From US News, "Experts: STEM Education is All About Jobs":

One thing was clear at Tuesday's science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education summit hosted by U.S. News—improving science and math educational achievement is about jobs. Lots of them. "

There's no more important issue in America," U.S. News Chairman Mortimer Zuckerman said.

Zuckerman wrote a chairman's column at the news website's excellent STEM Education section, "Why Math and Science Education Means More Jobs":

Look what we take for granted in our everyday lives: the Internet and cellphones, MRI scanners and microwave ovens, FM radio and transistorized hearing aids, lasers at the checkout counter, and cancer treatments made from bacteria we've programmed for benevolence. All these American innovations and thousands more come to us from science, mathematics, engineering, and technology—no, let's rephrase that: They came to us from people schooled in those disciplines and from people associated with them who supplied the entrepreneurial energies and capital that the scientist, engineer, and technologist may have lacked.

Right. STEM education teaches the knowledge and analytical skils necessary to succeed in math and science, and then the people put them to work.