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)."

Comments

High school doesn't prepare you for college

[Nemilar]

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

[rolfwind]

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.

Re:Pretty simple explanation...

[bill_mcgonigle]

....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.

Incentives, not challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[sackvillian]

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.

Bizarre

[ahoffer0]

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?