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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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...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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
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?
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.
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.