You can find Part I of this series here
You can find Part II of this series here
You can find Part IV of this series here
You can find the conclusion of the series here
Note: Some of those quoted in this article chose to use a self-selected pseudonym to remain anonymous.
I’ve seen a lot of people, almost offhandedly and easily, refer to South Brunswick as a STEM-oriented school. Like our entire identity as a school community has already become intangibly connected with these fields of study. People talk and act as if the way this school functions and is structured is simply meant to push science and math more than anything else.
As Senior…”67” says, “I feel like our school treats STEM courses as a higher priority than other classes. Like, there aren’t enough opportunities to take humanities APs, but there are way more STEM ones. The whole structure of the school makes students who are inclined towards STEM succeed, and students in the humanities are at a disadvantage.”
It isn’t just students who feel like there’s a systemic bias towards STEM courses.
“We have an entire computer science academy now within the buildings!” Said Mr. Colin Rossi, my former Creative Writing teacher. “There’s definitely a far larger number of AP classes in the STEM areas, far more electives.”
The English department hasn’t been the only department to feel undervalued by the school. The art department, in particular, has found the district’s policies to be unfair. “Every year, our supply budgets are cut a little bit more, and our classes stay the same, pretty much,” says Mrs. Rebecca Bufis, one of our school’s art teachers. “We lost two teachers, but the supply budget doesn’t line up with the amount of student services that we need. It’s to cut corners.”
Others argue this bias has less to do with the school itself and more to do with the people who attend it.
As said by Nishita, a Senior, “There’s definitely a large bias in the student body towards STEM fields. I would say the main reason is cultural values and the fact that a large segment of our student body is South Asian, and our families tend to value and push their children towards STEM careers.”
This was an argument that multiple people, including my own parents, have made.
In Open Door’s 2025 report analyzing patterns in international exchange for students, it found that 22.8% of Indian students are pursuing engineering degrees, 2.6% are pursuing health professions, 43.4% are pursuing computer science (no wonder we need an academy), and 5.5% are pursuing physical/life sciences. In contrast, about 11.3% are pursuing business management, 0.3% are pursuing education, 1.1% are pursuing fine arts, 0.3% are pursuing general humanities, and 2.1% are pursuing social sciences. These numbers, combined with the fact that, according to US News & World Report, our school is 63.2% Asian, provide compelling evidence for this.
Dr. Justin Negreval, the Social Studies department chair, had said in our interview that, “The administration ultimately has to worry about public relations. The people foot the bill here. Taxpayers. And if taxpayers are demanding that we have offerings that reflect their values and what they want, then they’re going to wind up responding to that in some way.”
Ironically, even though, as mentioned before, most STEM students did not mention parental pressure as one of their personal motivators, a lot of respondents still asserted that the parents of their peers are still the ones pulling the strings here. This goes beyond parents pushing particular careers onto their kids. A lot of students have simply grown up in families that have always gravitated more to these fields, and as a result, many do the same. When you consider it that way, it makes sense why the school district is incentivized to give less attention to other subjects.
There’s a really important, neglected bit of subtext under all this discourse. South Brunswick is an incredibly competitive school. Like, an incredibly competitive school. Standards here are extremely high. US News & World Report reports that 63% of students at South Brunswick have at one point taken an AP exam. We’re consistently highly-rated. There’s this strange unspoken truth about what it means to be a student here: If you aren’t the best of the best, you’re barely anything.
Ms. Rachael Levonaitis, my AP Statistics teacher, has experienced this mindset firsthand. “If you are taking Algebra 1 as a Freshman, you are ‘behind,’” she says, “I have students that will get 90s and say, ‘Can I get a retake?’”
Over in the English department, midway through my interview with Mr. Rossi and Ms. Jamie Weinstein, I was informed of a group of former students who had a paywalled spreadsheet tracking the GPAs of others. “The constant concern for grades is a big contributor,” said Ms. Weinstein. “I also think that perhaps the student body is a little bit too transparent with each other about where their standing is in terms of GPA.”
I know the GPAs of multiple of my friends off the top of my head. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t constantly check mine. We fixate on grading a lot at this school.
A lot of people claimed that there are more AP courses in STEM subjects than in humanities subjects. To investigate this, I took a cursory look through our course catalogue for this school year. We have (about) 6 AP-weighted Computer Sciences, 6 AP-weighted Maths, and 7 AP-weighted Sciences. We do have a good amount of AP-weighted Business classes as well, with a total of 7. The Social Studies department has 7, too. English and the World Language departments only have 3 each. This means that across each of the letters in STEM, our school has 19 APs. Every other department added together has 20. So perhaps not as unequal as it would seem, but there is a disparity here.
What I found most fascinating is that the CS, Math, and Science departments had far more AP-weighted classes that weren’t actual APs. Business also follows a similar pattern. It seems that people don’t just want to take STEM classes. They specifically want to take hard, high-weighted STEM classes.
“Whenever you weigh a class, you’re essentially creating a situation where you’re valuing some learning over other learning.” Dr. Negreval said. “That is highly problematic.”
Now, Dr. Negreval is also ironically my AP US Government teacher. But he makes a great point. AP weighting does a lot for your GPA, and we’ve already established how much South Brunswick values high GPAs. In recent years, we’ve been seeing more and more kids jump straight from regular classes to APs, skipping honors or accelerated courses entirely. And why shouldn’t they? Those courses just don’t have the same weight to them.
“The kids who take my classes, which are primarily AP, do so for the weighting, because it looks good for college…I don’t think it’s necessarily at all influenced by interest or that they see the value of it.” Says Mr. Halaw. “And I don’t want to diminish my students and put them down…they’re just there for a certain purpose, but it’s certainly not high on their list of priorities.”
So why specifically STEM APs? Do they just…look prettier? Well…yeah.
