take PLTW courses as their peers, and they were the only quartile to have a statistically significant increase in STEM major selection (1.3 pp), a finding that was consistent for both male and female students. For those in the bottom three quartiles, on the other hand, PLTW was associated with higher rates of college enrollment.
With more Project Lead the Way access, more students overall took STEM classes, enrolled in college, and chose STEM majors—but the subgroup results don’t tell such a straightforward story. And that’s partly the point: The program may help different students in different ways. Initially lower-performing students were more likely to enroll in college, and initially higher-performing students were more likely to choose PLTW courses, and later, STEM majors. That different pathways seemed to attract students of different genders is perhaps not surprising, but it reiterates that there’s work to be done when it comes to gender messaging around STEM fields. For now, though, getting more students into STEM pathways is a win, both for those students as individuals and for all of us.
SOURCE: Takako Nomi, Darrin DeChane, and Michael Podgursky, “Increasing Applied STEM Curricular Opportunities in High School and Impacts on Early Post-Secondary Outcomes: The Effect of Project Lead the Way,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (October 2025).
