How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
From the year 1 onwards. Unannounced in-class tests used to be common. If you solved the math problem you got good marks, if you didn't you get poor marks. There was nothing judgmental about it. And you could not move into higher education if you didn't have good marks.
Let me give you an analogy. Have you met the wacky person on a party who is an awful dancer, but doesn't realise it? You know, like Elaine from Seinfeld. Embarasing, obnoxious and feeling good about it. If it were a child, the US&friends school system would tend to encourage them and telling them how awesome they are, lest their feelings get hurt. An eastern block school would just give them bad marks and let them move on...
(And in soviet russia, the party embarasses you!)
These articles would be far more interesting and more of a catalyst for change if they could explain how graduating with a science degree can benefit a young person's life.
I don't mean abstract benefits like "problem solving skills," either. I mean concrete benefits, like getting a job. For example:
Imagine you are 22 and just graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in Physics. You don't have the best GPA, but not bad, either. Let's say a "B" average. You had to program some stuff in one of your classes, but you aren't really a programmer. For whatever reason, you aren't going to graduate school. So, you need to get a job. You'd like to stay somewhere in the upper midwest to be close to your friends and family.
What kind of job do you apply to, and where?
The $100K figure quoted in that article is really misleading because of that - it's not talking about people with a bachelor's - it's talking about people with tenure.
Apply to any and all entry level engineering type jobs and just try to convince them that you are able to learn what they need as a physicist.
Better yet, go back to UW and get an MS in medical physics. They apparently only need a master's and make decent money.
As someone else noted here, the problem probably has no one cause, but numerous interrelated ones. I have a couple of suggestions to add to the list:
a.) Standardized testing -- studies have shown that extrinsic rewards tends to dampen one's intrinsic desire to do something. (In the study, children given a reward for playing with blocks lost interest in them sooner than students who weren't rewarded.) I can't help but wonder whether increased focus on testing -- and the uninspired teaching that goes along with it -- is undermining whatever sense of curiosity and wonder students might have about various subjects. Now, one might note that other cultures (Japan, for example) place even greater weight on testing than we do, but they're more culturally homogeneous and may view science with more esteem. And in poorer countries, an engineering degree might be one of the few paths into the middle class.
b.) The nerd factor -- Paul Graham has touched on this. It's always been uncool to be a nerd or to be good at school. I was a loner who had few friends in high school. Has this cultural pressure intensified?
c.) Distraction -- hell, I barely have the attention span to skim the newspaper these days. I can't imagine what it must be like with added hormonal turbulence. My cousins (in high school) visited recently and they were on the computer checking facebook every 15 minutes. Is it simply becoming harder to muster the long spans of attention it takes to solve a complicated math problem? Because,
d.) Math is the cornerstone. If we made math fun and interesting, interest in science would follow naturally. It saddens me that we seem incapable of doing this.
One of the biggest reasons people would leave the Mathematics department at my university was because they couldn't deal with being told that their proofs were crap, and that they needed to get the quality of their work up if they wanted to succeed.
It's not that the work was "too hard". It's that students couldn't get coast on extra credit points and pure-opinion essays, like they had gotten used to in high school and junior college. Finishing a complete trip through Math, Engineering, or any of the sciences required actual effort, as well as the ability to handle criticism, a skill that many students lacked after over twelve years of education.
I also had a chance to see the other side of the coin, because my second degree was in a foreign language. My Japanese degree consisted of nearly four years of classes which required almost no effort whatsoever. Loads of extra credit and students handing in work months after the deadline were the rule, not the exception.
Many of my fellow students in the Japanese program were majoring in Asian Studies or Asian History, and complained incessantly about the difficulty of their classes. Even though their major fields were focused heavily on Japan, many of them couldn't even read at the equivalent of a fourth-grade level, after studying the language for four years.
I asked many of them why they chose their majors, versus engineering or mathematics, and the most common responses cited how harsh their previous Math and Science professors had been, by not allowing extra credit, late homework, and so on.
While this does not constitute any sort of proof or rigorous study, it illustrates the point that our schools are far too lenient on students, and lenient schools do not produce graduates who can survive the crucible-like atmosphere of even an undergraduate science program.
Although, I wish I had some of the lenient teachers you describe :). I didn't have much trouble with memorizing words, grammar rules, etc. But speaking and listening real time I found to be quite a challenge.
And I can empathize with people who had trouble reading Japanese at a 4th grade level :). Wasn't there an article on here a while back about the difficulties of studying Chinese compared to other European languages? I related to much of that.
Japanese is certainly harder for an English speaker than German, French, or Spanish, but even so, it should only take a dedicated student about two years to attain fluency in the language.
I was not a dedicated student, so I've got another year before I think I'll pass the JLPT 1, bringing the total to about six years, which is (somewhat) respectable, given that this is just a hobby.
But the majority of my classmates were majoring in the subject, with many planning on going on to graduate school. Even so, most were utterly incompetent, thanks to an education system that has taught them to avoid effort. I think that, if some of these kids had had their asses kicked, and gotten some real challenges, that they would have done some incredible work.
I actually feel sorry for my teachers; I could see that they wanted to push the students harder, but that they knew that it just wouldn't work, and that they had no power, because it was such a small department at the University. So, if they ticked off too many people, they'd be out of a job. The head teacher, who is a really sweet woman, has had a couple of nervous breakdowns over the past year, partially due to the stress of dealing with her classes.
She's actually one of the motivations for my study tools project, because it should help her out quite a bit.
Besides, science/engineering is hard - requiring 6+ years for engineering and 8-10+ years for science to be able to work as a "full member" of the field. Why take all that time when you can do 2-3 startups and retire rich?
I used to work in the fabs of the former Hewlett-Packard, all but one of which have now been outsourced to Malaysia and Singapore. It happened to the fab I worked in -- just after 9/11 we were told that our factory would be closed in a year and that most of the local workers would be laid off. It was a profoundly depressing experience -- like the opposite of working at a startup. I was working at a shutdown.
Every time a factory closes and lays off, say, five hundred people, that's five hundred families -- and their friends, and their relations -- who learn the lesson: Technically skilled people live in fear of being laid off.
It's pretty hard to get someone excited about mechanical engineering when every automotive engineer and machinist she knows is living the life of a frightened rabbit.
I don't know. The folks I know without a solid education of some sort live in much more fear of losing their jobs than I do. And with good reason it would seem. Most of them go through 2-3 jobs a year.
And, mind you, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'd certainly rather be an unemployed engineer than a fully employed minimum-wage day laborer. And, if that were the choice, engineering schools would all be full of people. But what we're trying to explain is why young people choose to pursue legal or medical [2] or business education instead of engineering. That's not necessarily a rational choice. Young people make that choice based on cultural cues. And the culture of U.S. manufacturing has been gloomy for years, not without reason -- the overvalued dollar was a disaster for domestic manufacturing.
[1] As opposed to sweatshop manufacturing, which I know nothing about. For all I know there's plenty of work as sweated labor. But that doesn't exactly encourage folks to go out and get those advanced degrees.
[2] Here it's worth noting that, thanks to their effective political organization, doctors and lawyers have licensing requirements that protect them from foreign competition. That's why everyone's free to talk about outsourcing medical tasks to India over the network, but nobody ever talks about the obvious possibility of importing Indian doctors to serve in roles -- like primary care -- that are suffering from shortages in the USA. For some reason that H1B-visa solution is only ever applied to engineers... do you think that people choosing college majors (and their parents) don't notice that and draw conclusions from it?
Now, I don't think this is as big a problem, in reality, as I just made it sound. Engineering is a much safer career than people think, and medicine and law are much more tedious and problematic than people realize. But that's not reflected in the relative reputations of the fields.
You've hit on a truly glaring omission from almost every hand wringing article about the dearth of US citizens in graduate science and engineering programs. It happens over and over (an interview with the Dean of the engineering school at Princeton comes to mind, but these articles appear once every month or two in a major publication).
As you've pointed out, they compare the salaries and working conditions for engineers with graduate degrees against a national average for all workers, and then wonder why the best and brightest Americans aren't lining up for graduate degrees in the Engineering school. But I have never, not even once, seen the author of one of these articles ask they question you just posed: why would a young person choose to pursue a PhD in computer science or mechanical engineering instead of getting an MBA and shooting for investment banking, getting a JD with an eye toward patent law, or getting an MD and applying to cardiology residencies? These programs certainly have demanding admissions requirements and turn a lot of people away, but nobody seems to lament a lack of interest among young Americans in these fields.
So why these and not engineering? There may indeed be some wonderful reasons to choose engineering or science, but this is the question that would lead to real, honest discussion instead of this "engineering is so wonderful, we just need to make it cool crap".
Nobody gets tenure by saying things like that.
Obviously engineering professors could help to improve working conditions for their graduates, if they know how. Many of them don't, though. You don't necessarily learn how to run a successful engineering business by teaching engineering in school.
But a big reason is that deans have little real incentive to change the system. The number of undergraduate majors in a major-university engineering department is poorly correlated with its reputation or its wealth. The real money in academic engineering departments is in research grants, and undergrads are a net hindrance to research. You need a lot of talented grad students, but it doesn't really matter if they're all from overseas.
The folks who are in pain from lack of domestically-trained undergraduate engineers are the companies trying to hire them in the USA, not the universities. A college would rather have you pay full tuition to major in English than in EE. Teaching English is one hell of a lot cheaper, because adjunct English professors are desperate to eat.
[1] Note: Argument exaggerated for effect. Author actually has no idea what aerospace engineering is like these days.
By the way, a professor name William Zumeta wrote a very good paper on this subject.
http://evans.washington.edu/files/zumeta-attracting-the-best...
It's not a rant - it's a very thoughtful piece.
"(1) effectively integrate research and education...(2) encourage diversity, broaden opportunities, and enable the participation of all citizens-women and men, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities-in science and research; (3) enhance scientific and technical understanding; and (4) benefit society."
https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/NSFHelp/flashhelp/fastlane/Fast...
The attitudes he is describing are quite pervasive in academic culture; as an academic, I know exactly what he is talking about. Keep in mind, he is writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, so he expects the typical reader to be familiar with what he is describing.
Example of international tests: PISA 2006 http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/13/39725224.pdf
What I disagree with is the implication that some how the market forces are science friendly (i.e. the need for scientists and engineers translates into good working conditions, opportunity, etc.). Unfortunately this is not so much the case.
"Back in 2003, the National Science Board issued a report that noted steep declines in "graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents" in the sciences. The explanation? "Declining federal support for research sends negative signals to interested students." That seems unlikely, in that the alleged decline hasn't dampened the enthusiasm of students from all around the world for our country's graduate programs."
Almost stopped reading there. I can think of 10 reasons why that's stupid reasoning.
"A society that worries itself about which chromosomes scientists have isn't a society that takes science education seriously."
Sentences like these make a lot of sense, until you think about them and realize they don't actually mean anything.
The guys is expressing his opinion. No doubt in somewhat vague terms, but I feel like I have a good sense of what he means.
Also it's easy to say to anyone who expresses an opinion to back it up with a rigorous scientific study. But that can simply be a rhetorical technique to limit discussion.
Okay, what about the society? Chromosomes can't be changed. You can't change your race or gender or who your parents were, so how can you judge someone based on those things? Scientific progress is made by human minds. Arguing about getting more women/blacks/jews/gays/who-ever into a field isn't helpful. It doesn't advance science, it turns it into a meta-discussion about people who do science.
I see a lot of meaning in both, and I haven't even started reading the article yet (I'll do it after I grab a coffee.)
He's talking like a mathematics professor who states some of the steps of his proof and expects the students to be smart enough to fill in the blanks and see his logic :-P
In the final analysis it smells like decline. And yes I agree that it probably has cultural roots.
Where? My first offer was for 50k, increasing to 60k after six months in LA County. Is this a PhD average salary?
US&A : A second-rate producer of scientists, but a world leader at producing bullshitting rainmakers. Yay.
Incidentally, a CEO has probably worked for longer to get to where they are than a given celebrity has even been alive, and probably makes a tenth as much money.
Really? CEOs have been doing pretty darn well recently.
Put it this way: in most cases it is probably a CEO deciding how much to pay that celebrity. I'm skeptical that the CEO is going to pay the celebrity more than he's paying himself.
ARod is rich. But he's not in the same league as George Steinbrenner.