Why Science Majors Change Their Minds
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I have TA'd students and have long had an abiding interest in educational curricula, stemming from my experienced being homeschooled, where as I grew older, I was able to select elective materials to study in cooperation with my parents.
There are a few highlighter reasons I believe STEM education has issues, and please remember that these are interlinked, and other issues are present, which also interlink into these issues. I've picked these because I think they are standout.
* ROI on engineering vs. ROI on the MBA course. Non-founder engineers cap their salary potential in their career, in general, and spend gruelling hours in classes. MBA's salary cap is higher to non-existent, and can apparently skiv off pretty easy in undergraduate years.
* Math education is generally broken in the US. That means that students are not ready for the rigourous thinking and numeracy demanded in STEM. They struggle understanding the basics of mathematics and computational thinking because they never have had it before, so the 'elite' students who do know what they are doing stand out.
* Hacker/elite snobs pissing on other classmates. This has happened to a few friends of mine, but not really to me. Some of the freshmen/sophomores really brag on their ability (i.e., they were coder geeks in high school) and this discourages other people. It's toxic.
* Gender imbalance and lousy social environment. A bunch of stinky guys geeking out over computers and video games which are outdated in a few years is not... primo.
* Young software engineers are expected to spend nearly every waking minute coding, just to have a chance to get a job. They need to get internships, contribute to open source, maybe build a mobile app, etc... and do well in class. This, as near as I can tell, is very rare. Only perhaps musicians have similar expectations. Spending this much time on your field is corrosive to your character and personality (see above two points).
* Culture heroes are entertainers and sports stars. Not makers of useful things.
* Focus on application instead of theory. Everyone wants to do something real cool right now, preferably yesterday, without any training. This is not realistic when laying the foundations for a solid career. Short-term thinking says, "pleasure now, pay later", which does not work well in STEM.
And a very good point about the hacker/elite snobs pissing on other classmates + gender imbalance and lousy social environment, it's not just limited to CS undergrads but is widespread in Ph. D programs as well, you'd expect that these Head Nerd types would have gotten with the program of life by then.
Combine the shitty social elements with a shitty ROI plus an increased awareness of other kinds of worth than being a coding rockstar, and you've got a bunch of disillusioned, not-very-young people who feel they have been deceived into making their life choices.
The last point is also what's making me reconsider being involved in computer science. It seems like even research universities are increasingly doing work that are more low-quality first-startup style grabs at attention, using machine learning (itself a balkanized field devoid of theory) as a semantic stopsign-marker of objective quality, and less of "classical" computer science results that were very mathematically informed.
I disagree with this. Much of the product of computer science departments these days is mathematical gibberish. Pages of proofs written by extremely poor writers with nary a point in sight.
The heyday of computer science, in contrast, involved academics working on interesting problems and publishing readable work that was accessible to practitioners. For example, the papers that came out Rice's Scaler Compiler Group in the early 1990s are a model of clarity and good taste in academic writing.
This is also great: http://hall.org.ua/halls/wizzard/pdf/Vaughan.Pratt.TDOP.pdf
I think that CS, CPE and EE are different than the rest of STEM that students get to start playing in their discipline much, much earlier. I know from experience that CS majors are writing code their first semester. Continually creating new things in your discipline sets up a feedback-loop that keeps you interested. I don't think this was true for engineering programs like civil, mechanical or aerospace.
For science, the payoff is much more abstract, since you don't actually do science as a science undergrad. You learn about science.
There are, of course, undergrads who get involved in research projects or extra-curricular activities centered around their major that allow them to actually play around in their discipline early on. But I think those are edge cases.
The chemistry student I know has been involved in her university's chemistry research labs since freshman year. Mechanical engineer students here frequently do projects, there is a ME lab for them to mess around with. Biology students have some opportunity (unsure how much) to participate in the university's activities.
But, maybe this University is more hands-on than other places.
There was still about a 50%washout rate.
For the record, my CS undergrad had similar attrition, but it was during the dot-com boom. I was a freshmen in '99 and there were 500 other CS freshmen. The typical number of students at a given level is, I think, roughly 1/5 of that now.
Recent CS grad (May of this year actually)
Its more than people being lazy. Though of course there is some of that but you hit the major and more important points.
I wish the whole of academia were as enlightened as you are
Well, some people are lazy. There's no getting around that. Some people would rather take bong hits or play video games than turn in homework. I don't understand those people. Especially when (as some people have told me) they've done the homework.
I think usually in 'lazy' cases the laziness is because they don't care about the bad grade or the lack of learning. The canonical stereotype is the frat boy with his parents paying his way. Stereotype's priorities are not aligned with seeking a degree. They are aligned with parties or making sure parents are happy. So they have no 'skin in the game', and they are not 'in it to win it'.
I didn't run into very many really and truly lazy people. Most people who didn't turn stuff in (that I talked to - please note the qualifier) simply didn't have priorities aligned with getting the degree with decent grades. Priorities in these cases might be "getting drunk", "arguing with girlfriend", "got sick", "other class had test".
My personal opinion is that Universities in the US are both training and education. We set our sights on education - we the academy - but our clients are often asking for training. I heard a slew of griping by the engineers (EE, ME) in a more theory-based linear algebra course. "Give me numbers so I can stick them in my calculator and crunch them" was the usual desire. When people's priorities are not aligned with learning what you are teaching, you get some poor behavior. My priority was "take hard classes, learn what they teach, suck up the weaker grade". So I sucked it up. I also have a bent for wanting to understand principles, which fits in well in academia.
I think the academy needs to contemplate the idea of "white collar training" and take that as potentially realistic option. Something like a three-year bachelor's degree. I am not sure. I think some CS students could use another year past the four just for code-mashing.
One college I heard about has two options for incoming students. Four year BSCS, or five year MSCS. The extra year adds theory.
Also even the programs considered good, generally AP or IB, are chock full of bad incentives. Most rankings are based upon pass rates, making the dominant strategy teaching students to perform well on the test by analyzing problem frequencies and released grading guides. This ends up being teaching an algorithm rather than reasoning skills.
If you're into politics, I don't think there's much stopping you from climbing the ranks of a corporate giant, MBA or not?
So (thought experiment, not backed with anecdote or data) if I can get a (say), History degree and a MBA and have a similar track as a CS degree and a MBA... I know which one provides a better ROI in terms of time invested.
A lot of times stories like this are received derisively, and it's like some sort of mark of eternal shame to admit that, yes, the gender balance and social scene in my field is important to me.
Sometimes I feel like hackers (and traditional engineers like EE and MEs) aspire to some kind of neo-valhalla. Instead of eternal fighting and mead-drinking it's coding and soda-drinking. This leads to a field that's incredibly flat and simplistic - aka boring.
I have coded since my early teens, so a lot of the code-adoration has faded through the simple wear of time. And, like people seem to as they look towards the end of their twenties, I've made a few mistakes and had a few growing up experiences and those have really broadened my mind about career and goals.
The cyber-valhalla is fun and after a while - for most - the fun palls and you stumble out of the soda hall one day and realize that there's a whole world with unexpected complexity and richness that you've neglected in your pursuit of the code. There's a whole book - Microserfs - about that experience. It's worth reading.
That's doing it wrong. I agree with you that math education is probably broken. I imagine that math is very boring if memorizing equations is what you are doing.
It turns out you can write tests to check for memorizing tricks though. Given a certain mathematical pattern, a certain trick solves it. That is how I remember the GRE as being. I found it a truly atrocious metric.
Science majors change their minds once they find out that they will be required to take challenging courses, yes, but it is not this challenge, in and of itself, that causes them to "change their minds". It is that people who are smart enough to be in a position to take these courses, people who the article talks about as having great scores on the SAT etc, people like these are also smart enough to do a quick ROI calculation and realize that a comparatively easier (don't take this as a rip on people with these degrees, many of them are my friends, are very, very smart, and have made this very decision themselves) degree in econ, business, or law will yield vastly greater material dividends.
If you want people to stop changing their minds about science, you have to do something to change the ROI calculation that goes "I can work 2x as hard as my peers, graduate and receive 1/2 the monetary compensation or I can....not do that".
But keep in mind, we're talking about undergraduate degrees here, which is a different beast entirely. Engineering and physical science majors really do have considerably better employment prospects on average than humanities or social science majors.
That said, I suppose you still have to analyze it from the perspective of a student who is sure to attend professional school. If you know you're law-school bound, you're at a reputable university, and you have high grades in humanities and the ability to ace standardized tests, you can still have a high paying career in law without ever taking a serious math class.
Engineering/Sci majors are often more desirable on the way out - a law school graduate with an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering has more options than one with an undergrad major in English.
Considering how much harder these degrees are, it could still be rational for a student to avoid these fields even at the undergraduate level - and if they harm your GPA, it might be best to avoid them (though some admissions officials do say they discount high GPAs in "easier" majors). And even if you can hack it, you'll work a hell of a lot harder in college. But if you're willing to put in the effort and have the ability, you do improve your job prospects with an rigorous Math/Sci/Eng major over a humanities major in almost every career scenario.
So on the balance, I think you can make a very strong ROI case for engineering in eng/sci/math at the undergrad level. MS, less so, but it's a short program. PhD? Well, the RAND institute already crunched the numbers better than I ever could, it's pretty hard to justify a PhD in STEM relative to the professions if you're going off career ROI.
I'll first qualify this by saying that I wasn't talking about doing an ROI comparison against humanities or social sciences. If you have a Bachelor of Arts in Renaissance History, of course your prospects are going to be worse that someone with a Biology degree. But someone with a chemistry degree is going to do much, much worse than someone with a Business or Commerce degree, and possibly even an econ degree.
Engineering changes this balance somewhat as it is quite pragmatic and has a much more industrial-friendly focus to it, so yes a chemical engineer is probably going to do alright. But even then, someone smart enough to get a Chem. Eng degree is also probably smart enough to do really well with a business degree, or get a law degree, and would probably do better monetarily in either of those fields.
When I was in University I watched as many of my friends and classmates made the same calculation and acted on it. The guy who lived across the hall from me in third year busted his balls to an A in quantitative chem, working through some really hard and grueling lab sessions, looked at the effort he had just put in and promptly switched majors to Commerce. 2 years later he graduated after taking a workload that allowed to network way more and find a hot girlfriend, and now works downtown for an oil company making ~120,000 at the age of 28. This is in a place where that is real money, not New York where that doesn't go far.
The sciences are already basically full of people who are taking them out of love and passion for the subject, people for whom this ROI calculation is meaningless because they can't put a dollar figure on their feelings for their discipline. Apparently this is no longer enough, and we need more people in these subjects. But unless you do something to entice the people who are capable, but are also able to be logical about their choice, then I don't see this situation changing anytime soon.
As for the law degree... law (at least in the US) is almost always a graduate degree, so we'd be comparing a JD with either a MS (a little shorter) or a PhD (much longer), not a BA or BS. A chem engineering grad can go to law school and will have more options than most other majors (I read somewhere that IP firms have the highest per-partner profits, and getting a job is easier as there are very few law grads with this background).
Of course, the presence of lucrative professions that can be entered without these difficult undergrad degrees certainly should play into the calculation. If you can do well with a law degree regardless of major, well then why bother with something hard? Ok, so your options are slightly reduced, but as long as they're really good (and they tend to be for top law grads regardless of undergrad major), people may decide that the ROI on engineering vs economics or even art history just isn't worth it. Sounds like your buddy made this calculation and acted on it.
Still, I think the picture is discouraging for PhDs in STEM fields (though better than the utter misery of PhDs in the humanities), whereas I'd still say that majoring at the undergrad level in engineering or hard science puts you in the position where you have the most options leaving college, though it is also a very difficult course of study.
Also, I just can't agree with a good ROI "regardless of salary". Salary can be lower - quite a bit lower, but there is a limit to the size of the gap. Graeenspun and the RAND study I referenced mentions this - that the financial sacrifice has gotten too great, even for the "winners".
Fundamentally, the main problem with students that come from the US educational system is a lack of background in math. The prospective science major who's having trouble with fractions and basic algebra is, unfortunately, a disturbingly common presence on college campuses these days.
It's hard to fix K-12 in this regard (especially as everyone wants to fix it in a different way). But if colleges really want to solve the problem, they should put more effort into remedial math classes, instead of lowering the standards (and reducing the theoretical content) for those classes they already have.
My first degree was History. I went back for engineering and failed Vector Calc and Electro-Mag both twice before finally understanding the material and getting an A in each. I was 30 when I took those, and was too proud to take the remedial.
Luckily, I've had some amazing research experiences so I know I can do the science; that said, I can easily imagine how differently things could have gone if that wasn't the case.
Here is my example in case you can benefit from it. I was studying EE and I had classmates who were able to skip Calc I, Calc II and one guy even clepped out of Differential Equations! Me? I was failing Pre-calc and I had to drop down to College Algebra. I was even failing that, unfortunately. I went to talk to the teacher, who unhelpfully stated, "In my 12 years of teaching I have only had a single student manage to pass considering where you are starting from." That seriously pissed me off. Fortunately, the next test was on exponentials and logorithms, which I just "grok". I got a high A on it. From there I dedicated even more time to the materials and I scoured the library for better math reference books. I found some books that took a practical approach to problem solving and used them to understand the process correctly. In the end I ended up with an 89 for the class. Considering that I had a 60 when I talked with the teacher, I was very proud of it.
I ended up having to add a year to my University studies and therefore added an extra major but it worked out well. I graduated with my EE degree and ironically some of the people that were exempted from the Calc series dropped out since the program was "too hard".
Change the way you are studying if your struggling. Look for other reference materials, try out a few different tutors. There are different ways to learn things, and you just need to find out how you learn and then you push it for all it's worth.
Maybe in-demand engineers make more than the average lawyer, not sure about that. Maybe an MBA isn't really that much easier? But I'd say higher social status, especially in the USA holds true.
And I doubt there'll be that kind of a bottoming out. That said, I'm a 3rd year Cdn law student and programmer looking at a career in law that at least in the next few years will probably be less lucrative than being a programmer.
P.S: I also have a science degree so this post particularly caught my eye!
Engineering is both less segregated (people at MIT aren't all making Google salaries and people at Penn State can get still top jobs) and less bimodal (the top jobs don't pay 3x as much as the median job, and even people who do poorly grades-wise can often find some sort of employment).
So if you're looking at a top engineering program like Berkeley versus doing a bullshit humanities degree followed by a top law school, you'll likely come out ahead monetarily pursuing the latter option. On the other hand going to a decent state engineering school is probably a better bet than aforementioned humanities degree and a decent state law school.
That being said, even someone who went to aforementioned state law school and is working in "small law" for $50k can make a lot of money if he can bring in business. And if you went to that big firm and can bring in business, you can get paid millions while still doing legal work. On the engineering side, you either have to go the startup route, get an MBA and go into management (which involves not being an engineer anymore), or be content hearing "we couldn't possibly pay an engineer as much as a manager!" It's changing a bit with the Google's and Facebook's of the world, but is still the basic reality for most non-software folks.
Median starting and mid career salaries by undergrad major. Engineering dominates the top salaries.
I took until late in my sophomore year before things started to click for me. I can't point to any one specific thing that did it, other than I had matured a bit and my brain was now ready to learn the more difficult subjects.
I went from C's and D's to mostly A's and a few B's and double majored in Computer and Electrical Engineering with a Math minor of all things.
I don't think everyone is ready for college the minute they graduate from high-school. I suspect if I had taken a couple years off and did some blue collar work for a while before heading off to college, I would have done better and gotten even more out of it than I did.
Now I never switched majors, but the thought did cross my mind those first two years. I wonder if slightly delayed college entry would be helpful to others.
I think the whole "math is tough" point of view is not defensible, yet a large percentage of the non-technical population believe it. Yes, math is tough if you are 8 years old, but when you are 20+? Really?
Rather than standardized aptitude tests, I think we need good math textbooks for adults. Not for dummies, just regular explanations focusing on the applications.
On that note, I want to shamelessly add a plug to my upcoming book, in which I explain //all// the high-school math in 50 pages. I decided to add this section, after I saw many of my students struggling to find t in equations like: 3(t+4) = 4(t+3).
Email me if you want to see, and be a test reader. Oh yeah, the book also covers university-level Calculus and Mechanics in 150 pages.
I'm a grad student in English lit, and, if it makes you feel any better, the prospective humanities major who's having trouble with comma rules and simple grammar is also distressingly high. More of them than you might imagine end up thinking humanities classes are too hard, which leads them to business or comm, which leads to problems like the ones discussed here: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/07/student-choice-employment-ski... .
And I've talked to a lot of my peers who say they simply won't teach basic grammar and writing principles, even briefly, because students should "already know them." Which seems rather unfair if the students have already been fouled by the K - 12 system.
Eh. Math illiteracy is a problem, but I came into college having taken calc/physics/quantum mechanics, had nearly perfect math SAT's/SAT II's, etc, and I still hated engineering school.
I think engineering is just plain taught the wrong way. I'd say 80% of my classes were literally just the professor deriving some formula in some tortured fashion, doing a token problem, then going onto the next formula. This might be an adequate pedagogical style for a PhD candidate, but at the undergraduate level this just rewards the kids who have the longest attention span.
As a practicing engineer, you need to understand some of the origins of the formulas, sure, but more than that you need to see how the formulas work in practice, how they interact with each other, how they fit into the big picture. Professors give barely token attention to any of that. In fact it even goes beyond the theory/practice distinction. Playing with concepts and seeing how they interact, rather than laboriously grinding out every mathematical detail, is a great way to teach theory too!
The basic components of good communication are universal: you tell your audience what you're going to tell them, you tell them, and then you tell them what you told them. Engineering professors can be ridiculously inept at doing this, and it's no surprise people tune out and leave the programs.
When I left engineering to go to a smallish private law school, I had a totally different experience. Classes taught entirely by professors. Maximum of ~60 students per class and more typically 20-30 in upper-level courses. Professors who would engage the class in hypotheticals rather than just dryly recount the rules. Exams that actually tested the material we learned.
The fundamental problem is that engineering schools, especially the big state ones like Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, and Georgia Tech, are research factories. They crank out certain amount of BS's to meet industry demand for engineers, but their investment in those graduates seems minimal at best.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think an undergraduate degree in engineering is still the best way to go (as long as you can hack the math and it won't kill your GPA). Even if you ultimately want to do law, finance, or consulting, people really do take you more seriously. But at the same time, I really can't blame people when they stay away from STEM majors, especially ones that test well and know they will be able to go to a top graduate school with their liberal arts degree.
This is interesting. Could it be that at more selective schools, when students encounter difficulty in STEM courses, they are less hesitant to switch to an easier major because they figure that their degree will still have value due to the name recognition of their university, while their counterparts at less selective schools don't have that luxury? That's one hypothesis...
I majored in CS at Berkeley, and there were only one or two professors that I can recall who strayed even slightly from these departmental guidelines. For me, the harsh curves essentially ruined what would have been an amazing educational experience. It was basically a perpetual preparation for the next exam, because you were always competing for your spot on the grade scale.
This is a very real deterrent for not only students who need a decent GPA (e.g. for grad school), but also for those who want to actually enjoy their time at university.
[0] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Policies/ugrad.grading.shtml
Are you saying that the caliber of student in the EECS department of Berkeley is so high that even the bottom 13% of the class would have gotten C's or B's at another school?
also i'm sure there is some of that percentage that are capable but fucking off and not doing homework because they are 18 and just moved out of their parents house.
Entirely possible, but I think that says more about the capricious nature of admissions at elite colleges.
Certainly not any other school in general, but at your average university, probably yes. That's not so hard to believe given the competitiveness of Cal's engineering programs.
You can complain about grade inflation, etc, but at the end of the day you're telling that 18 year old kid: "don't even try to major in engineering, because even if you keep up with your highly qualified peers you'll still kill any shot you might have had at a non-engineering graduate program."
Also bigger, more prestigious universities seem to care less about their students and more about their research: see: TAs who are incapable of teaching, can't speak English, etc. When you're taking a difficult subject and lecture is a waste of time because your teacher can't communicate it's no surprise people drop out. They didn't sign up to self-study by themselves for a semester and take a final.
By junior year I realized I loved science too much, overcame being bothered by what other people thought, majored in physics, and got a PhD.
My last two years of the PhD I ended up starting a company and became a successful entrepreneur in media, which is, I guess, the payoff to the economy of someone going into math and science.
Check out this irony. I've come to create art with my medium and taught a couple art courses at art schools to MFA and BFA candidates. The art students learn programming, circuits, entrepreneurship, design, and such.
I'm talking about programs like NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Project and Parsons' Arts, Media, and Technology program.
We created these displays, which is pretty techy and beautiful. - http://joshuaspodek.com/tag/unionsquareinmotion - http://joshuaspodek.com/new_bryant_park_in_motion_videos
I had to double up on classes and take some subjects on my own over the summer. Two classes one semester literally overlapped by about fifteen minutes and I had to get special permission to show up late for it. I got a passing grade for it, but finished it afterward.
It wasn't a matter of being super-human, just loving the subject. I agree, though, that if your passion isn't overwhelming, you can't do it. You can with many non-STEM majors.
The first couple years of graduate school were brutal. I had taken twenty math and science classes undergrad. Typical Russian and Chinese classmates had taken thirty to fifty and they blew me out of the water. The one guy in the program who took nineteen courses dropped out, so I was right on the border.
If the implications of bio/chem theory were taught in a more practical, problem-solving approach, (a la computer science), I feel people would develop a better passion for science (as they did in High School with science fairs as the article describes), and stick with it longer.
K-12 education in the US channels a lot of really bright kids onto a highly time consuming and sequential STEM track, and the idea that anything other than a STEM major is for wimps is not uncommon. In addition, STEM majors is where such students are directed by guidance counselors.
I went off to college to major in EE. I had a 3 minute conversation with my academic adviser which consisted entirely of him telling me exactly which 15 hours to take. I walked out and changed majors to CHM, where the academic councilor explained the various degree options and discussed electives over the course of about an hour.
But it turns out, though I loved the theory, I really fucking hated laboratory sessions. Organic synthesis on paper was an interesting problem - I just didn't care for going through the motions, cleaning glassware and pretending I was conducting a meaningful experiment.
It took me several years to decide that there are lots of worthy intellectual endeavors and challenging problems outside of STEM [YMMV]. I believe my choice to pursue a liberal arts degree is among the best decisions I ever made.
Personally, I think the problem is that the US educational system narrows the funnel toward the STEM field too early - for all practical purposes it's already narrowing way down into the primary grades...even though the it is obvious that people can find their way into the more "open" STEM areas (such as programming) without being channeled academically toward a STEM career.
In other words, the primary reason that a person first exposed to algebra at Junior College is less likely to become a mathematician is lower expectations, both on the part of the academy and on the part of the student.
You don't learn enough in four years to do meaningful lab work in OChem, but you still have to learn the basic techniques somewhere.
Personally I really miss bench chemistry. If the professional culture weren't so conservative and hierarchical I'd probably still be doing it.
I think a lot of it also has to do with expectations from parents. For a lot of students, graduating with an engineering degree and a 2.5 GPA will leave mom and dad less happy than an English degree with a 3.5 GPA, even though the former is more likely to be useful in the job hunt.
If your future employers are looking for that, you do your living best to pad your transcript to stuff your GPA up.
I studied in the UK, so you apply from high school to do, "Computer Science" or, "Physics" or, "English". And that's what you do. You have some choice in terms of the classes and courses you take, but (generally) they're all totally within that sphere. I think having some options to do other courses would be really valuable, but equally it means people don't typically chose to switch from an STEM based degree to something else, and people stick it out (or just drop out).
I don't know that including pre-meds in the analysis is worthwhile. While medicine is certainly quite technical, I don't really consider it a STEM field. The economic multipliers from improved medicine (increasing productivity for each of a doctor's patients) is qualitatively different from those for "real" STEM fields (increasing productivity for potentially anyone who can get the discovered knowledge).