Day 840 of 1000
Betty Blonde #20 – 08/13/2008
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My buddy Jon sent me a link to an interesting article in the New York Times about the falling number of students interested in pursuit of a degree in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math (STEM). I think the Times, not normally a bastion of veracity and evenhandedness, describes a difficult problem fairly well. This paragraph describes the problem fairly well:
Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career or a college major involving science, technology, engineering or math, known collectively as STEM, according to a survey of more than a million students who take the ACT test. The number of students who want to pursue engineering or computer science jobs is actually falling, precipitously, at just the moment when the need for those workers is soaring. (Within five years, there will be 2.4 million STEM job openings.)
I think this is certainly true. It is not fashionable to study the hard stuff. And the interesting thing is that there are more jobs available for people who study the “kind of” hard stuff (I imagine that means studying through Calculus, Diff Eq, and that sort of thing) than those who study the REALLY hard stuff like high level math and statistics (Real Analysis, Mathematical Statistics, and the hard proofs classes after that). Here is the quote from the article:
Only 11 percent of the jobs in the STEM fields require high-level math, according to Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. But the rest still require skills in critical thinking that most high school students aren’t getting in the long march to calculus.
This morning, Lorena found Christian’s books laid out on the island in the kitchen looking like this. He and Kelly are both going through lots of pain getting ready for finals in classes that feature really hard stuff.
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