Tag: STEM

Did politically correctness kill the Liberal Arts with the help of the College Board?

On Thursday, June 4, 2015

GW Thielman, in an article at The Federalist helpfully titled The Liberal Arts Are Dead, Long Live STEM, makes the point that what goes for a Liberal Arts education today has become incredibly illiberal. STEM, of course, being the acronym for fields in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. He believes the focus of “liberal arts” education these days is more about the politically correct zeitgeist of the day than the preparation of students to think critically. He gives a great explanation of this point I have tried to make frequently on this blog.

STEM curricula have been critiqued for supposedly neglecting the humanities, but students who major in STEM obtain more credit hours in languages, arts, and human interaction than their humanities counterparts obtain in scientific fields. Rhodes College professor Loretta Jackson-Hayes has explained the benefit of liberal arts for STEM students, but liberal-arts students could likewise benefit from cross-training in the more exacting disciplines.

Students who pursue STEM majors are also better at the humanities than liberal-arts majors are at the sciences. Harvard law professor Harvey Mansfield in The New Atlantis observed, “Science students do well in non-science courses, but non-science students have difficulty in science courses. Slaves of exactness find it easier to adjust to the inexact, though they may be disdainful of it, than those who think in the realm of the inexact when confronted with the exact.” Perhaps envy subtly contributes to liberal arts defensiveness against STEM.

This is precisely why our children earned STEM undergraduate degrees. One went on to graduate work in STEM, but the other was accepted for a PhD at a great school in a non-STEM field specifically because she had an undergraduate degree in a STEM field. Theilman goes into this in detail with some excellent supporting links.

Right after I read his article, I ran into another article by Stanley Kurtz in National Review titled How the College Board Politicized U.S. History. I believe it is about precisely the same problem. The article discusses how the College Board, the company that makes standardized examinations like CLEP, the SAT and high school AP tests is degrading their AP materials by politicizing in a disturbingly politically correct, left-wing way. He is not the only one. You can read more about a group of highly credentialed historians made a statement denouncing this revisionism in this article at Real Clear Politics titled College Board’s Reckless Spin on U.S. History.

This is precisely why we are so grateful we homeschooled our children and sent them on to do STEM degrees and why I continue to push back on this kind of revisionism whenever I get the chance.

Betty Blonde #338 – 11/02/2009

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Boys should not be pushed into STEM fields?

By Dad

On Tuesday, December 23, 2014

In Education

I just read a blog post linked by Luke in the “Other Posts of Note” list over at the Sonlight Blog. The title of the blog post is Stop telling boys to go into STEM and it is just wrong on so many levels I do not even know where to start. First, the idea that there are too many STEM majors is questionable at best. Read this article and this article to start then google it for more articles and lots of research on both sides of this issue. The upshot, though, is that STEM majors make a lot more money whether or not they chose to work in a STEM field. In addition, the author inadvertently makes a very important point when she tells the following anecdote:

Lest you think I’m just being negative toward men, this is actually something a man told me. I had an English professor who was one of the best college teachers I’d had, I think in part because he was very knowledgeable in science. In fact, he’d received a degree in engineering from Stanford but then shuffled around for several years before finally getting a master’s degree in English. During one conversation, I asked him why he got a degree in engineering when he really loved literature.

It is arguable that a STEM degree is better preparation for non-STEM work than many non-STEM degrees. Our daughter Kelly took a similar path by earning a STEM degree (Statistics) all the time knowing she never wanted to work in a STEM job. She has gone on from that Statistics degree to further education in a non-STEM field–several schools offered her funded PhD’s in Marketing. She chose University of Washington. There is no way she would have been accepted into the program after her Bachelors degree following the normal trajectory which typically includes a non-STEM BS, some relevant work and an MBA in Marketing. That she gets the Math and can “do” big data got her in the door.

I guess the issue centers more on the fact that liberal arts degrees are not highly valued in the work place. There is absolutely more academic and intellectual rigor required to earn a STEM degree than a typical liberal arts degree. It has been argued that many hiring managers view many liberal arts degrees as similar to having no degree at all. See here. My argument is not that non-STEM work is not valuable, but that there are better ways to prepare for it than getting a non-STEM undergraduate degree. I think the answer is to change the non-STEM degrees so they ARE valuable by adding rigor including more Math, Statistics, and Computer programming. Maybe less people would enter those fields, but that is right in line with Charles Murray’s idea about too many people going to college anyway.

And don’t get me started on pushing people toward anything based on their gender. It is abjectly elitist and sexist to do that. So what if a person’s culture, value system or worldview pushes a woman toward a “feminine” field. It is THEIR culture, value system and worldview, not yours. Why is your idea about what they should do better than theirs? Additionally, the sexes ARE different from each other, even (if not especially) in the way their brains operate. Maybe men ARE inherently better at math (a religious discussion onto itself), but even if it is just a cultural construct, who is anyone else to say what is right for given individuals whatever their sex. Why do the self-appointed academic elites get to chose what is right and, therefore, what gets pushed when it is a decidedly unscientific “right or wrong”, personal choice kind of question.

It is a luxury to be able to do what one loves as anything other than an avocation if it does not put food on the table. If you do something you love and it does not pay the rent, someone else has to pick up the tab. If that someone is a spouse, an ancestor who gave you a big inheritance or some other benefactor, good for you. The sad part of all this is that it is off “we the people” who end up paying via ill-advised uses of our tax monies. If such a luxury is not immediately available, it is probably a pretty good idea to a get a job that pays well enough to eat, then work your way into the vocation you love. A STEM degree is not a bad way to do that. The probability that you will make enough money for following your dream is much higher if you start with a STEM degree whether you end up deciding to work in a STEM field after that or not.

The education bubble

By Dad

On Tuesday, January 7, 2014

In Education

Day 869 of 1000
Betty Blonde #35 – 09/03/2008

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Here is a great article in the Wall Street Journal on the education bubble. The say all the normal stuff: 1) Education costs too much, 2) people get degrees in fields where there are no jobs, 3) too many people who should learn a trade go to college instead and 4) not enough people are getting STEM degrees. There is some good news in all this. College has gotten so expensive that fewer people are going. Tuition has actually dropped at a number of well known schools which has led to good results–more revenue because more students could attend. I do know whether more students is a good thing or not. I am completely on board with the WSJ’s recommendation.

America’s higher education problem calls for both wiser choices by families and better value from schools. For some students, this will mean choosing a major carefully (opting for a more practical area of study, like engineering over the humanities), going to a less expensive community college or skipping college altogether to learn a trade.

Math, engineering, opportunity, and hard work

By Dad

On Monday, December 9, 2013

In Education

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.)

Studying for the really hard stuff 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.

Why not skip high school? (Part 9) Christian takes Chemistry at Big State U.

By Dad

On Thursday, April 4, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

Day 591 of 1000

This is the ninth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Christian’s first class at NCSU was Chemistry. We really wanted Christian to get started the same way as Kelly. We described in the previous post in this series how we put her in a single summer class to get her started at Big State U. (NCSU) when she started there. We helped her choose a hard class called Foundations of Advanced Mathematics because we wanted her to get a feel for the difficulty of STEM classes at national research university and because it was the first class she needed for some future sequences.

The reasons to put Christian in the same class were the same as for Kelly, but we ran into a snag. When we evaluated his whole program, we realized that he was going to have a pretty tough go at getting all his classes done in time to graduate in four years both because of the sequences he needed and because he did not have nearly as many credits as Kelly. We described all the reasons for that in this post. We got a little bit frantic, but figured out a way he could graduate on time. The problem was that he would have to take a Chemistry class in the summer rather than the Foundations of Advanced Mathematics class.

That was all good and well, but there were two problems. First, because the Foundations class would have to be put off until fall semester, Christian would have to take a very heavy load during spring semester (he is in that right now) so he will have the prerequisites for the classes he needs to take during his senior year to be able to graduate. Second, he had to pass a test that showed that he had enough skills from previous Chemistry studies to perform well in this college level Chemistry class. The problem was he had not had a Chemistry class since fourth grade. He had only two weeks to study before he had to take the test. To complicate things a little more, he used that same time period to study the material need to test out of the computer literacy class all incoming students are required to take. It was a little bit of a grind, but he passed both tests without too much trouble.

We did something by accident that turned out to be important later on. Christian and Kelly took most of their hard STEM classes together at the Community College. They helped one another and worked together a lot. What we did not think about when we split the kids up for this summer semester is that we really did not know how they would do in one of these hard STEM classes if they did not have each other. It turned out OK, but if we had to do it over, we might have split them up for at least a few classes earlier in the process.

The Chemistry class was a joy to Christian. He feels that if he had had more time to focus on that earlier, he might have even tried to get a degree in Chemistry. He had to work hard, but got an A. That he got an A was a confidence builder for his next semester.

Computer programming for kids – a new series of posts

By Dad

On Wednesday, March 27, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Software, Technology

Day 583 of 1000

It is my daughter, Kelly’s, birthday today. She is now a 19 year old Statistics major at North Carolina State University and is taking her first two formal programming classes, Statistical programming with SAS and Java. She has also programmed with the R statistical programming language. She enjoys programming a great deal, but is a little frustrated with her Java class. Kelly is not frustrated with the material; she enjoys that. She is frustrated because I taught a lot of programming to Christian, but virtually none to Kelly.

She said, “Dad, why did you teach Christian how to program and not me?”

I said, “Because you enjoyed other stuff like art and crafts and Christian wanted to know how to program his Palm Pilot.”

She said, “You should have taught me, too. I need to know how to program now and I am having to learn it from scratch.”

“You really have to have something you want to do with programming or it is really boring,” I replied.

“You made us do Mavis Beacon Typing 15 minutes every day for two years and we didn’t have any real use for it until years later. It was really boaring at the time, but got A LOT out of being able to type faster and better than everyone else. We are really glad you made us do that.”

All this was true. I think I failed Kelly in this. Christian learned how to program on his own, but I bought him the learning materials, made computers available to him, and vmade a program of study that was both systematic and and integrated part of his homeschool curricula. The reason we did all this for Christian was because he had something he wanted to accomplish. I should have thought to teach them both how to program whether they wanted to or not. The program we put together for Chrisian has given him a huge leg up both in class and with work opportunities. Any student who plans to get a hard (STEM) degree, would benefit from such a study program. I am just sorry I did not do this for Kelly.

I have decided that, when I finish my current series on Why not skip high school?, I will write a series on how we taught Christian to program. I will link to that series from this post as soon as it is started.

Kelly has a new article up at The College Fix

By Dad

On Tuesday, December 6, 2011

In Education, Money, Politics, Work

Kelly and I just had the following instant message exchange. The first link is an article she wrote. The second link is about students who study hard stuff versus students who don’t. After the exchange we discuss why it is OK to finish your career in something other than just STEM stuff.

Here is a great quote from the second article:

…people with an undergraduate STEM major make $500,000 more over their lifetime than non-STEM majors.

Kelly
hey dad check this out
12:48 PM

Kelly
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/9828
and also this : http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/9824
apparently lots of STEM majors leave the STEM work after 10 years in a STEM career
which is sad

me
Very, very cool! No it is not sad! They move up in the world so they are managing STEM people. You need experienced ex-STEM people to manage STEM people and sell STEM created stuff.

Kelly
oh ok

me
Some STEM people move right into the the sales/managment/marketing mode–that is not bad either.

Kelly
wow cool!

me
I am going to be wearing a STEM and a marketing hat.

Kelly
yeah that is super cool
12:51 PM