<p>As someone who has worked for the past 20 years in applied sciences (public health), I think we need more musicologists.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl,and anyone else,</p>
<p>Could you clarify to me whether or not you think of Spain as a developing country?</p>
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<p>Wasn’t meaning to pick on you. Just using those terms as a jump off point to expand the discussion to discussing one of the other extremes in such discussions.</p>
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<p>The countries ahead of the US in proportion of STEM degrees granted include France, Finland, Australia, Britain, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Japan, Sweden etc. etc.</p>
<p>Why are you suggesting that people who want to see more encouragement of STEM fields believe that “STEM is more important than humanities”?</p>
<p>You’re right fig, it does not have to be an “either/or,” and one is not more important than the other. However, I don’t think it makes sense that colleges need to graduate the same numbers of humanities majors as STEM majors. The fact is that we need more STEM majors for industry - there is a strong demand for certain (not all!) engineering concentrations. The demand for humanities is softer and driven in a very different way by those who have a love, and frankly, the resources or willingness to live without in some instances, of their particular field. These people add to our culture and humanity, certainly, but they don’t make the planes fly or the trains run on time. This is such an apples and oranges discussion.</p>
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<p>As a member of the 1% geek/nerd class (14 years of STEM, 4 STEM degrees) let me answer the above.</p>
<p>There’s several subsets of the STEM nerd/geek class, all very different from each other.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>the super-high achievers (4.xx GPA, AP Lunch Break and IB School Bus, Chance Me for the Dean of Sciences position at Harvard). No problem with those, except that the ego inflation that comes along with grade inflation may be a bit too much to handle for some kids. I’ve met several such kids, some are down to earth, some are not</p></li>
<li><p>the ‘loved school too much to get a real job’ types (that’s me). Why graduate when you can achieve the university high score in Nethack?</p></li>
<li><p>the dark side hackers - nuff said</p></li>
<li><p>the social misfits that can’t really function outside an academic environment. Largely a myth, but there are some…</p></li>
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<p>: : : : :</p>
<p>As others have said, there’s STEM and there’s STEM. And high achievers - those who live and breathe their major - have their own culture regardless of major.</p>
<p>The Architecture nerds/nerdettes that occupy, er, study in the studios at DD1’s college are no different than me and my buddies in the computer center 30 years ago pulling all nighters debating the merits of PL/1 pointers versus C pointers. The art studio crowd a couple buildings down have their own subculture just as well.</p>
<p>I’m sure English and Psych and the like have their geeks as well; Had a friend studying linguistics at Cornell a while back, she was a linguistics nerd clean and simple… Performing arts? need I say more?</p>
<p>So, everyone ‘dedicated’ or better is a nerd in his/her/its (:)) own way, it so happens that some nerds are more visible than others to the ‘outside’ world due to stereotyping, the media, and the like. McGyver can solve any engineering problem in a minute or less, but we don’t see much of a genius linguist deciphering ancient Sumerian or Martian…</p>
<p>Weird that I knew a linguistics girl at Cornell as well. Anyway, the report linked to by the OP is primarily about the lack of encouragement or even the dissuasion provided to young people in the US for going into these fields. I don’t see how that overvalues STEM, undervalues the humanities, or suggests that we need as many STEM majors as humanities majors.</p>
<p>I think it is quite simple: math and science are, as a rule very badly taught in US primary/secondary schools. When the subject is presented as nothing more than brute force memorization and regurgitation, it is not attractive to many highly capable, intellectually-inclined students who are more than capable of doing the work. Absent the kind of cultural reinforcement found among certain groups or a strong financial motivation, it is not surprising that many students look elsewhere.</p>
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<p>Non-Communist China (Taiwan after 1949) was also basically a one party state until the end of 1991, when the legislators elected from mainland constituencies prior to 1949 were forced to retire.</p>
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<p>However, note that many of the popular liberal arts majors are commonly chosen for pre-professional reasons:</p>
<p>biology: common major for pre-med students*
political science, English: common majors for pre-law students*
economics, psychology: common substitutes** for business (which is really mostly applications of social studies like economics and psychology)
English: common substitute** for journalism, communications
math, statistics: for finance and actuarial jobs
visual art, performing art, music: intent to be an artist, performer, or musician</p>
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<li>Many seem to be under the mistaken impression that pre-med or pre-law require specific undergraduate majors.
** Substitution may not necessarily be as “accurate” as the college freshman or sophomore who chooses it thinks it is.</li>
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<p>Jesus, the stuff you people come up with… Given that gay marriage and drug use are legal in Spain and Portugal, respectively, I’d say these two societies are much less worried about exposing their young to the morally corrosive evils of free thought than the US. Seriously, the reasoning behind what you just said about Portugal and Spain is absolutely, 100% wrong.</p>
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<p>I left that out because for a couple of decades…the most popular and hardest major to gain entry other than medicine was actually a humanities subject…Foreign Languages & Literature(a.k.a. English/Comparative Lit). My parents recalled that was the second most difficult field to test into once gaining admission to a given university was taken care of. </p>
<p>The motives were an attempt to gain a better command of English language skills in order to join the civil bureaucracy, diplomatic service, academia, and/or emigrate to the US. There’s also a cachet of being a writer/journalist back then…despite the miserly pay. </p>
<p>Heck…it was considered far harder/more prestigious than law or even many STEM subjects. </p>
<p>STEM-mania outside of medicine only ascended to the top after my parents emigrated sometime in the late '60s-'70s.</p>
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<p>Then, I’d recommend you read the history of those two societies from the early 20th century till the mid’70s. </p>
<p>Both Spain and Portugal were ruled by authoritarian dictatorships during that period…and the rule was such that universities were heavily suppressed to minimize political dissent. </p>
<p>In fact, one thing you may notice is that the very reasons why Spain and Portugal are more liberalized than many parts of the States nowadays is precisely because it is a reaction to the legacy of Fascist or religiously motivated authoritarian dictatorships.</p>
<p>I’m well aware of the historical facts you’re referring to. It’s just that you’re assigning them weight and meaning that simply aren’t there when it comes to the attitudes of university-bound Iberian teenagers in the 21st century.</p>
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<p>I wouldn’t be too sure of that considering most of their grandparents and even some parents were old enough to not only remember living under such dictatorships…but also the strong formative influences in many areas including education. </p>
<p>My parents were old enough to remember and be strongly influenced by events taking place 3-4 decades before I was born(mid-late '70s). Also, cannot discount influences one can get from grandparents…especially since their formative influences could stretch back 50-80+ years into the past.</p>
<p>in other news, Portugal and Spain are way more broke than the US, so their math-types aren’t helping too much with that. Not sure about Turkey.</p>
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<p>no one would refer to Spain as a developing country. Spain has the 12th highest GDP in the world.</p>
<p>Whether or not you think that we should be more like Spain/Portugal/Finland/China, etc., the fact remains that U.S. colleges do not turn out as many science/math/engineering graduates as are needed in many industries. We all know the reasons for this; math and science are not well taught in the lower grade levels, students who major in math & science are commonly disparaged as geeks and nerds, and graduating with a math/physics/engineering degree is quite challenging - requiring persistence and motivation that is lacking in too many U.S. students.</p>
<p>We could wring our hands, but instead we should be working on doing a better job of giving elementary/middle school teachers a better foundation and resources for teaching math and science. This is quite challenging because many elementary/middle school teachers went into these fields because THEY don’t like math and science. If we fixed this problem, the rest would follow.</p>
<p>I agree that the shortage of STEM majors in the U.S. is due to its cultural progess, but not in a good way. As ALF said these areas of study require a lot of motivation and persistence, qualities that are receding in the younger generations as their standard of living has risen. For top students, they may be equally drawn to excel in humanities or sciences. But when you move down toward more average students, a lot of them are planning their studies and careers around what they perceive to be the “easiest” route to comfort. I say this mostly based on the experience of my kids’ high school, which I do not believe is atypical. Many kids have a tougher time in high school math and science courses and frankly it appears it is often because they can’t bs their way to a good grade in the same way it is possible in many English or History classes (it has been suggested that many kids do well in English class without ever reading the full version of the book). This makes them assume that they are better suited for humanities when in reality they are just avoiding the greater challenge and risk of failure. I think this has a lot to do with the comfort level with which they’ve been brought up. They assume they’ll do fine taking the easiest path. Perhaps, if the next generation faces greater economic competition and hardship, motivation to achieve in all areas will come back.</p>
<p>^^^^^ SHORTAGE of STEM’s??? </p>
<p>for what? so that salaries can drop even more? Anyone ever read Prof. Matloff’s writings about the myth of shortage and the like? I’ve been reading stuff like that in sci.research.careers for decades and the only shortage is that of cash to pay people.</p>
<p>I admit my ignorance of STEM fields but my friends who work in STEM all say things similar to Turbo above: that there not many opportunities in STEM, that it doesn’t pay that well, etc. I also read about how many MIT grads ditch engineering and go into finance. So I do wonder how that squares with the handwringing over us not producing enough STEM graduates.</p>
<p>Also, it seems to me that it doesn’t matter whether a given country produces a relatively high number of STEM grads if they all have to leave the country to get employment. You can’t “do science” by yourself; you need a pretty large and complex cooperative infrastructure. The US has one of the best science infrastructures in the world.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about everyone else’s high school but my classes were repeatedly told by teachers that engineering majors made more than the rest after graduation.</p>