<p>This topic has been discussed in many threads on CC in different forms. Everyone laments on the fact that China, India, Vietnam… produce more engineers and scientists and that USA is going to lose its grip on innovation etc. etc.</p>
<p>The problem is simple: people will gravitate to where the well paying jobs are. In US the well paying jobs are in the FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) sectors. Facebook is going public and Wall street may make half a billion (yes more that $500,000,000) on fees to make the company public. Does that money create many new jobs? Does it add that much value? I do not know but it is going to make some bankers and lawyers very rich.</p>
<p>In China and other such countries, STEM jobs are the way to prosperity. In the US it is not any more, it used to be at one time. Again, women have gravitated to Law, and finance. If there are good monetary opportunities, they will graduate to STEM also.</p>
<p>This year our local high school will graduate 170 students. Back in September probably 140 of them envisioned themselves as going to a 4-year college. At least 50% of them saw themselves majoring in a STEM field. In September few of those students had really thought much about what colleges required, and during course selection as freshmen, sophs and juniors many had made decisions based on what was expedient, rather than what would best prepare them for college. So why take Honors Chemistry or Physics when regular Regents Chem or “Technical Physics” gets you a science credit and is less likely to dent your GPA or class rank?</p>
<p>So here we are in February. Maybe 100 or so seniors have actually applied to 4-year colleges. Many of the others have already decided to start at CC and see what happens. In a couple of months others will join them at CC as they fail to receive admissions to colleges they actually want to attend. Most of those students who end up selecting the CC route – 45% of the class – will never earn a Bachelor’s degree, even if they earn an AA. Of the 80 or so who go directly to a 4-year school each year at our local HS, at least half are STEM candidates. Once they get to college, however, many of them begin to dscover the downside of taking an easier route in HS. Whether it’s calculus, organic chemistry, general physics or whatever, many students begin faltering. Of the 10-12 kids who leave our HS every year planning to become engineers only 2 or 3 on average ever achieve their goal. Our 12-16 “pre-med” hopefuls? Maybe 1 gets to medical school. </p>
<p>A similar winnowing process goes on in the majority of high schools and communities across America. Not necessarily at Milburn HS or Katonah/John Jay HS or Thomas Jefferson in NOVA, at least not to the same degree. STEM majors aren’t for everyone, particularly not for those who lack the long-term preparation and/or aptitude for college math and science courses.</p>
I agree with this, but I’d say a bit more. Many Americans don’t major in subjects that don’t interest them very much even if it would make economic sense for them to do so. I think this is the part of it that non-Americans may have trouble understanding.</p>
<p>Most American don’t major in math/science for two reasons. First, most of our teachers (especially in elementary and middle school) aren’t knowledgeable about math. The same is probably true for lots of HS students. Second, related but perhaps more important, math and science are hard compared to lots of other fields. According to a couple of articles that were referenced in CC posts, the population of college students has grown, the number of math/science majors has stayed has not increased. The big increase in students thus has been in humanities/social science/other “softer” stuff.</p>
<p>Not where I went to undergrad (graduated last may). Over half of the students in my biology and chem classes were female, including “harder” science courses like molecular cell bio and biochem. The only classes I took that were predominantly male were calc-based physics, and Calc II. </p>
<p>That’s just anecdotal, but I was also under the impression that women are equaling men in applications to medical school as well as life science graduate programs (but… to lazy to actually find numbers to support that).</p>
<p>Not only hired on the cheap, but are also purple squirrels to boot. </p>
<p>One issue in the CS field is that a lot of entry-level jobs have either been offshored or are requiring graduates to have much more than mere coding skills in the programming language du jour. </p>
<p>One major frustration a friend who works for a major computer technology company is that far too many CS graduates come from programs which overemphasizes the pre-professional aspects such as learning the programming language du jour at the expense of underlying mathematical/computational theory which is required not only for entry-level jobs…but also for sustainable career advancement. If one comes from a CS program which prioritizes the churning out of “code-monkeys” learning the programming language du jour…they tend not to last very long at his firm or other similar companies.</p>
<p>I agree that this thread is stupid, because it is rehashing a topic that already been discussed to no end many, many times, but there is still a disparity in some fields of science/engineering, if not pre-med - my home department of Mechanical Engineering is about 80/20 male/female, and CS/ECE are worse off. ChemE and others are much more even, though.</p>
<p>I think that many with the skill sets to succeed in stem decide to go into finance. I know I did. I attended a leading engineer’s school program as a HS student, but then took a outside scholarship (professional society) to Wharton. I was afraid. I thought engineering meant at least 8 years of school, and didnt understand grad school would have fellowships. My family was in that area between where finaid would be avialable, but it would still hurt to pay for college. </p>
<p>My mother told me that right after WWII, finaid was much more generous to STEM and medical/nursing students. I think we should relook that.</p>
<p>When we went to a local info session for MIT I was shocked and rather depressed at how **all **the alumni there had majored in engineering but were doing finance. Of course that’s probably an artifact of our location, but still!</p>
<p>For at least the last 6 or so years, it seems most Columbia SEAS graduates go off to work in finance/ibanking rather than engineering or engineering related fields. It’s almost become a running joke even among many current/recent grads from SEAS.</p>
<p>Why should more Americans major in STEM when companies just want to import cheaper foreign labor and being over a certain age makes you considered to be dead weight?</p>
<p>At the same time, those that do go into engineering (compared to Amerians on average) I think are often of the family background or personality that gears them toward the practical or financial aspects of a major. Not surprisingly, the differential between engineering and Wall street is too hard for many to pass up.</p>
<p>As the parents of two daughters, we’ve always told them it’s cool to be smart, it really is. There’s alot of pressure out there for young women [in middle school especially] to conform, to play “stupid”, to fit in. It’s discouraging to see. Our oldest daughter will be off to a liberal arts college in the fall, we’re not sure where. We hope that she takes full advantage of a liberal arts education. However, we’ve also made it clear that we expect her to come out of college with [at the very least] a strong foundation in science.</p>
<p>I would just like to add that any topic that doesn’t interest you seems hard, whether it’s math or English literature.</p>
<p>Kids get mixed messages–that they should follow their passions and their dreams, but also that they should think about their economic futures, and that America needs more scientists, etc.</p>
<p>The Smith controversy is interesting. I agree with CrewDad that it’s pretty misleading to say
when in 2011 only 19% of the degrees awarded at Smith were in anything resembling a STEM field. The only way you could justify Smith’s 30% claim is if you count its very high number of psychology degrees (9% of the class) as science degrees. I don’t have too much of a problem with that, but in a context in which “humanities and social sciences” are contrasted to “natural sciences and engineering,” there’s no real question which side of the line psychology falls on, and it’s not the one Smith implies. Nor do I believe that the national figure of 18% of degrees awarded to women being science degrees counts psychology degrees like those awarded by Smith.</p>
<p>^Maybe it means that at some point in their college career, 30% of Smith women declared science as their major, but then changed it before graduating.</p>
<p>Yes, but then how does Smith “far outpace[] the national figures for the proportion of undergraduate degrees to women awarded in the sciences”, when the degree comparison is 19% to 18%? (And the 19% is latest-figure data from Smith, while the NCES national data tends to lag a few years.)</p>
<p>So engineers aren’t interested in engineering? That’s about the opposite of my experience. How many engineering students do you know that always complain about all the humanities classes they don’t care about?</p>
<p>My perception of math and science is that people in those fields do not deal with a whole lot of human interaction. If you are an outgoing person, or even an average social person, that type of career may sound unappealing.</p>
<p>Of course I could be wrong because I am not a math or science person, but that is my perception.</p>