Virginia high school students will begin learning “mechatronics” to prepare for engineering tech classes in community college, well-paid jobs in high-tech manufacturing and possible transfer to Virginia Tech for a four-year engineering degree.
STEM is too hard for most students
January 12, 2012 by
Lack of interest and aptitude keeps students out of STEM majors, reports the Washington Post.
Do tell.
Despite higher employment and earnings for technical degrees, only 16 percent of college graduates earn degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. Why not?
Mainly, they aren’t good enough at math in high school, and they aren’t interested in STEM as a result. According to a study of high school students performed by the Business-Higher Education Forum (pdf) in December, only 17 percent of high school seniors were both proficient in math and interested in the STEM fields. (Fourteen percent more were not proficient in math but still interested in STEM). In fact, many students — 27 percent — weren’t interested in math or science degrees even if they were math proficient.
Students interested in STEM are motivated primarily by academic and career achievement. Non-STEM students see college as a “general life experience” and may lack “critical academic skills,” the study finds.
College’s economic value depends on the degree
January 8, 2012 by
College is worth it, but majors linked to occupations offer better job prospects than majors focused on general skills, concludes a new Georgetown report, Hard Times: Not All College Degrees Are Created Equal (pdf).
Another general rule: “People who make technology are better off than people who use technology.”
A bachelor’s degree is one of the best weapons a job seeker can wield in the fight for employment and earnings. And staying on campus to earn a graduate degree provides safe
shelter from the immediate economic storm, and will pay off with greater employability and earnings once the graduate enters the labor market. Unemployment for students with new
bachelor’s degrees is an unacceptable 8.9 percent, but it’s a catastrophic 22.9 percent for job seekers with a recent high school diploma — and an almost unthinkable 31.5 percent for recent high school dropouts.
Except for architecture graduates, who’ve been hit hard by the construction crash, unemployment rates are higher in non-technical majors such as the arts (11.1 percent), humanities and liberal arts (9.4 percent), social sciences (8.9 percent) and law and public policy (8.1 percent).
Unemployment is low for computer science (7.8 percent) and math (6 percent) graduates who can write software and invent new applications, higher for information systems graduates (11.7 percent) ”who use software to manipulate, mine, and disseminate information.” However, the report predicts jobs for computer majors will “bounce back strongly” as the recovery proceeds.
Median earnings among recent college graduates vary from $55,000 among engineering majors to $30,000 in the arts, psychology and social work. While new graduates in computer engineering average $60,000, physiology graduates average only $24,000.
To quote Barbie: Engineering is hard
November 7, 2011 by
My daughter, an American Studies major, was talking with her lawyer friends. They all decided they’d raise their children to be engineers. “No sociology majors!” she says. “No English majors! No American Studies!” Engineering graduates have it made, the lawyers decided. (They’re assuming their children will earn engineering degrees at top universities.)
But attrition is high for college students who plan on science, technology, engineering and math majors, writes the New York Times. In middle and high school, kids decide that science is fun. In college, “the excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls ‘the math-science death march.’ Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.”
Some 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors switch or quit. That rises to 60 percent when pre-meds are counted, twice the attrition rate of all other majors.
While some students lack the math skills or the work ethic, the attrition rate is high at super-selective schools, says UCLA Education Professor Mitchell Chang.
“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.”
Grading is tougher in science and math classes than in the humanities or social sciences, discouraging some students.
Others find the coursework abstract.
Some engineering programs are breaking up large lecture classes, giving students more design opportunities and pushing social engagement.
(Notre Dame) students now do four projects. They build Lego robots and design bridges capable of carrying heavy loads at minimal cost. They also create electronic circuit boards and dream up a project of their own.
“They learn how to work with their hands, how to program the robot and how to work with design constraints,” (Dean of Engineering Peter Kilpatrick) says. But he also says it’s inevitable that students will be lost. Some new students do not have a good feel for how deeply technical engineering is. Other bright students may have breezed through high school without developing disciplined habits. By contrast, students in China and India focus relentlessly on math and science from an early age.
In other words, it’s hard.
President Obama wants U.S. universities to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year. Not going to happen, say engineering professors.
STEM college students feel unprepared
September 10, 2011 by
Only one in five STEM college students said their K–12 education prepared them extremely well for their college courses in science, math and engineering, according to a Microsoft survey.
Camp Make-It-Yourself
August 23, 2011 by
Gadget Camp — a week of band saws and factory field trips — is trying to interest kids in manufacturing careers, reports the New York Times.
Manufacturers . . . complain that few applicants can operate computerized equipment, read blueprints and solve production problems. And with the baby boomers starting to retire, these and other employers worry there will be few young workers willing or able to replace them.
Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs, a foundation affiliated with the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, is financing 10 Gadget camps this summer, including one in Illinois for girls only.
Across the country, a handful of companies, nonprofit groups, public educational agencies and even science museums are trying to make manufacturing seem, well, fun. Focusing mainly on children aged 10 to 17, organizations including the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Pa.; and Stihl, a maker of chain saws and other outdoor power equipment in Virginia Beach, Va., run camps that let students operate basic machinery, meet workers and make things.
Antigone Sharris, who came up with the idea for the all-girls Gadget camp, worked in manufacturing before becoming an instructor in electronics, welding and computer-aided machinery at Triton College, a community college that hosted the camp.
“Girls don’t naturally gravitate toward engineering,” said Ms. Sharris, a jolly and patient instructor who interspersed practical tips on using a band saw or a drill press with casual explanations of fractions, the concept of leverage and Newton’s laws.
. . . 16 girls aged 11 to 15 designed and constructed a cat feeder, a candy dispenser and various pieces of jewelry and music boxes, using foam board, wood, metal, fiberglass and PVC pipe.
“Not letting your children learn the hands-on component of the theory of science is killing us as a nation,” Ms. Sharris said. “You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.”
Girls learned about manufacturing salaries, which start at $40,000 in the area, and visited nearby factories.
Stop giving kids books? I hope not. But I do think children need more opportunities to make things — real things, not virtual representations.
I took shop in fourth, fifth and sixth grade. We all learned to use a band saw. I made a set of shelves, a lamp and an inadvertently Dali-esque checkerboard, though my fiberglass ring was sucked into the buffer and never seen again. We did technical drawing too. I don’t know if it produced any engineers or carpenters, but we were very proud of our creations.
Science or science appreciation?
August 7, 2011 by
The National Research Council’s new K-12 science framework will prepare students to be technology consumers not creators, writes Ze’ev Wurman, a high-tech engineer who’s worked on education standards and advised the U.S. Education Department.
The framework has prestigious authors in science and science education and they promise a “coherent and consistent approach” that will enable students to “actively engage in science and engineering practices and apply crosscutting concepts to deepen their understanding of each fields’ disciplinary core ideas,” Wurman writes. Furthermore, engineering is introduced as a K-12 subject for the first time.
But “the framework does not expect students to use any kind of analytical mathematics while studying science.”
By grade 12, students are supposed to be competent in “recognizing,” “expressing,” and “using simple … mathematical expressions … to see if they make sense,” but not in actually solving science problems using mathematics.
Before Lavoisier’s quantitative approach there was no chemistry, only alchemy. Before Newton’s invention of calculus, physics was more a craft than a science. Mathematics has been inseparable from science for the last 300 years, and has been largely responsible for the world we live in. Yet here we have a “21st century” science framework for our students that effectively ignores mathematics.
Wurman went back to the first page, which explained the framework’s purpose.
The overarching goal of our framework for K-12 science education is to ensure that by the end of 12th grade, all students have some appreciation of the beauty and wonder of science; possess sufficient knowledge of science and engineering to engage in public discussions on related issues; are careful consumers of scientific and technological information related to their everyday lives; are able to continue to learn about science outside school; and have the skills to enter careers of their choice, including (but not limited to) careers in science, engineering, and technology.
The framework isn’t teaching students to solve science problems, Wurman concludes. It’s teaching science appreciation. He doesn’t think a math-free, science lite curriculum will prepare U.S. students for Silicon Valley’s high-tech jobs, many of which are filled with engineers trained in India, East Asia and Israel.
College grads start at $36,000
August 3, 2011 by
One year after earning a bachelor’s degree, the average employed graduate earns $36,000. The average lifetime value of a college degree is $570,000 on an average $102,000 investment, estimates Brookings’ Hamilton Project. The field makes a big difference: A degree in engineering can add $1 million in earnings over a lifetime while a degree in education can add $241,000, conclude Georgetown researchers.
Also on Community College Spotlight: A Tennessee college is training chemical workers for a huge new German-owned plant.
Recent Comments