Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out? 841
Hugh Pickens writes "Christopher Drew writes that President Obama and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in science, technology, engineering and math but studies find that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree — 60 percent when pre-medical students are included. Middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion, but the excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg calls 'the math-science death march' as freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students where many wash out. 'Treating the freshman year as a "sink or swim" experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,' says a report by the National Academy of Engineering, 'is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.' But help is on the way. In September, the Association of American Universities announced a five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM fields to use more interactive teaching techniques (PDF)."
High school doesn't prepare you for college (Score:5, Interesting)
Public high school STEM classes are nowhere near sufficient as far as preparing students for a university-level STEM courseload is concerned.
Maybe if we made public education more about actually teaching and challenging students, rather than a game to see how you can bend the rules to pass the most students, then the first year of college wouldn't be such a difficult experience.
Re:High school doesn't prepare you for college (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe if colleges understood that, going in, many students aren't really understanding what they're getting into. Maybe that would help.
Kids idealize much of the world around them. This is a fact. Too many think that science and engineering involves the kinds of stuff they see on the Science Channel. They need to have someone somewhere give them a wakeup call on this before it's too late. Sadly colleges are handling this by letting kids fail in their first year for not knowing what they were really getting into when they took up a science or engineering major. There isn't much that can be done about it.
because they teach it all wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
it's not that classroom-learnin' ain't no good -- that's also true -- but it's simply that suhc environments are insufficient by themselves.
I know what you're thinking, "but that's why we have labs!" And that's my point. Have you seen the STEM labs assignments? These "practicals" are so very academic that they might as well be more classroom lectures. Pouring one chemical into another chemical isn't the practical application of anything -- unless you designed the spout on the first beaker, or the splash guard on the second.
Look at the practicums in arts, or in psychology. Being a subject/participant/donkey in someone else's psych experiment is actually real. Painting a painting for a crummy art gallery is real.
4+ years of labs counts for nothing.
Perhaps rational logic is the reason. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a huge proponent of the scientific method, am completely pro-science, especially against psuedoscience... but I completely understand why simple logic would prevent most folks from entering a proper science degree, once they've gotten a chance to digest the extent what lies before them.
It's not the math. It's not the science. It's not the hard work.
It's the fact that they will have no control over their life, in the field that has precious few opportunities, and seems to amount to grueling busywork 90+% of the time.
Either that, or end up as an industry scientist, with some rather nasty ethical consequences in many cases.
In many cases, it would be the love of science that would keep many from rationally choosing to bet their lives in the very limited and dwindling pool of opportunities available in the field(s) now. Not that there isn't research that desperately needs to be done - it just isn't economically feasible to do big things, so you'd just end up a researcher performing tasks for people unable to really progress science much. You'd be wasting your limited existence serving goals that don't help.
At least that's how it looks from the outside.
Get industry to fund real research again, shift university funding to actual general research, and clean up the "Intellectual Property" mess that stifles research, and there would be a rational path to more progress of the sciences - until then, it really does seem a poor wager to bet your life on.
Ryan Fenton
STEM requires intelligence. Lots of it. (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is simple: STEM is hard!
How you structure the education almost doesn't matter: 1/10 graduates, at most, will have really mastered the basics of their field; Magna cum laude hardly means anything in terms of the graduate being effective.
After interviewing junior STEM hires for 25 years, I can see almost no correlation between education and effectiveness. That's no saying there is none (obviously, we don't see many high-school only types,) but, of the pool we do see, philosophy majors, college drop-outs, etc, seem to do pretty well. A PhD in CS seems to actually be a negative predictor of effectiveness.
All the education in the world simply will not turn an average intelligence person into a great engineer.
Re:Pretty simple explanation... (Score:5, Interesting)
....because STEM majors are so much more demanding than others ... if you fall behind ... you're fucked ... If you're getting a degree in English ...
And yet, look at the way the two are taught. My Freshman bio class had 190 students with two assistant profs, in a auditorium, and my total freshman class was just over a thousand. Neither prof was good, the TA's were unavailable, the textbook was poorly written, and on the final the average score was 23% (I got a 44, but one nerd pulled a 62 and blew the curve). These were two hundred students who did well enough to get into Dartmouth who were utterly failed by the lack of teaching.
In comparison, my freshman English seminar had 12 students. This was a mandatory class, so they have close to a hundred sections over the three Freshman terms. The claim is that writing can't be taught on an industrial scale but science can be. Yet, mysteriously, 60% of students are failing to succeed in the sciences.
Colleges are hostile to men (Score:3, Interesting)
Since math, science, and engineering students are more likely than other students to be men, it seems reasonable that the University environment's hostility to men is an important factor in math, science, and engineering students dropping out.
When I went to college, it was a depressing place filled with extremely narcissistic, hateful people. It didn't seem like an experience worth paying for. Meanwhile, at the office, people are happy I'm there. They thank me for my help and pay me.
Incentives, not challenge (Score:5, Interesting)
Engineers and scientists are underpaid and overworked as it is. Seriously...this is true all over the country.
Teachers, same deal.
Adding more of them to the labor market will make these problems worse. Higher supply of workers pulls wages down, as a matter of simple economics.
People drop out because the subjects are hard, sure. Making them fun won't make them less hard, so that won't address the problem. Asking colleges to churn out more graduates won't increase the incentives that people have to go into the field, let alone to stay in it.
If you want more engineers, then pay them. If you want more teachers, PAY THEM. People will follow the money. It is as simple as that.
Re:Sometimes that's the plan (Score:5, Interesting)
Some universities in my country have too many freshmen so they deliberately try to make half of them drop out.
Which is not a bad strategy when you consider the alternative: absurdly high entrance requirements. That's the strategy that medical schools have adopted, at least up here in Canada, and it's pretty clear that trying to separate the top 1% from the top 10% for admissions doesn't make for more successful students. If anything, it selects for the hyper-competitive, the resume-builders, and/or the lucky.
Better to let in as many as possible and let the actual material decide who really has the needed ability and passion.
Re:High school doesn't prepare you for college (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me put forth some propositions:
a) Many science/math teachers suck. Maybe it's because nerds tends towards autism spectrum, but I had teachers who couldn't communicate worth a damn. Of the ones who could speak english (some were imports and didn't master the language yet), many took delight in speaking in jargon and not english. One guy I knew prided himself on failing 3/4 of the class. And yes, college is hard (at least science/math) and it should be, but there is little excuse to obfuscate things.
Some teachers didn't suck, but they were the exception not the rule. They were a joy to have. When those didn't come up. Guess what? Learn from the book and just hope that's what the teacher tests you on.
b) Lack of hands on experience. Some of the best programmers I worked with never took college. Some of the worst graduated college but were fresh out, but couldn't program anything more complex than hello world in less than a day. Okay, a bit exaggerated, but it was like they were all theory and never sat down to program for fun.
c) I read 10 years ago that 30% of freshmen dropped out anyway. Assuming this is par for the course still, perhaps this 40% is not a big dea.
d) Not so much a proposition, but college shouldn't be the end of the world or beginning. There shouldn't be a monopoly on education nor should all the jobs that want degrees really even need them. Germany has a much better apprenticeship system, where you actually get paid a small amount to learn on the job and taught by a master for several years. Not like here where you get taught a bunch of unrelated classes, some focus on what may (or may not) be in your future job -- and then justify the $10's of thousands expense by calling you "educated" (or some other chestpuffing adjective you can lord over other less inclined) and not one of those "lowly tradesmen". (I've seen that here a lot).
I mean, get real, most Comp. Sci. grads won't become academics or push the edge, but most programmers get taught in college as if they were. Now, if they were to become Engineers (the real thing, with a rigorous test and certification and all that), it's a different story, but there really isn't much in this field like that.
Bizarre (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is an alternative perspective.
In the US, there seems to be a very strong connection between universities and vocational education. I never really grokked that. I grew up thinking that universities is where people who loved to learning gathered to learn, share ideas, and advance knowledge. Education was its own reward. If one wanted to learned something practical, like something for a job, one attended a vocational school, training course, or the employer took responsibility to train their employees. I think it used to be that way.
Somewhere along the line that seems to have changed. A four year degree has become the minimum entry criteria for a desk job. Over the last twenty years, I've had nothing but desk jobs. I've been a software developer, a business analyst and a solution architect. None of these jobs required anything more than a two year vocational degree-- 90% a motivated high school grad could have learned to do the job.
Why is there such emphasis on university degrees in the job market? I understood that employers liked to hire university grads for certain jobs because employes knew these people could learn things on their own, enjoyed learning, and in general wanted to do a good work. I later realized that a university education had class implications and employers often want employees from certain social classes. But there is nothing wrong with vocational school, training courses, or even learning on the job. Why try to pump a quarter of your population through the university system when the needs of many of the students (and their future employers,) would be as well or better served by other avenues of learning?
It saddens me when I see people with master's degrees in computer science spending their days executing test cases for point-of-sale systems or Web shopping carts. It saddens me when I see chemistry majors running the same water quality tests five days a week. It saddens me when I see people with advanced degrees in economics spend their working years fiddling with Excel spreadsheets to balance project budgets.
From my perspective the system we have created is a tragic waste human capital and other resources. The indebtedness it is creating threatens to turn the next generation into indentured servants with white collars. Meanwhile, the university system continues to water down its curricula and loose its vitality.
How did it come to this?
Re:High school doesn't prepare you for college (Score:5, Interesting)
There is the question of temperament. Suppose, suddenly, there was no need for math, science or technology workers - that AI has taken care of all those positions, and the only thing left for which people are competitive are those which are unique to people, like emotional work (the service sector), entertainment, counseling.
Would you just be a few courses away to being competitive for those jobs? Or would the market have left you behind, forcing you to the lower ranks of the economy, at best?
The problem is that our fates are dictated by the whims of the job market, and temperament and inclination don't respond accordingly. There is a reason why the old communist dream was "from each according to their ability" - because it ultimately becomes rather unfair to reward people only because their skills of the hour happen to be marketable.
The result is what we see now: people crowding into fields for which they are ill-suited simply to get a job.
I'm a gatekeeper. (Score:4, Interesting)
I teach physics at a community college in California, so I'm one of the gatekeepers who washes out STEM majors. It's my job to do that. Society can't afford to have anesthesiologists who can't convert grams to milligrams, or civil engineers who can't add force vectors. A lot of the people who don't succeed in my class are very nice, sincere people. It's just that their talent lies somewhere else than in math and science. The sooner they find that out, the sooner they can find a more appropriate major.
In addition to the good but untalented students described above, there are many who don't succeed for other reasons. There's a book called Academically Adrift, by Arum and Roksa, which is summarized here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand [newyorker.com] . One of their findings is that the average time studying has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years. The average number of hours per week was 25 in 1961, 20 in 1981, and 13 in 2003. This drop is still present when you control for the fact that different people go to college now than in 1961.
Another finding, which has been replicated by others, is that students' critical thinking and writing skills show extremely small improvements over the course of a college education. The improvements are so small that they are undetectable on the individual level, and still quite small even when you average over a large number of students. Well, maybe we shouldn't expect critical thinking and writing skills to increase so much. Maybe they're innate talents, or maybe they're fixed at an earlier age. But if you get a degree in a field like English or philosophy, essentially the only thing the school *claims* you're getting out of it is critical thinking and writing skills. And greater improvement in these areas is found to be correlated with faculty's high expectations, high standards, and approachability; the fact that there is so little improvement on average suggests that the lack of improvement is caused by faculty's low expectations, low standards, and lack of approachability. For example, a third of college students report that by the time they graduate, they have *never* taken a course that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week.
The thing is, in STEM, you can't just BS your way through your term paper. There are right and wrong answers. We can't just lower standards the way the humanities have done.
A lot of students are urged by their parents to go into STEM because they think the kids will make a lot of money. Once the kids are in college, they often realize that if their only goal is to make a lot of money, they are much better off getting an undergraduate degree in business. Unless you're in particular subfields such as finance, business is by far the easiest major.
Re:...stuff they see on the Science Channel. (Score:4, Interesting)
When you look at TV, you also see that most programs glamorise lawyers, cops, doctors and sports stars. When was the last TV show that starred an engineer and made it look like a great thing to do? Even in Star Trek, Scotty was a secondary character.
Re:Incentives, not challenge (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, maybe the problem is the entire model of college education, which comes to us from medieval times when a young gentleman could go to university, and come home after a few years with a sizable fraction of all human knowledge. Today people have to keep learning all their lives. Why does college education have to look the way it does? Rather than contemplating dumbing down the current system, I think it makes sense to ask whether a different but equally rigorous system might be more successful.
From what I've seen, many people enter college well before they've grown up. That is not necessarily a moral failing, in fact it strikes me as irrational to expect somebody to be as mature at eighteen as he will be at twenty-two. What happens is we send everyone to college at seventeen or eighteen as a kind of experiment to see if they're ready, and obviously many are not ready to get their degree in four years. The result is that ultimate success at university is often related to the affluence of the student's parents, not necessarily the student's ultimate potential. If a student needs another semester to finish, and has no family resources to draw upon, he's stuck. I once knew a guy who was a mediocre student but had a very rich father. His dad pulled some strings so the guy could get into a master's program in public health when he was thirty or so, and from their the guy went on to earn his MD in his late 30s. Yet despite how unfair this was to other people (e.g. to the person who lost his place in med school), this guy went on to be a distinguished surgeon. In this case the exception carved out by money and influence allowed someone to reach his full potential.
I also have a strong suspicion that the brain continues to develop in certain ways well into the 20s. When I went into MIT at 17 years of age I was pretty good at math, but I feel strongly that my natural aptitude for mathematics continued to improve until I was in my late 20s. I'm also reasonably certain that many brains entering college at seventeen and eighteen have not finished developing what psychologists call "executive control functions": being able to direct attention, to control impulses to weigh the present effort against the future rewards.
I just don't think four year university right after high school works for everyone. Nor does it get the most out of many of the people who do manage make it through, but not with distinction. Some people who struggle through four years and make it out by the skin of their teeth might pass with distinction if they just started their college career two or three years later, whether that reflects life experience, brain biology or some mix.
But if the problem is that the design of the current system doesn't meet everyone's needs, then dumbing it down is the worst possible choice. The system *still* wouldn't work for the people it currently doesn't serve well, but the people it *does* serve well are cheated. On the other hand it makes no sense to shortchange students who might have equal potential but don't fit the current system, either because they need a few years seasoning or don't have the money to cushion them through a tight spot.
I'd like to see options that are equally or more rigorous, but more diverse. I'd like to see some students earn their bachelors over six years or even eight years, paying for their with co-op work or national service. Stretching out education this way would in itself would allow students to bring more life experience to classes in social sciences, literature and business management.
I'd also like to see the end of the expectation that somebody can get a bachelor's degree at twenty-one years, and coast on those credentials until he's sixty-five. I'd like to see degrees expire unless you show you've continued to learn into your thirties or beyond.
Re:...stuff they see on the Science Channel. (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Since when do corporations control education? Education is dominated by liberal progressives who are, if anything, anti-corporate. If anything, it is the generally left-wing educational establishment which is discouraging critical thinking. See http://thefire.org/ [thefire.org] [thefire.org] for numerous examples of the suppression of free speech at college campuses.
There's problems on both sides. Conservatives are actively anti-education: they throw a fit when education conflicts with their fundamentalist religious dogma, for instance, and they also don't like "wasting" their tax money on education, when they could have lower taxes instead and spend that money on crap. Liberals, by contrast, actively encourage education. Of course, both of them want their own biases instilled in the education (conservatives want Creationism and religion (their religion) taught in public schools, until 8th grade and then all the kids who can't pay for more kicked out; liberals want their ideals such as "diversity" which really means "white people are evil" taught in public school). Basically, they want to use the system to indoctrinate others to their beliefs. Unfortunately, this is partly what education is about, at least at the lower levels: indoctrination. Putting kids in school and teaching them all these things that society deems important is a form of indoctrination, because otherwise children aren't prepared to be adults in modern society. You can't educate without a certain amount of indoctrination, so the different political sides are constantly arguing over what to indoctrinate kids with. Reading, writing, and basic math everyone can agree on, but the rest of it they can't.
You complain about suppression of free speech, but how much "free speech" do you think there is at Bob Jones University, Liberty University, or BYU? In any group of people with certain accepted ideas, anyone who challenges these ideas is usually met with derision or worse.
The real problem with liberals and pre-college education is that liberals generally aren't that good at business and getting things done because they're too idealistic about certain things. Can you imagine a military force run by liberals? So what we see in elementary education is teacher's unions, which started out as a good idea like every union: keep employees from being mistreated or underpaid, etc., but then turned into something very ugly. As a result, we have schools where really horrible teachers cannot be fired, teachers are not evaluated on merit but on tenure (longevity), bad teachers are protected, etc. Sounds like the police doesn't it? So instead of lots of good teachers, some great ones, and a very small number of "bad apples", you get about half of them "bad apples", and the rest struggling in futility to make a difference. Again, sounds just like the cops, doesn't it?
Re:Preparation, not incentives (Score:4, Interesting)
There may be some truth to this. My high school physics teacher was in his first year teaching and clearly thought he was teaching a college class. It was brutal with about 2 hours of homework a night and every day started with a quiz on the material. The class started with about 20 students and 7 finished, only one with an 'A'. The teacher was fired due to complaints from parents (which I still feel was appropriate).
My college physics class was breeze, since I know most all of the material when I walked in the door.
While I think the teacher went way overboard, for those who could cut it (I managed a 'B"), it was an outstanding experience, though I did not feel that way 40 years ago. Probably something between that class and and a "typical" class would have been ideal, but I was ready for college classes, at least and I really appreciate it.
By the way, The teacher, Gary Mantelli, was re-hired a year later after promising not to push so hard and taught until shortly before his death about 5 years later. I wish I had gotten a chance to thank him!