With final grades being released and semester GPAs being calculated, maybe you can’t help but cringe when you check MyPurdue. Your beginning-to-middle-of-the-semester optimism has mostly turned into ‘Please, God, just let me pass.' After hours of slaving away at organic chemistry or cellular biology, you may feel that some of the life has been sucked out of you. You are not alone. In fact, The New York Times argues that you are overwhelmingly supported by your peers in this feeling. A recent article published showed that, when including pre-med students, 60 percent of STEM majors at prestigious institutions end up switching their major or washing out before completing their degree. This rate is twice the combined attribution rate of all other majors. Why? Why is America losing a huge portion of our science talent once the students get to college?
Science is hard. That is a statement that no one doubts and no one wants to change. I do believe that STEM majors should have to struggle a bit; we definitely want our nation’s best and brightest taking care of our sick and building our nations infrastructure. Although, I do believe at some point hard becomes too hard. To what extent do we feel ourselves struggling just to struggle, without really learning anything? I would argue that most of my education up until this point has been just that. Working hard and struggling immensely just to struggle. Most of the emphasis of what I do in school is on the grade distribution and test scores, rather than an emphasis on hard work and critical thinking, or even just retention of material.
As The New York Times pointed out, this high attrition rate is incredibly prevalent at prestigious universities like Purdue, and is highest among pre-med and engineering students. Why? Tough freshman weed-out classes and dry course content until senior year. The highly competitive atmosphere and lack of encouragement of 'critical thinking’ skills discourages even the most qualified students. We aren’t just weeding out the under-prepared or disenfranchised students, we’re weeding out those with the highest test scores and best high school preparation. It is no wonder America is falling behind our Asian and European counterparts in terms of country-wide STEM majors and science preparation.
I recently had a professor sit down with me and tell me that I was doing everything he wanted his students to do to prepare for his class and that he could see where my train of thought was going and that he thought it was in the right direction. Although, since his class was only going to affect my overall GPA by roughly 0.02 in the long run, he didn’t want to give me an A instead of a B in the class. Basically, even though I was busting my butt and working 20+ hours per exam and doing everything he wanted me to do, it wouldn’t matter much in my GPA, so he wouldn’t raise my grade. What is that? What message is that sending to the students who are working the hardest? “Oh, good job and keep up the hard work, but it's fruitless, because the numbers just don’t work out in your favor.” No wonder students are getting the hell out of science as fast as they can; it isn’t rewarding to work hard and receive little reward. Numbers determine everything, and that’s crap.
So what? Some people arguing that STEM and pre-med majors do not have the right to complain, because we have to know our stuff and we have to know it well. I agree, but would like to point out that we mainly need to know our stuff and its application. With no training in critical thinking or application, I would like to throw a counter-argument that our colleges are not creating the most well-rounded students. Hell, some medical schools are proposing adding extra years to medical students’ residencies because even at 28, some students cannot stand on their two feet. Probably because if the question isn’t formatted in multiple choice format, modern day students are lost.
How do we fix it? Create a science and engineering core that fosters growth as a person, not just growth as a student. Make us take some humanities, some writing, some ethics classes. The majority of us would be happy to do it for a variety of reasons: grade inflation, development of the whole mind, and honestly just for a break from the soul-sucking sciences. Make science learning interesting and fun, not just drudgery. We have got to keep the students we are washing out at the Berkeleys, MITs, Georgia Techs, and Purdues of the country, or we are going to really fall behind. Creativity, curiosity, ingenuity...these are all traits that lay at the very heart of the sciences, so we need curriculum that fosters these traits. Sure, keep science tough, but at least make it a worthwhile tough.
