<p>Yesterday, we went to a merit scholarship dinner by one of the greek fraternity. There were about 80 kids from 80 high schools. When they were announcing names and prospective major, I was shocked to hear that about 50% were going in fields beginning with the word 'bio'. Another 25% business, economics. There were only half a dozen kids with engineering major and 2-3 with math/physics majors.</p>
<p>what is happening???</p>
<p>Would there be a perception that there is more research money/future employment opportunities to be found in the bio-whatever fields?</p>
<p>I had a converstaion with a guy a few days ago who works for Martin Marietta , part of his job is recruiting from the engineering schools. He says that there is a fear amongst many people that engineering jobs will continue to be outsourced overseas and so many students that may have considered engineering fields are turning to Bio fields where they feel there is better job security</p>
<p>Things go in cycles. Back when the space race and cold war were on money was being poured into the hard sciences and engineering, and there were plenty of students. Today we are in the midst of the biotech revolution. It is today's sexy flavor that gets the money and attention. Tomorrow it may be something else.</p>
<p>BTW, there is no apathy at our house. D has changed her major from chemistry to physics.</p>
<p>I think a big part of this is fear of math, or lack of facility and confidence with it. As one moves from engineering to physical sciences to bio, the math content becomes less.</p>
<p>There is also the fear of hard work. The perception, and it is largely true, is that you will work harder and have a lower gpa if you are a physical science or (especially) engineering major. This lead to a fear of being disadvantaged if one wants to apply to professional school. And we all know that conventional wisdom among undergrads is that if you want the big bucks life, you need a professional degree.</p>
<p>Finally, bio seems to get all the press, and seems to be where the excitement is. Certainly, the excitement of discoveries in bio are, shall we say, a bit more accessible to the layperson's mind than discoveries in particle physics.</p>
<p>Well, maybe because Engineering is probably the hardest and most time-consuming major in college, and after you're done you land a <100K job in which if you succeed someone else takes credit and if you screw up you get burned alive (no offense to any engineers on CC).</p>
<p>I don't know. D, who has long excelled in the sciences and continues to do so in college, will not major in them. She says she "misses ideas," which she gets in the humanities and social sciences. Learning in the sciences is much more vertical than other fields, with facts and concepts building on one another, and it takes longer to get to the point where they are interesting for students like her. I wish it were otherwise and do see that many schools are working on programs that integrate ideas right from the start. There is one at her school, and it's excellent, but it literally takes up half a student's schedule.</p>
<p>With all the brouhaha about genetics in the media, it seems to many today that this is the field where the action is. We have engineers and particle physicists in the family who don't seem to think their star is rising. Alternative energy sources ought to be a great field! But we are not putting the funding behind it. </p>
<p>I don't really like the terminology "hard sciences." Today the life sciences are so intertwined with the others...</p>
<p>engineering is a professional degree in some schools- LACs for example don't often offer engineering as undergrad feeling that engineers I suppose need a broader based education than focusing on engineering in undergrad would give them. ( I agree)
I also don't think that biology at least as it is taught in my daughters school is a soft as opposed to * hard science*- Her school does however have a good number of students in physics and chem- she is becoming more interested in biochem but not so far as changing her major at this late date- she is still very interested in astrobio, but she chose this school because of the opportunity to get a broad based edcuation which she is getting- astrobio will have to wait till grad school.
She had physics in 9th grade- but that wasn't calc based physics- her bio teacher was probably one of the strongest teachers in the school- and projects like mitrochondrial DNA with Mary Claire King did a lot to increase students intrest in bio as a field.</p>
<p>While biology students at Reed top the list of %s of students aquirring a Ph.d I don't see among her friends either at Reed or from high school going into biology in any larger numbers than physics or chem. Of her friends from high school, more are actually going into chem, although her room mate for next year is getting a biochem degree ( which means he has two quals-although there is already a protocol for an interdisciplinary thesis in biochem)</p>
<p>but ya know what does disappoint me?
That some schools consider psychology to be a hard science and count psych degrees in with numbers of students getting degrees in sciences- misleading IMO for students looking at colleges with strong science depts</p>
<p>Do not go for engineering as it is not worth $$$$ and no job security. American economy is only 10% based on manufacturing and 40-50% on service sector. All future engineering jobs can be outsourced hence no need to study math and science (this one is sarcasm). It is better to study soft non scince subject and get admission to a good undergrad and grad school (this one is sarcasm too). Why waste a life learning math and scince.</p>
<p>How many kids are taking degrees in art/English/History/economics?
I am more concerned about students not ever having to take a history class to get their tech degree, than in students interested in biology</p>
<p>I think the lack of science teachers in the high schools would be contributing to students chosing other fields in college.
Not every one has the experience of kids in the after school program where my daughter works where she is designing an experiment to enable them to extract the smell of an orange using dry ice- pretty cool for 3rd graders. In her sisters 3rd gd class- they just watched mice replicate :eek: ( and then infanticide when they decided they didn't want to be parents after all)</p>
<p>I'd agree that going where the money and jobs are is part of it, given that job security has pretty much disappeared during the life times of our kids. Also, biology is much more intuitive, even though it increasingly includes a lot of courses in chemistry. There are so many opportunities for students to do research in biological sciences, and to see the relationship between what they do and helping people.</p>
<p>Physics not only requires a lot of math, but it does not provide the same instant gratification. My son's physics prof last semester, for example, told them they would need about six years of physics classes to understand what is going on in the prof's laboratory. Add to that, that physics classes are very demanding and that many of the students in those classes come from other countries where the math preparation is much stronger.</p>
<p>Economics majors are often headed to either business or law school. They may be surprised, however, that economics departments increasingly require a lot of the math students thought they'd avoid by not going into physics or engineering.:)</p>
<p>The US is losing its initiative in technology. The best and brightest are not studying technology because there is no future in it here in America.
We are going to have a nation of lawyers (if we don't already).</p>
<p>Small reassurance, I know, but at least half of the "best and brightest" students from my son's private school are going into technology/computer science, engineering, or "hard sciences" in college next fall. I have great hopes for them.</p>
<p>while I think K-12 math and science education in many parts of US "sucks", I also would rather have my D attending school in US than in say China.
We still have lots of innovation and new ideas coming out of US.
I don't see India for example coming up with world changing inventions.
( but even if they did... so what? We need more people willing to take risks I abhor this tendency of research scientists to go after funding that replicates earlier work- because they know they can get a grant to do so.... and don't even get me started on the districts who are teaching creation science :( )</p>
<p>Emeraldkitty:</p>
<p>If I am not wrong I think a big majority of GE, Intel, Microsoft research work is already being moved in India and China.</p>
<p>Sorry, mootmom, all the IT jobs will been outsourced to India soon. I have not hope at all.</p>
<p>I know that lots of engineers from Boeing and Microsoft are based in India- but my impression is that that work is subcontracted- to save those companies money-not necessarily where the prototypes are being constructed.
Don't know anything about GE( although on second thought I do know long time engineers who were laid off from GE- because of subcontracting)
I do know a few people who were formerly employed at Boeing/Microsoft who were put in the posistion of having to train their overseas replacement- either that or get fired for not doing so, and then were laid off when their whole dept was transferred to India :(
Subcontracting is saving these companies a lot of money- but sux for everyone else.</p>
<p>I didn't say "IT", did I. I said "technology". Those are different beasts. Just as "computer science" is significantly different from "computer programming".</p>
<p>Innovation will continue apace.</p>
<p>I think most college students come in without a firm grasp of what exactly they want to study, which is fine, for most majors. Speaking from personal experience as an engineering major at UCLA, if you don't start your math/science classes as soon as you get into college, there's no way you'll graduate in four years. At the same time, engineering majors just don't have the opportunity to explore other classes that they might be interested in.</p>
<p>I would suspect that most high school students really do not know that much about the subjects, "bio-" included. They have had some basic science courses but not a lot of hands-on lab work. </p>
<p>"Bio--" and now "Nano--" are hot-sounding topics. And some students believe that a degree in such a subject will get them very high-paying jobs (see posts on becoming investment bankers by getting economics degrees, becoming rich corporate lawyers, etc.). Once in college, though, exposed to more subjects, ideas, and a few courses, students can change their minds</p>
<p>Students may sound interested in "bio-" this or that, but may change their mind when they get into the nitty-gritty of the details. And some won't change their mind - or won't until they are in grad school, or even later. In my field (intellectual property/patent law) we see a fair number of people who had worked through Ph.D. and post-doc positions before they decided that research was not for them, and then went to law school.</p>
<p>Bio-- jobs are not necessarily being outsourced directly to India and China, but what has been happening is that local entrepreneurs (some US-educated, some educated in that country) have been working at building up a scientific/industrial base in those countries, and have succeeded. They are now competing in the markets with their own products (India) or with American outsource companies for outsourced lab work (China). Their people are qualified and a lot cheaper. It's frightening how quckly this is moving. Singapore and Malaysia are now looking to emulate them.</p>
<p>The other thing is that students' thinking at the beginning of college is, of course, four or more years away from the job market reality. In the past, when oil was high-priced, some students looked at petroleum engineering or chemical engineering as the ticket to prosperity. Four or five years later the job market was oversaturated with recent graduates in those fields; took another few years to even out. </p>
<p>Engineering at the college level is tougher than physical or life sciences partly because of the math and partly becasue of the heavy course load, which is designed to put a student with a bachelor's degree at work as an engineer, whereas others need at least a Master's to function as a scientist.</p>
<p>The world changes faster than we can keep track of it. Maybe the answer is in a post this morning (I think the thread was something like "college graduates have to think outside the box") with an article in which the emphasis was said to be placed less on the specific major but on the ability to do analyses and problem-solving. Who knows?</p>