STEM

This seems a popular topic on the blogs right now, on account of it having recently become politically relevant, so I thought I'd throw my two cents in.

If a convention somehow containing every critic of Finnegan's Wake (chosen as one of the hardest subjects in English literature to understand) suffered a critical architecture collapse, and every one of them died, would society suffer any serious setbacks?

What if a convention containing every single kernel-level driver programmer (chosen as one of the hardest subjects in programming to understand; substitute BIOS programmers, if you wish, or even trivial branches of architecture or engineering) suffered the same disaster?

What advantages do liberal educations confer which extend beyond the first couple of semesters of material, which STEM majors are already obligated to study?  The fact that this is a challenging question to answer in liberal arts educations, but -not- in STEM majors (where the answer is fairly trivial; advanced studies are for specialization in field, specializations which industries depend upon), sums up the divergence.