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Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out?
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)."
...because STEM majors are so much more demanding than others. In addition to having heavier workloads, everything builds on everything else - if you fall behind, or don't master a particular fundamental like calculus or kinematics or chemical bonding, you're fucked. If you're getting a degree in English, and you don't master Blake, it's not going to have any impact on your study of Wordsworth, unless your thesis is a comparison of the two.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
the excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg calls 'the math-science death march'
What a load of B.S.
The problem is jobs... there aren't any in this country for non-H1B holders. Its very much like the market for French Literature, 1% of the graduates will get $100K/yr professorship jobs, the rest.... will not have a positive outcome.
Would a degree in Physics have been fun for four years? Sure. Would living in permanent unemployable poverty be fun for the next sixty years? Not so much. I'd rather see my kids being rich enough to own shoes, or not depending on food stamps for my next meal.
If you're going to end up with an "unemployable" degree, why the heck not get one in something more fun, with more women, better parties, less homework...
I encourage my kids to avoid STEM fields because they do not live in China or India. Why go into a field the government is actively trying to destroy? It would be like encouraging my kids to go into automotive assembly line work or textiles or manufacturing consumer goods or ...
(Note there is absolutely nothing wrong with STEM as a hobby.. nuke-eng or chem would be a tough hobby, but my son likes computers, and theres nothing wrong with IT/CS as a hobby, as long as he has some other plan, one that involves making money)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Exactly my high school didlittle to prepare me for actuallysurviving college. In high school I could sleep through most classes and get A and B on everything but handwriting.
We need to separate out students and challenge them all. Different people learn in different ways. Our system only teaches in one way
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
But I'm not blaming students, I'm blaming the curriculum and instruction methods in high schools. High school math classes don't have enough time to teach the material. Every high school math class I was in dedicated the first half of the class to going over homework sets (generally 10-40 problems of varying complexity) which takes away from instructional time. Many math classes ran out of time so if you wanted to get the last 10 minutes of the lesson you had to stay after class (how exactly is this supposed to work in a world where your next class starts in 6 minutes, unlike college where you might have 2 hours to your next class). I went to 3 different high schools in 2 different states, and this was a general theme everywhere.
I've also done 2 years of physics, at 2 different high schools, and those were well taught classes that had time to cover their material. They didn't go over homework at the start of class. In fact, one of my teachers didn't actually grade the homework, just strongly advised doing it. There was an extremely strong relationship between doing the homework and passing, and everyone figured that out very quickly. Even though the homework wasn't graded, everyone who cared about the class still completed it.
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College is where you move from practical, demonstrable stuff to abstract theoretical stuff, like Newton's laws of motion to quantum mechanics,etc
While that's true, a lot of students wash out before reaching quantum or similar topics. I'd say the problem is more that college is where you move from qualitative descriptions of physical processes (i.e. the calculus-free physics courses so popular in high school today) to quantitative descriptions, that demand you to actually know the math and do the work.
We've dumbed down high school too much already. The article's solution of dumbing down college to match would be disastrous.
Look at the emphasis on sports in high school and college. And no one is talking much about the "attrition" rate where high school / college athletes don't make pro.
How about a science program with the same model?
Kids are identified in high school and they take extra classes after school and in the summer so that when they do get to college they've already completed the 1st year classes in their last year of high school.
With scholarships pretty much guaranteed for the kids in the program.
Crab fishing? Ice road trucking? Paranormal investigation?
Governments do not want a critically thinking populace. Just suck up the bullshit they, the bought dogs of the corporate states of America, want you to think and believe.
Science and math require a solid foundation in the basics. With a solid foundation, politicians, corporate thugs and banksters cannot sway the public. Bread and circuses brought down the Roman Empire in approximately 200 years. This country is next.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I don't think it's high school's fault. The problem lies in the fact that doing well in those types of courses requires a certain type of analytic thinking that is simply not that intuitive for most people.
I graduated with a bachelors of science from an engineering focused university. I like math and science and use both in my work daily. The problem I saw was that the introductory classes were treated specifically as a way to weed out some of the students with mindless busywork. First year chemistry was an entire year of several hundred students in a giant lecture hall memorizing the periodic table, memorizing ion charges, and (in short) doing nothing at all relating to science or the type of problem solving or analytical thought actually needed to be a competent scientist. Something like half the people who took those chemistry classes switched to another major or dropped out, but I seriously doubt there was a strong correlation with those that would be good at science.
The introductory math classes were little better with huge classes where you were supposed to memorize formulas and methodologies and then apply them, with lots of minor mistakes, on paper. The only use they had was helping students learn a good balance of speed versus meticulousness. At least in introductory computer science you actually did some programming and did some of the nuts and bolts work of making a computer work for you. In general, however, it felt like teachers with no interest doing as little work as possible by forcing a lot of rote memorization for no real purpose other than to weed out students so there were more manageable class sizes going forward. It was as though all the advances in educational theory and methodology over the last 100 years were intentionally ignored.
Not a fan of the man, but I agree with this:
When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.
-- Steve Jobs
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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.
No, students do not drop subject just because they are hard. They drop them because they are hard AND they have never been academically challenged ever before. I've seen this happen numerous times with smart first year students. They are completely used to coasting through school with one cylinder firing because there is no challenge at all for them. Then, when they get to university, they are suddenly faced with material that they cannot master with a quick read through and they literally do not know how to cope.
If we challenge even the brightest students at the school level then they will be used to having to think things through carefully and then, when they do finally understand it, they will get the sense of achievement which comes with that. Some of my colleagues who have a reputation for teaching very challenging, senior undergrad courses have some of the best student feedback because, by that point, the students like to be challenged and to succeed. Sadly though we lose a lot of students before we get there just because they are completely unprepared for university and don't know how to cope.
AC is right on with this one. Only the problem is much worse than that. The US does not value the scientists that they have. The current job market for scientists is absolutely miserable. In the field where I used to work, pharmaceutical drug discovery, the industry is sending research jobs to China and laying off huge numbers of scientists in the US and Europe. Over 90% of the chemists that I know, that are over age 50, have been let go at least once in the last 10 years. Few have found new jobs. Those that have found jobs have taken large salary cuts. It's a real mess. We don't need more scientists. It would be nice if we knew more science and it would be even nicer if we had jobs for the scientist that we have now.
Engineers and scientists are underpaid and overworked as it is.
Adding more of them to the labor market will make these problems worse.
Worse, for who? Not for companies.
"We don't have enough engineers" is largely just an excuse for allowing corporations to get exemptions to immigration laws and import indentured servants in technical fields. US schools have produced plenty of engineers. Most of them aren't in engineering.
46 year old. Ivy League EE undergrad. Neither me nor any of my friends in undergrad spent more than 7 years as engineers. A couple jumped to business school in undergrad. After spending a couple years working, a couple went to business school, and a one went for a MSEE, and I went for a PhD in EE. MSEE worked for 5 years after graduation then went back for MBA. I worked in engineering 5 years after PhD, then moved to business IT analysis/proj mgmnt.
The opportunities in engineering were lacking. The opportunities in business were better. There are plenty of engineers. There aren't great opportunities for them.
The professor is paid to present the information; the student pays for the opportunity to learn from an expert. As a student, it is your responsibility to study until you understand the material. University is about taking personal initiative in learning what the professors say is important. And while some of them are poor teachers, all professors were at one time undergraduates, and thus they tend to have a good idea about what you need to understand to be a master of a subject.
If you expect a professor to stuff your head with information without any effort on your part, then you do not understand how the learning process works. If you pay for a gym membership and personal instructor and then never do the exercises regularly and properly, you have no justification to whine that you didn't get your money's worth when you're still out of shape. Suck it up, and take initiative.