"RISD is a very small school. Only 2,282 students total. According to [1], they had 835 admissions, with a 34% acceptance rate. If my math is right, that makes for 2,455 applicants."

I'm afraid you're missing the point. The point is that those who want to study art will study art. In addition many don't just study "art" in the traditional sense of making paintings. They study some applicability of art whether it's design, architecture, etc. Why? Well the same reason more people become programmers and not computer scientists, or engineers and not theoretical physicists. Theory only appeals to some people

"But how much math did they take by the time they make it through high school math? Maybe 9, 10, or even 12 years of math. Which is probably an order of magnitude more than they have years of art"

Again, I'm going to have to ask you to be specific with your definition of the "creative arts" because it seems your gripe is that we are teaching kids math instead of drawing in school; to which of course the appropriate response is school is for learning, not for doodling. Just like you should have a certain level of reading capacity, you should also have a certain level of reasoning capacity. This is the bare minimum one should have. So if your gripe is about the amount of math taught, well, I hope you take that same gripe with history, literature, geography, and even PE. Furthermore, art classes are offered as electives and are free to be utilized by students who want to take them.

"Of those, I'd say Nursing and the more sciencey fields like Biology, Computer science, Psychology, and maybe some Political science need math. The others not so much. Of course, out of these, Computer science is the most math-heavy.
Incidentally, according to this[5], Stanford's most popular major now is Computer Science"

Seriously, what point are you trying to make? It seems more like you're disgruntled that math is relevant to more spheres of life than art - however it is that you are defining that. Furthermore, noting the dearth of CS grads at Stanford is like noting the dearth of engineers at MIT (or blackjack players ;) ). What do you think the school is famous for? In any case, the author of the essay's point has nothing to do with who is studying what because if it were he'd be complaining about social science, humanities, and business majors. His essay is about the demise of creativity - however he defines that. Furthermore, as a relation to my first post, noting that one should learn science before one has an opinion about it, it seems it would be beneficial if you followed that. Just because one reads a "science" subject does not mean they will learn math, especially not Biology and Psychology. As a matter of fact, many CS grads get away with only calc 1. And to be clear, until you get past calc 4, you're not really doing "math", just numeric manipulation - which itself isn't trivial.

To be clear: it's not about how many areas of life find math beneficial. As a matter of fact, that is the point. Despite the overwhelming potential for analytics to transform the world, despite the new knowledge to be gained STEM has not been culturally relevant till now. Now is when it is most painfully obvious that he who understands the world holds the power. It used to be he who holds the purse strings, but thanks to the litany of these technologies that we're talking about, it's becoming less so (though not fast enough). The important questions in the world are/have been/ are being asked, and not many of them involve "self-expression". Knowledge of Science and Math add a whole new dimension to our exploration of the world and people are just taking notice. That is the point. The journey that STEM has made from esoterica to becoming a full participant in the cultural discussion. The idea that we can even consider STEM a cultural activity. Smashing that barrier that keeps people assuming that STEM people are these little weird people with their irrelevant subjects and threats to human existence and starting to see it as a part of the human experience like any other. That's what I'm talking about. That's what the author of the essay doesn't get. That's why I keep volunteering to teach kids math and physics on my own dime. So of course, arrogantly determining, from an old world view of the subject, that STEM is a mechanistic chore best left for uncreative robots is not only very annoying but very unproductive. I'm sure you're very passionate about art, and in a perfect world, we would all have the things we love be recognized both culturally and economically. But antagonizing an entire field just because one's field isn't getting the limelight is not a productive way to go.