Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
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Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students.
“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”
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It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.
After studying nearly a decade of transcripts at one college, Kevin Rask, a professor at Wake Forest University, concluded last year that the grades in the introductory math and science classes were among the lowest on campus. The chemistry department gave the lowest grades over all, averaging 2.78 out of 4, followed by mathematics at 2.90. Education, language and English courses had the highest averages, ranging from 3.33 to 3.36.
Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors.
Stemming the Tide - Walter Russell Mead
Georgetown’s latest education report names Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) the safest bets for high wages and consistent demand. It reads:High and rising wage premiums are being paid to STEM workers in spite of the increasing global supply […]The deeper you dig into the report the better it gets for STEM graduates. Both undergraduate and graduate STEMS earn roughly 50% more than their non-STEM counterparts.
Demand for the [STEM] core competencies is far greater than the 5 percent traditional STEM employment share suggests, and stretches across the entire U.S. job market, touching virtually every industry. Since 1980, the number of workers with high levels of core STEM competencies has increased by almost 60 percent.
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But something else emerges from this important study that students and parents need to keep in mind. What you study is more important than where you study it; students who take solid courses at solid schools will often learn more and do better than students who take empty classes as flashy name schools.
STEM Executive Summary - Carnevale, Smith, Melton (Georgetown Univ.)
