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To win acceptance to Cornell University,
Will Najar had to convince the philosophy
department that he would be a perfect fit
for the program. But after taking mostly
humanities classes in his freshman year,
the 19-year-old Najar changed his mind. “I
wanted to build things or help people,” he
says, “and I realized that I wasn’t going to
be able to make that kind of an impact on the
world as a philosophy guy.”
So Najar switched his major to biology.
The change meant “working harder for
lower grades,” Najar says. But he persevered,
and along the way he taught himself some
computer and Web skills. After graduating
last May, he snared a well-paying job as a
technical account manager at Microsoft,
where he uses his scientific training to help
customers solve their computing problems.
Najar’s academic path has long been
thought to be an anomaly. Conventional
wisdom holds that few college students ever
transfer into a STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) field
because they lack the necessary academic
preparation. The field is already plagued
by high attrition rates: At least one-half of
students who declare their intention to major
in a STEM field either switch majors or
never earn a degree, some driven out by poor
instruction and a chilly climate for women
and minorities. Both the low inflow and high
outflow have long been thought to be unique
characteristics of STEM disciplines.
The unfortunate result, experts say, is
a dearth of technically savvy workers that
U.S. companies need to compete in a global
economy. That alleged crisis has prompted
the federal government, industry, and private
foundations to spend billions of dollars trying
to understand and reverse the pattern.
But new data poke major holes in that
conventional wisdom. The findings could
have important implications for an issue that
for 2 decades has spawned bitter ideological
battles between those who say that the leaky
STEM pipeline is a national crisis and those
who say that the supply of STEM workers is
more than adequate.
One study, a first-ever look at attrition
rates outside the STEM fields, has found that
STEM majors are no more likely to switch
out than are students in the humanities,
business, and education. In November,
Xianglei Chen of RTI International in
North Carolina reported on her analysis of
a nationally representative sample of 19,000
students who began college in 2003.
The study, which tracked the students for
6 years, found an attrition rate of 48% for
STEM majors (20% dropped out and 28%
switched to a non-STEM major). That
compares with 56% for initial humanities
majors and 50% for business majors. “We’ve
never really looked at attrition in non-
STEM fields, so we never really knew the
comparative size of the problem for STEM,”
says Matthew Soldner of the Education
Department’s National Center for Education
Statistics, which commissioned the RTI study.
A second study, also released in November,
looked at how student preferences change
during their first year of college. The data,
from the Beginning College Survey of Student
Engagement (BCSSE) and the National
Survey of Student Engagement, involve
78,000 students at 119 institutions in 2012.
Researchers at Indiana University found that
24% of the students who entered college with
plans to earn a STEM degree had shifted into a
non-STEM field by the end of their freshman
year. But they also discovered that 27% not
originally planning to major in STEM had
switched into a STEM field by spring.
Those two findings come as no surprise
to Hal Salzman, a professor of public policy
at Rutgers University in New Brunswick,
New Jersey. Salzman’s previous work has
questioned those claiming a shortage of
STEM-trained workers. And in a new paper
not yet in print, Salzman argues that the leaky
STEM pipeline metaphor should be replaced
by a two-way street, with students continually
moving into and out of STEM disciplines.
“If you talk to 17-year-olds about their
plans, or ask adults how they got into their
profession, you’ll find that their interests
change and they change majors,” Salzman
says. “I think what has happened is that
we defined [attrition] as the problem, and
that led researchers down a certain path.”
Salzman thinks educators should focus
on understanding the factors that affect
whether students stick with any given major,
including STEM.
Talking back
The push to improve U.S. science educa-
tion across the board dates from the post-
Sputnik era. But it was a 1997 book by Elaine
Seymour and Nancy Hewitt, Talking About
Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sci-
ences, that made undergraduate STEM educa-
tion a hot research topic. In lengthy interviews
with 335 students at seven U.S. institutions,
the authors found, as one reviewer put it, that
“students are very disappointed with college
[STEM] courses and professors.”
The book was a call to arms for improving
how STEM courses are taught and attracting
and retaining more women and minorities, all
with the goal of stemming the high attrition
rates. (Seymour and Hewitt pegged the rate at
55% for their diverse sample of colleges and
research universities.)
For 2 decades, that philosophy has ruled:
A 2012 report by a White House science
Studies Suggest Two-Way
Street for Science Majors
SCIENCE EDUCATION
Lifting the curtain.
Leah Gum’s decision
to switch from theater
into electrical engineering isn’t as rare as
many experts think.
NEWS & ANALYSIS
