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I realize that not everyone out there believes the leaky pipeline, but to me it appears to have a solid foundation. Essentially our school system discourages STEM students before they even realize it. A huge portion are attrite'd out in middle school by poor science and math preparation. Teachers in general don't like math and hard sciences and it shows. We lose even more in high school because the math gets harder and teachers more discouraging. Most science taught in high school is memorization based. Then they get to college and even more attrit out because the courses get hard. They aren't prepared. They haven't been taught how to learn. Most haven't even been taught how to take notes.
I don't think it's that teachers don't like STEM subjects. It's that people who like STEM and would be good at teaching it can make more money in other lines of work.
I realize that not everyone out there believes the leaky pipeline, but to me it appears to have a solid foundation. Essentially our school system discourages STEM students before they even realize it. A huge portion are attrite'd out in middle school by poor science and math preparation. Teachers in general don't like math and hard sciences and it shows. We lose even more in high school because the math gets harder and teachers more discouraging. Most science taught in high school is memorization based. Then they get to college and even more attrit out because the courses get hard. They aren't prepared. They haven't been taught how to learn. Most haven't even been taught how to take notes.
I must have rep'd you sometime recently because the machinery won't allow me do so now.
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Your outline is right on the money........unfortunately our K-12 thought leaders are far, far more interested in other things as the current anti-math and anti-honors sentiments prove. Further, follow the money - depending upon whom one believes we spend between 2.5 and 4X more on the bottom 5% of academic achievers than the top 5%.
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A few bits per math:
We sent our kids to private schools in large part to avoid any and all new math. It worked.
For sure math talented kids very often outstrip math teaching talent by high school.
Math may be the most painful example we have underscoring the failures of the teaching credentials over contextual expertise ethos.
Wages that have been stagnant for decades say otherwise, along with the fact that as of 2013, the US produced more STEM graduates every year than there were STEM jobs available. Not all of those STEM jobs even required degrees. Unless you meant the US needs to import hundreds of thousands of H1Bs so that companies can keep wages down.
Wages stagnant for decades in STEM? Where do you live?
We've been over all of this before. We do not have shortages across every STEM study path. We have too many BS biology, BS general chemistry and probably too many BS EEs for examples. Probably too many MS biology and some others too.
We suffer acute shortages of home grown talent at the higher end of just about every area of STEM.
Just off the top of my head:
We import roughly 28% of our clinical physicians. With precious few exceptions the 28% must complete formal US residencies in order to become physicians...........so the claim that we do not have enough residency slots does not apply per the cadre. I read the other week we import not quite 25% of our dentists.
I've never been able to find what seems like high confidence information per MS and Ph.D level medical researchers but I'd be surprised if we don't import 30 - 35% of the cadre (probably more). Anecdotal for sure but my son has been on more than one research team in which the was the sole native born American.
H1-B for sure is used from some companies to depress wages. That does not mean that H1-B talent is not needed due to respective home grown talent shortages.
My wife is a CIO and I can tell you you are in a dream state if claiming the US produces enough IT talent. We flatly do not.....especially at the advanced degree levels.
We do not produce enough medical, engineering, math/physics, chemistry etc. academicians. We import high percentages of each cadre out of need.
Why? Because you'd be unable to help with homework?
My public high school taught "new math" after trig/pre-calculus. Then, new math was basically boolean algebra. Believe it or not, this significantly helped my career in information management and retrieval.
Funny. But no.
My math chops are far better than average and my wife's exceptional with a BS in applied math and CS masters from an engineering school. She's a CIO as well so maybe I'll get her on here and you can regale her with data masterstroke retrieval and some heroic forensics stories?
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Anyway what matters is outside their professional schooling our daughter has two engineering degrees and our son has an MS in physics. So like it or not our "plan" worked.
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New math after trig/calc isn't the same as new math to a K-6th kid.
ETA - corrected frighteningly bad typo.......left the rest.
You are of course broadly correct. However, I see two key contextual issues.
A. Our K-12 system simply does not produce enough STEM ready rising college freshmen. This is essentially proved out by the fact that we must import hundreds of thousands of STEM workers and we have high early college STEM students washout rates.
B. Across the various professional STEM career paths we have numerous acute worker shortages and little hope of backfill from domestic talent. Medical research is a pain point. Clinical medicine is another we simply do not produce enough rising STEM talent ready to advance into medical school, residency and then clinical medicine. My wife needed a Ph.D level IT security VP.........it took her over a year to find a person qualified......he's absolutely great and he's Russian.
In terms of A...is that the fault of the K-12 system, or the fault of the way human beings are. Going back to the 1970s and 1980s when I was still teaching science, girls used to drive me crazy when -- all too often -- they would say things like. "I just can't do science. And my mother says she never could either". I'm not kidding...I heard that often. I imagine that has improved since then, but I still think it's an issue. If we look at females in STEM professions, only 27% of STEM professionals are women. My degrees were in geology, and while the number of females in geology rose to 21% of all geologists, in the last decade that percent actually declined.
I'm getting old and have had some medical issues lately. I still find that nurses are overwhelming female and doctors are overwhelming male.
In terms of A...is that the fault of the K-12 system, or the fault of the way human beings are. Going back to the 1970s and 1980s when I was still teaching science, girls used to drive me crazy when -- all too often -- they would say things like. "I just can't do science. And my mother says she never could either". I'm not kidding...I heard that often. I imagine that has improved since then, but I still think it's an issue. If we look at females in STEM professions, only 27% of STEM professionals are women. My degrees were in geology, and while the number of females in geology rose to 21% of all geologists, in the last decade that percent actually declined.
I'm getting old and have had some medical issues lately. I still find that nurses are overwhelming female and doctors are overwhelming male.
I'm sorry you've faced medical challenges lately, hope things improve on that front so much as possible. What's the saying.........."getting old isn't for sissies?"
IMO our STEM related educational shortcomings revolve around a few more or less co-equals and a third trailing issue.
1a. Parents - from the disengaged to the excuse makers, "I want little Jimmy to enjoy K-12 and not best stressed out or work hard."...........all the while kids all over the planet are working harder than Jimmy.
1b. Our K-12 system that too often places the wrong people in front of kids as teachers. The pedagogy/teaching credentials over expertise bit hurts us in STEM and especially math. And the growing tendency to not segregate kids by talent is also damaging per STEM.
1c. We are fat, rich and lazy as a people, those at our poverty line before any transfers and other aid are only a little less wealthy than the medians in Japan, France and The UK. As such fear isn't much of a motivator.
2. Odd and dated pressures on young females. Maybe the only net positive from the Soviets was proving women could be experts in math, physics, chemistry, statistics, engineering and medicine in large numbers. The Red logic was cold but sensible.........prime of life men were needed to work coal mines, farm, log, heavy construction, in steel mills etc. so women in great number took charge on the academic side. The yield is a deep legacy of STEM exploration led by women.
The idea that women can't succeed in math/STEM is long proved hogwash and needs to die off.
I'm sorry you've faced medical challenges lately, hope things improve on that front so much as possible. What's the saying.........."getting old isn't for sissies?"
IMO our STEM related educational shortcomings revolve around a few more or less co-equals and a third trailing issue.
1a. Parents - from the disengaged to the excuse makers, "I want little Jimmy to enjoy K-12 and not best stressed out or work hard."...........all the while kids all over the planet are working harder than Jimmy.
1b. Our K-12 system that too often places the wrong people in front of kids as teachers. The pedagogy/teaching credentials over expertise bit hurts us in STEM and especially math. And the growing tendency to not segregate kids by talent is also damaging per STEM.
1c. We are fat, rich and lazy as a people, those at our poverty line before any transfers and other aid are only a little less wealthy than the medians in Japan, France and The UK. As such fear isn't much of a motivator.
2. Odd and dated pressures on young females. Maybe the only net positive from the Soviets was proving women could be experts in math, physics, chemistry, statistics, engineering and medicine in large numbers. The Red logic was cold but sensible.........prime of life men were needed to work coal mines, farm, log, heavy construction, in steel mills etc. so women in great number took charge on the academic side. The yield is a deep legacy of STEM exploration led by women.
The idea that women can't succeed in math/STEM is long proved hogwash and needs to die off.
1a. Hmmmm. Well, "all over the planet" is a gross exaggeration, from my perspective. And are you saying that being stressed out at age 12 is a good thing? Are you saying that all parents need to raise their children the same way with the same values?
1b. I don't think it's an issue of who the system is putting in front of kids, as much as it is an issue of who they have to put in front of kids. Taking only the four core subjects, I never had a problem hiring English or social studies teachers. There were times in those two content areas where I had up to 25 candidates for each opening. On the other hand, when it came to math or science, there were times I only had one candidate. Literally. I could either hire that math teacher, bad as she was, or have no math teacher for 130 kids. And this, by the way, in what was considered to be in the top 5 middle schools in the state.
There are still a lot of assumptions -- in both directions -- about what boys and girls can do (or in the case of some people, should do). In the electives field, it was never a challenge to get girls to sign up for 'home ec' and never a challenge to get boys to sign up for 'shop'. Cultural expectations.
Btw...thank you for your opening comment. Things improved greatly yesterday when I found out my suspicious thyroid nodule was benign. May still have to have surgery, but no cancer treatments.
1. The school system is 80% signaling & 20% human capital formation (aka learning something meaningful). The main benefit of going to college is signaling that you are smart so that employers won't throw your application in the trash. College mostly is a glorified HR department that allows employers to save time onboarding applicants. What are you signaling - Intelligence, conscientiousness (hardworking) and conformity.
I don't have a problem with this. Many people value education in this country even if the majority of the effort is just to obtain a different perspective. If an employer simply wants employees with the same background experiences to maintain a well-oiled machine, as opposed to needing employees to come up with something innovative or more efficient, then some evidence (resume) is the starting point to check for people who have the same values and experiences.
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2. Educational psychologists have been studying transfer of learning (aka critical thinking, learning how to learn etc.) for 100 years and are very pessimistic about it happening in the real world. Learning is specific. Whatever critical thinking ability one has is very hard to improve through training and mostly baked into the cake of IQ.
School is mostly run on a curriculum so it is the "covering" of information and not how to learn it. If we slow it down for the people who need more scaffolding, then people complain about holding back the smarter students. If we speed it up, then students complain about the teacher not teaching or not making it relatable which then may lead to the behavior described below.
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3. Most students don't care for knowledge for its intrinsic value. Students mostly party in college, take easy classes to get easy As & sometimes cheat. That's rational behavior if signaling is the main purpose of college. Appeals to lofty human ideals about poetry, the arts, democracy & other things don't move the needle very much. If you look at poetry book sales and other measures of student uptake of these ideals, it's very little to nothing.
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4. People forget what they learn. So even more important material like science & social studies are halfway gone when people become adults. If you ask adults what they know about basic science & history, they will do poorly.
As long as I know where to look it up and comprehend what I am reading, I don't have a problem with this. The only problem I can see with this is if you are expected to be an expert in your field and your reputation suffers for not knowing certain things off-hand.
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5. Despite the lack of knowledge people can get by because they work jobs that require little of what they learned in school anyway.
I can see these things being a case against education for some people, especially those who may start their own business that doesn't require any licensing.
Wages stagnant for decades in STEM? Where do you live?
We've been over all of this before. We do not have shortages across every STEM study path. We have too many BS biology, BS general chemistry and probably too many BS EEs for examples. Probably too many MS biology and some others too.
We suffer acute shortages of home grown talent at the higher end of just about every area of STEM.
Just off the top of my head:
We import roughly 28% of our clinical physicians. With precious few exceptions the 28% must complete formal US residencies in order to become physicians...........so the claim that we do not have enough residency slots does not apply per the cadre. I read the other week we import not quite 25% of our dentists.
I've never been able to find what seems like high confidence information per MS and Ph.D level medical researchers but I'd be surprised if we don't import 30 - 35% of the cadre (probably more). Anecdotal for sure but my son has been on more than one research team in which the was the sole native born American.
H1-B for sure is used from some companies to depress wages. That does not mean that H1-B talent is not needed due to respective home grown talent shortages.
My wife is a CIO and I can tell you you are in a dream state if claiming the US produces enough IT talent. We flatly do not.....especially at the advanced degree levels.
We do not produce enough medical, engineering, math/physics, chemistry etc. academicians. We import high percentages of each cadre out of need.
There are plenty of underlying issues associated with the shortage of physicians. One is that the physicians do not want to go where the jobs are. The second is that the percentage of foreign physicians is higher in primary care fields, which is where the most demand is for primary care doctors. The problem is so great that a lot of rural states now allow PAs and NPs to provide care without being under a protocol with a physician.
I would go so far as to say that a lot of fields (particularly in STEM) have this problem. When you have a highly educated population, often look for places to live that have certain amenities- good schools, lots of enrichment activities for adults and children, etc. There is also not much of a professional community. In more complex cases, you may want your patient to get a second opinion, but what if that second opinion is three hours away? That may not be practical for the patient. FWIW, I work in a job where I look at medical records, so I see the issues people face with finding doctors within a reasonable distance who can provide care.
You can train STEM workers day and night, but if they don’t want to go to more remote locations, that isn’t going to help the problem. Even with programs that encourage doctors to go to rural/underserved areas in exchange for loan forgiveness, those programs are typically only for a set period. After that, doctors can move onto other areas.
My cousin works (or used to work- not sure exactly if she still does this job) with companies to decide where they want to put large corporate campuses. Part of her job involves talking to people already at a company to figure out whether they’d be willing to go to X or Y place in order to figure out whether a certain location makes sense.
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