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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)."
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.
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Some universities in my country have too many freshmen so they deliberately try to make half of them drop out.
The percentage of high school graduates entering college has gone way up in the last few decades, as college is regarded as a right rather than a privilege. So it stands to reason that more would drop out, since college happens to be rather difficult. As a college dropout myself, I can attest to that: although I was at the top of my high school class in math, it was a math class that did me in.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
...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
Yes, science is "hard." (I don't think hard so much as there is a more limited number of people with the right aptitude... if science is you shouldn't be doing it.) But the rewards are with business and management. We don't need to go into why and how things are the way they are.... the OWS thing is indication enough that people can at least sense that something is wrong with the way things are at the moment. But there are some very qualified and skilled people who don't get appreciation, let alone compensation, for what they deliver.
And yes, I know there are some people who will respond "Bullshit. I'm a programmer/scientist/whatever and I get over $100k." Congratulations. You're not among the average. The real average is considerably different.
'Treating the freshman year as a "sink or swim" experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,'
They'd make more money filtering them on the output stage rather than on the input stage, since that is all that matters to the administrators, I don't understand why they don't do this.
I know the educational-industrial complex is corrupt and evil, I'm surprised the only "output filtering" I can think of is lawyers having to pass the bar exam after law school collects all the money.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The US does not need more engineers. Salaries aren't going up. This has been discussed before on Slashdot.
As for attrition, that's by design. The classic paper is "The Cooling-Out Process in Higher Education": "The cooling-out process in higher education is one whereby systematic discrepancy between aspiration and avenue is covered over and stress for the individual and system is minimized. The provision of readily available alternative achievements in itself is an important device for alleviating the stress of consequent failure and so preventing anomic and deviant behavior. The general result of cooling-out processes is that society can continue to encourage maximum effort without major disturbance from unfulfilled promises and expectations."
"Cooling out" in this context comes from a criminal term, "cooling out the mark": keeping the victim of a con game from coming back with cops or a baseball bat. It's not about being cool.
The alternative is tougher admission standards. If you can get into MIT, you have a 91% chance of coming out with a degree. Cal Poly, 40%.
One alternative is better vocational education. In the US, that's a dirty word, because all kids should go to college. In Germany, it works. German makes it hard to fire people. As a result, there's an incentive to train and retrain existing employees. Germany also has a functional apprenticeship system.
We have slacked off on students over the past several decades, making it an easier experience, and we produce dumber students. When they get to the "hard sciences" they are shocked by the need to actually apply themselves and study hard. It's hard to sugar coat science, math and other terminology rich and study intensive fields.
Take the Red Pill.
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.
Crab fishing? Ice road trucking? Paranormal investigation?
I started college as a pre-med biology and chemistry double major. I got through two years of undergrad and just got burned out. Lots of hours in the classroom, laboratory and studying. I dropped the chemistry major but my GPA already got hurt so the med school thing was a long shot. By the time I graduated with my B.S. in biology I had no desire (at the time) for graduate or professional school. I took a job as an analytical chemist and did that for nearly ten years working my way up to a PhD equivalent type of position (Principal Investigator and Study Director type of roles).
Something that people who are not in the sciences do not seem to realize is that science jobs really suck, for lack of a better term. The locations are very fragmented (I had to move halfway across the country to move up the industry ladder), if you don't have a PhD you are capped, and even at that many - if not most - PhDs in the industry are doing basic bench-work alongside folks with their B.S. The pay is just terrible as well. So you work your ass off in school taking difficult and time-consuming classes to make crap money in an industry that lays off tens of thousands of people each year (just look at the M&A in pharma and industrial chemicals). And people wonder why students don't want to go into science.
Chemical engineering is another story - that is what I should have gone into if I knew then what I know now.
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.
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
Erm, no ... it doesn't. That would be that "somewhere else in the equation" part I was speaking of.
I agree with you completely and that was my point, though presented in a much more tongue and cheek fashion.
The post talks about changing things at the college level. This reeks of the same logic that got us to where we give kids medals for just showing up.
What high school does not teach is a self work ethic. This leaves the student totally unprepared for college where they are not even punished for not showing up at class. Miss a class or two, skip doing the required reading and suddenly they are totally lost and way to far behind.
It is sink or swim in the sense of being self-responsible for attending class and doing the required out of class work.
University means 15 hours of classes and 30 hours of self motivated work a week. Most are not going to do that. Especially when you add in being away from home for the first time.
-- see this policy -- that is not preparation for university
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2010/09/29/teaching-plagiarism/
"Under a new evaluation method for report cards, Saskatoon public high school students will no longer face penalties for handing assignments in late or trying to pass off someone else’s work as their own. The idea, according to the board, is to shift focus from behaviour to learning. “We’re trying to keep the emphasis on the learning, not on the penalty,” "
Back in the day (I graduated in 1976 (BS)) it was a mix of people who really wanted to be engineers (mech/civil/hydraulic/electric/etc) and people who thought they would make a lot of money. Honestly, I think the curriculum was hard enough at my mid-level state U that if you weren't dedicated and involved, you'd not finish your degree. The geeks did well, the money seekers changed majors (mostly to business).
I hadn't thought about career prospects, just knew I wanted to be an engineer.
I did go back to grad school 2 decades later for "fun" and got a "hobby PhD" in CS doing computational microbiology from a top 20 University. Not using it, still nursing the bruises, maybe don't regret it - learned a ton, and it does help in day-to-day work, but ...
I was working as an engineer with a Masters' and about 8 years in the field, the company was hitting some hard times and I was looking around at what I could do. There was a post-doc position in a sister organization that I talked about doing temporarily... thing was, it only paid 1/3 what I was making as an engineer, and these guys were 3 to 5 years past getting their PhD. I'm not too good to work for less money, but I did have a mortgage to pay and that just wasn't going to cut it.
Similar story for an ME I knew, he had a post-doc doppelganger at his old job, ME had a wife, new baby, house, etc. Postdoc had a bicycle, judging from his website he liked his bicycle a lot.
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.
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.
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.
I see a lot of well educated engineers coming into the field that have terrible problem solving skills. I am sure they have great grades but they can't solve their way out of a card board box. I am not exactly sure this weak student elimination thing is working out very well.
Why? There are vast numbers of qualified, unemployed teachers in every state. When districts are actively laying off teachers and have been for many years, the only thing more teaching degrees would cause is more unemployed teachers. Besides, I don't think a teaching degree is much of an indication that a person is a particularly talented teacher.
There may be a bit more of a need for engineers, but I suspect the real need is in more scientific and rational trained people in all fields.
Our system seems to have the belief that we should FORCE more STEM students in order to juice the economy, even if it means a dead-end career for many.
Maybe STEM is just not America's comparative advantage, at least economically. Brains are plentiful and cheaper in Asia and we can't easily change that. Academics is a cultural obsession with them. We can't do the same just by passing legislation.
America's comparative advantage is marketing, for good or bad. We are experts at suckering consumers and corporate buyers purchasing outside their area of expertise. As Dick Cheney said, "America's business is business". (Not that I always agree with him, but he was right on that one.)
Table-ized A.I.
'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.'
Not if you do it right.
I went to a private university in Germany, which - contrary to almost all other universities here - intentionally uses the first semester to weed out its students. Not by attrition, the way the article suggests, but by way of a test that you have to pass in order to continue.
The vital differences were that
a) everyone knew up front this was coming, the entire process is transparent
b) actual knowledge was tested, not the ability to withstand the horrors of crowded lectures
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
My first several semesters as an undergrad were brutal. The assignments were very abstract, the courses hard, and some of the computer science classes were clearly designed to fail half the students at mid-semester, or so it seemed to me.
And I'm glad.
Being an adult and having a career is often full of hard work, most thankless, and sometimes tedious. I'm glad that my professors in college didn't coddle me, or try to spare my feelings. Adjusting to work life was hard enough, but it would have been doubly difficult if I had been under the mistaken impression that the purpose of work was to entertain me.
So, I'm all for adjusting coursework to make it more engaging and for capturing the imagination of young students and keeping them interested. But, when I put on my old man hat, I also want to make sure that students understand that there will also be a lot of hard work that will be terribly important and will be terribly boring.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
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?
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 . 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.
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I mean think about it, in Star Trek, engineering officers had the most demanding work keeping the ships in one piece, and none of them ever made captain.
That's because Star Trek is a communist utopia. You get promoted through connections, not competence.
The student isn't paid to learn, the teacher is paid to teach. You have it backwards.
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.
America's comparative advantage is marketing, for good or bad.
Nonsense. Economies don't and can't grow on the back of marketing - not for any meaningful length of time. You have to have a valuable product to market or it isn't sustainable. You are just being cynical.
As Dick Cheney said, "America's business is business
That was said by President Calvin Coolidge. If fact it is his most famous quote in all likelihood. Cheney may have repeated it but he is most definitely not the originator.
the question is how employable are you right now? You need to be working EVERY SUMMER in either the field you're studying, or a closely related one. Then, when you go to get hired and are competing against the hundreds of people who graduated in your class, YOU'LL have work experience and they won't. The 4 months between semesters you do stuff on a job, even tedious, boring stuff, is very very important. go out and get a job.
Some years ago we had a president who said we would put a man on mars, and... no-one listened, because we all knew he was lying and the project would only be quietly forgotten in a year.
I'm friends with various academics who feel students could all be coddled into success. They are wrong.
I've taught courses four different countries and groked the educational system in another two. There is only one educational strategy that works present opportunities and expect results. It's fine if people fail, just give them a chance to try again later.
In Europe & elsewhere, there isn't this bullshit idea that students are 'education consumers', no, students are the product, society is the consumer. We present the educational opportunities for free and the students attempt them.
You know what? American medical schools determine who become a doctor during their admissions phase. European medical school determine that by failing people out.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The family owns a Plumbing/HVAC company so I'll say you're kind of right. I have worked in it frequently before jumping into the IT world. The main reasoning was my father has always said he didn't want his kids getting into the industry. He's 3rd generation master plumber and I took his advice. Skilled trades are often overlooked at being just that, highly skilled. But the job can be physically demanding and if you're in a cold climate and furnaces go down it can be a time sensitive job. Hernias, back surgeries, and other physical problems can be par for the course. It can be a good career just know what you're getting into.
Further competition is growing in new ways. The box stores (Home Depot, Lowes, Sears) are already into the service offering. The contracts with those stores give laughably small margins. But those stores can find people willing to work for that. If you're in an area and have loyal customers it can be profitable, yes. But it's not a guarantee of constant work and profit.