The United States faces a severe shortage of college graduates in the fields of Science. Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). Recently the CEO of Intel on Neil Caputo’s TV show lamented this shortage and stated it was a major reason for the lag in growth of jobs in the United States. In a January 2011 article in Scientific American Vnod Khosla, the most widely known investor in clean technologies, stated, “There is plenty of money but not enough breakthrough technologies. There are not enough PhDs in these fields. There is not enough technical talent to make large breakthroughs.” President Obama in his 2011 State of the Union speech claimed this is a “Sputnik moment”. Then added that we need to increase funds for education to become more competitive in a global economy.
The United States is second among the developed nations in the amount of money we spend on education which makes one wonder how spending more money would help. Moreover, we have about 3 million students in college each year which is about four times the number who attended college in 1955 about the time the Russians launched Sputnik into space. So why do we not have enough children becoming educated to become scientists, technologists, engineers or mathematicians? This Perspective will dare to seek the reasons.
The first thing to note is that the ratio of men to women attending our universities has shifted from about 80% male in the 1950’s to about 40% today. In other words, the boys are not going to college at the rate that they were in the ‘50s.
The second thing to note is that the number of females who major in the STEM subjects is significantly less than the males. A study sponsored by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) published in February of 2010, states: “Fewer women than men pursue STEM majors. By graduation men outnumber women in nearly every science and engineering field, and in some such as physics, engineering and computer science, the difference is dramatic with women earning only 20% of the bachelor’s degrees. Women’s representation in science and engineering declines further at the graduate level and yet again in the transition to the workplace.” Women graduate principally in law, political science, communication and medicine.
Since boys are the ones who will most likely choose science and engineering majors and the percentage of boys going to college has been cut in half, it stands to reason that we would have fewer science and engineering majors and thus fewer science and engineering graduates and thus fewer scientists and engineers to work on green technology and other high tech breakthroughs that industry leaders and investors claim we need.
For perspective, if we could increase the male population of colleges to the same percentage as the female population while keeping the percent that choose STEM the same, we could increase the number of science and engineering graduates by 33 %. If we could increase the male population to the same proportion as females and at the same time persuade the females to take STEM subjects at the same rate as the males, we could double the number of STEM students we could graduate per year.
So how did we get into this predicament? Why do boys not go to college? It certainly is not for lack of funding! Could it be that they can make more money in fields that do not require a college diploma? Yes, that was true during the past two decades, because many computer programming jobs did not require a college degree and they paid good money! Or are the boys turned off by school in general?
It certainly is possible that school turns them off. Consider what we have done to them in the past 40 years or so. First, and foremost, we have reduced or eliminated recesses in elementary schools. So, boys have to sit in class all day with no way to bleed off the testosterone energy. Then they may act out and disturb the class which is a no-no! The girls, meanwhile, lacking testosterone, sit quietly studying and rarely disturb the class. What to do? Draw attention to the poor behavior of the boys, and when that does not work, put them on Ritalin. If this means of controlling them goes on long enough, surprise, the boys begin to dislike school. They will want to get out of school as soon as they can. Certainly they are not motivated to go to college.
Exacerbating this situation is society’s desire to encourage girls to become whatever they want to become, and to compete fully with the boys in all areas from sports to all fields of academic achievement. This highly desirable goal places further pressure on the boys. It is true that in recent times the schools have begun to recognize the shortage of male students, and actions are finally being taken to ameliorate it. In the case of colleges, they are now actively recruiting boys in order to obtain a more equal balance of the sexes.
OK, so girls are motivated to go to college but tend to avoid taking STEM courses as freshmen. But why do girls who enter the STEM courses as freshmen, drop out in the following years? Let’s keep in mind that we are talking bell curve here. Obviously, there are girls who like and perform well in STEM courses and even go all the way to get PhD’s in those fields, but this is a small part of the female population.
A study at the University of Rochester attempts to answer this question. They have found that it is true that women who intend to major in science or engineering change their college major while they are in college. The study lists these major reasons:
Women feel that, in STEM courses, the instructional environment is confusing.
Women often lack positive feedback from instructors
Women feel isolated as one of only a few women in the class
Women feel there is a lack of peer support for pursuing a “male dominated” field
Women have less access than males to informal academic networks
Women may have difficulty reconciling the images of scientist and woman
Women may be victims of subtle sexism
Women may not feel comfortable with the style of aggressiveness and competition in STEM subjects
I was able to run my own experiment two years ago. While visiting in Burlington, Vermont. I encountered a young woman working in a sporting goods store during her summer vacation. She stated she just ended her freshman year at the University of Vermont. When asked what her major was, she stated: “Mechanical Engineering”. You can imagine how my ears perked up at that statement! I then asked her how many women in her freshman class were majoring in mechanical engineering. She responded that there were 30. I then asked how many were going into the sophomore class. The number she gave was 7. As a follow up I asked what she thought was the reason for the drop out, and she opined that the work was too hard, especially with the afternoon labs.
This anecdotal data seems consistent with what the University of Rochester has found regarding females dropping their engineering major after their freshman year
One might conclude that there is a genetic factor. In fact a study funded by the AAUW, alludes to a genetic factor by making this statement: “While biological gender differences, yet to be well understood, may play a role, they clearly are not the whole story.” However, we must be careful. Remember when Larry Summers, as president of Harvard University, lamented about the lack of female PhD scientists and engineers on his teaching and research staffs? Then, unfortunately for him, he stated that, among several reasons, one might be genetic. The mere mention of this possibility made the females on the Harvard faculty go berserk, and they had him fired.
On one key point he was correct, and the research is supporting him. That point is that the main difference is how boys and girls are socialized. The facts are clear that the girls are just as smart as the boys in math and science, but that they want different things and different out comes. One National study asked high school girls who were earning top grades in math and science whether they planned to study physics or engineering in college. They almost universally answered, no. By contrast, boys often answered, yes. In other words, the girls know that they are perfectly capable of doing physics or engineering, but they just don’t want to.
Further research is showing that the best way to teach boys physics and engineering is not the best way for girls. The University of Rochester study reports “With boys you start with kinematics, momentum, race cars accelerating, foot ball players colliding, etc. With girls, the best place to start is with a riddle involving the nature of things. For example, what is light; is it a wave or a particle? They then discover that it is made up of both waves and particles.” The accepted threory, wave and particle, is where the boys end up as well.
To focus on increasing the number of women in science University of Rochester set up an organization has called URWISE which stands for University of Rochester Women In Science and Engineering. The Rochester group has concluded that the best way to increase female participation in the sciences is to separate the genders in the class room. In that scenario they find the girls gravitating toward the sciences and engineering in greater numbers than would be the case in co-education.
Now, if our future depends upon science and engineering, we need to take actions promptly to increase the number of those who have these skills. Here some ideas:
Make school more attractive to boys so they want to go to college
If we believe that girls are just as smart and trainable as boys, then find ways to make them want to become scientists and engineers
We can and should take the needed actions to make school more attractive to boys for more reasons than just to increase the number of scientists and engineers, so we should get on with this immediately. But let’s face it, re-socializing girls so that they enjoy and prefer engineering is a task that society will probably be unwilling unable to undertake. Moreover, such a course of action would take a generation or more to affect any significant change in the number of engineers we need.
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Therefore, to obtain the engineering breakthroughs we need in the time available, we need to take a more radical approach. One way would be to increase the quotas for foreign trained scientists and engineers who want to come to and become citizens of the United States. In addition, we should entice foreign students who are in our universities taking STEM courses to remain and become citizens of the United States. These actions can be taken quickly and we could expect results quickly, as well. If the large number of lawyers in our federal government understood anything about what we are talking about, they could make this happen.
