
Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard) - tysone
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html
======
Androsynth
I was an EE major in college at a good school and I can tell you that it is a
long, hard grind. I never had a problem with the math/physics pre-reqs. In
fact those were the fun classes.

It was the soph/jr/sr years where it was very difficult to tie what you are
learning to anything real and concrete. The worst part is that you are being
asked to remember facts/processes/patterns for a test, then you rarely have to
go through them again. So you end up forgetting most of what you learned.
Since you didn't know what it was used for in the real world, you end up
forgetting about something you didn't even care for in the first place.

The courses I enjoyed, I really enjoyed. At a school on the quarters system,
you end up taking about 50 total courses and I enjoyed < 10 of these. My
junior year I built a 4-bit processor on a breadboard using discrete parts for
everything but the control system (fpga). This was one of my best memories
because I understood the real-world applications of a processor and I got to
sit in a lab and build it myself.

It's a broken system. It's a long grind thats not effective at getting you up
to speed as a professional or getting you interested in your career. Its also
terribly inefficient at improving your problem solving and analytical
thinking. It still improves your problem solving/analytical thinking through
brute force and I think thats a necessary process, but there has to be a
better way.

If there was a way to combine the rigors of academic courses (to improve
analytic thinking/problem solving ability) with the hands-on experience of
vocational learning, I would be all for that. It is more applicable to
software than some of the more traditional engineering disciplines, but I
think it could work for all of them.

(admittedly my situation was poor because I chose the wrong major. I was an EE
who was taking all CE electives and I moved into software after I graduated)

As for not being able to graduate enough STEM majors, ffs let's drop the
jingoism and bring in more foreign students.

~~~
kiba
_It was the soph/jr/sr years where it was very difficult to tie what you are
learning to anything real and concrete. The worst part is that you are being
asked to remember facts/processes/patterns for a test, then you rarely have to
go through them again. So you end up forgetting most of what you learned.
Since you didn't know what it was used for in the real world, you end up
forgetting about something you didn't even care for in the first place._

SRS are your friend. Remember, you will forget everything you will ever know
given sufficient time. It's best to exploit study technique that take into
account spaced repetition. Your skills and all the things you learn are like a
muscle, either you use it, or you lose it.

Right now, I have minuscule amount of haskell knowledge loaded, ready to use
when I am ready to learn or code something in Haskell. Once I learn something,
I add new stuff to my Haskell deck.

~~~
achompas
Can you (or someone else) recommend SRS for iOS? Ideally I'd use it while
walking my dog, waiting for an elevator, etc.

~~~
genieyclo
Flashcards Deluxe by OrangeorApple is a great one, not only because of its
great use of SRS and fantastic interface, but also because it has the massive
and active Quizlet library behind it:
[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flashcards-
deluxe/id307840670...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flashcards-
deluxe/id307840670?mt=8)

I've used it to great success in a few classes in the last year. You really
have to be dedicated in the first few weeks though, and not skip a day in your
SRS routine. That first bit of grind really pays off down the line though, as
you have to spend less and less time studying from then on. Skip though, and
it'll come back to bite you.

------
hugh3
There's a simple solution: stop subsidizing useless degrees.

If someone wants to pay money to spend four years of their life studying
Gender Studies or Semiotics then good luck to 'em, but make sure they're
paying the full cost of their degree, preferably up-front. Underwater basket-
weaving is a fine hobby for the idle rich.

I they want any aspect of their education subsidized, they should be studying
something both useful and _hard_. Every university degree should include
serious mathematical content.

What about the students who aren't good at mathematics? They're probably not
benefiting from a university education anyway. Let 'em go get the low-level
white-collar drudge jobs that they'd wind up in after graduation anyway, and
let 'em do it at the age of eighteen and start building up some wealth rather
than forcing 'em to wait 'til they're 22 with a net worth in the negative six
figures.

This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about.

~~~
noblethrasher
Liberal arts degrees subsidize the hard science and engineering degrees since
the per-credit-hour tuition is the same but the guy doing gender studies is
way cheaper than the girl using the microbiology lab.

~~~
Bostwick
STEM degrees subsidize the liberal arts degrees by bringing in grants and
research money.

~~~
_delirium
This is generally not true; the overhead charges from grants and research
money just about pay for the added cost of the (much) higher faculty salaries,
travel, research equipment, and the increasingly onerous grant application and
accounting/auditing/reporting processes, but not for undergraduate education.
In fact it's usually prohibited to cross-subsidize education with research
grants, and funding agencies are surprisingly strict about this, doing things
like auditing whether computers bought on a grant are used in teaching a
course (not allowed).

In many cases grant overhead doesn't even pay for the cost of research; only
the top-tier research universities are particularly successful at pulling in
enough, and big enough, grants to do that (see this from Georgia Tech's former
Computer Science dean: [http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-
ten-su...](http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-
fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/)).

The liberal arts, meanwhile, are so cheap to teach that in many cases they are
actually _making money_ , i.e. their expenses are lower than tuition fees, and
the remaining tuition is used to cross-subsidize science education:
[http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-
humani...](http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humanities-
really-155771.aspx)

------
_delirium
There's an odd cultural aspect to it that I'm not sure is entirely the same as
difficulty per se. Among some programs, at least, there's an almost
masochistic _love_ of all-nighters, long-as-hell problem sets, etc., etc., and
if you're not into that culture, you'll probably feel like a foreigner.

Fortunately, where I went, that was common in engineering but not in CS, which
had more of a "work smarter, not harder" attitude--- still quite a bit of
work, and sometimes people pulled all-nighters, but there was a cultural
difference in that people didn't see pulling all-nighters as a _good in
itself_ , some sort of hazing-esque badge of pride, but just something that,
unfortunately, sometimes happened due to too much work, poor planning, or
procrastination.

That's a bit different from the actual difficulty of the material; you can
study difficult material without that kind of culture, and in the other
direction, it's quite possible to grind someone down with piles of work _even
if_ they find the subject matter itself easy, depending on how you design
courses and assignments.

------
bdhe
I'm completely speculating, but I wonder if the bottleneck of math being hard
is tied directly to how notoriously bad the standard of math in K-12 education
is? I've always wondered how in the US the public school system is very weak
(or at least people constantly complain about it being so) and yet they have
some of the best technical colleges in the world (MIT, Stanford, Caltech,
etc.) I've always wondered how students cope up with this big jump from high
school to college.

~~~
repiret
I think that there is a very high variance in math education (and people) in
public K-12 schools. My high school math consisted of advanced algebra, proof-
based geometry, trig and a smattering of calculus. This seems to be typical
for college-bound student across the country. I went to a second-tier
technical university (CalPoly, San Luis Obispo) and I was well prepared for
the typical first year physics and math classes. From what I can tell, the
first-tier schools you cite have substantially similar first year math and
science curriculum.

That said, I know people who went to the same school middle and high schools I
went to, but who were never able to get past the introductory algebra class I
took in 8'th grade. Sure, some people probably got better or worse teachers,
but I believe some peoples brains are just better at math than others.

Then why does the US look so bad at math? I don't know. I suspect that both of
these statements are true:

1\. Many countries have better alternate education paths for people who aren't
that interested in college. People on these alternate paths are excluded from
foreign statistics, while people who ought to be on them dilute US statistics.

2\. Doing poorly in school is more acceptable to Amercan parents than it is to
parents in many other developed countries. (Ironically, this may be because a
lack of alternate education paths led parents to becmoe disillusioned with the
value of school)

~~~
coffeedrinker
We home educate our kids and I can tell you the differences in math ability
between each child.

One of my daughters can hit anything thrown at her. My other daughter is more
advanced than most kids her age at math, but I know that she has already
learned more math than she will _ever_ use in her life (she is in eight grade
but is doing very advanced algebra). Her interests will never lead her to a
career that requires more than she already knows.

The problem is pushing everyone to one standard, when they do not need it. It
makes them feel stupid, and is a waste of time that could be used developing
other skills.

------
msluyter
IMHO, the tl;dr here is "math is hard." I do feel like math is the sticking
point. At my school, it wasn't intro programming courses that weeded out so
many CS students, it was sophomore level discrete math. That class had a 50+%
failure rate.

Edited to add: I'd like to pose a question. I've always felt that math divided
people into two classes -- those for whom it was mostly easy (or at least
approachable) and fun and those for whom it was inherently unpleasant. As
someone from the first group, it's hard for me to relate to some of the ideas
in the article, such as making classes feel more socially relevant. To me,
that seems superfluous. My question is, has anyone experienced these sorts of
approaches directly, and how did they work for you?

~~~
Dn_Ab
The tl;dr I got was different. What I got was a.) that our society has focused
too much on the stimulation of our dopamine pathways. b.) Many professors
forget that the enthusiasm they posess for a subject is not self evident.

The hardness of STEM was orthogonal to this piece; the focus was on how
pointless the seemingly unapplicable dry list of equations and facts were to
many students. This made it hard to continue the perceived self flagellation
to little gain. They gave an example of a smart kid with an 800 SAT score in
math who quit to psychology because his mechanics class was dull in comparison
to the more active psych class. They also mention that classes like english
give better grades than chemistry and math so people switch cause they feel
they are doing better.

Their prescription is more interesting and interactive classes. That is a good
idea as long as the essence is not lost to fluff and education does not
degenerate to an exercise in marketing I guess.

~~~
chernevik
But if the more important problem is diminution of student capacity /
capability for the work, better teaching helps only so much. Anecdata like
"helicopter parenting" suggest more kids lack emotional preparation hard work
and differentiating curricula. I certainly don't see any sign that K-12 has
gotten _better_ at math preparation.

Then there is the premium attached to integration into social networks. Wall
Street bankers are scarfing down large chunks of the national income, more
from government guarantee of leverage than productivity. Prices are signalling
to focus on placement in the social network, rather than on productive work;
and once there, to get good at predicting / managing regulatory intervention.
The interest in studies orienting people to the political and social milieu
shouldn't be surprising. Especially when these offer less risk of marked out
as a loser by poor grades.

There is a premium for government work, too. It's less remunerative, but more
secure, and has very high status, in many circles. The effect carries over to
nearby careers like law, and journalism. Median income, housing prices, and
unemployment rates in greater Washington D.C. all suggest that the worldly
payoff for public service isn't bad.

So I worry that we're training less capable people, and encouraging them to
think more about where they work than how they work. It can't go on forever,
but a lot of folks will get hurt as it ends.

------
InclinedPlane
There are a few things at play here.

There's "culture shock" of being comfortable within the high school world
where there's a lot of busy work but it's easy to get an A in any class as
long as you put in the hours and can memorize a few things, even if you don't
honestly understand the material. And then getting tossed in the deep end of
hard-science in college where you have to put in enough hours to actually
understand the material, not just do the busy work. And you have to be able to
learn in class and learn on your own as well, because there's quite a lot of
material to go through. For some people this is like going from George
Jetson's job to digging ditches, and it's too much to adjust to.

Relatedly, high schools have been doing a piss-poor job of actually instilling
mastery of basic skills like math, reading, and writing so a lot of students
will come into college at a disadvantage. When you have, realistically, about
one or two years (if not more) of remedial education that you need to get
through before you're able to grapple with the actual college level material
then college because a lot more of a slog (and potentially a very much more
expensive slog) than it might be otherwise. If you don't have calculus, trig,
and technical critical reading and writing skills nailed by the time you start
tackling chemistry, physics, biology, math, etc. in college you will be at a
severe disadvantage.

And finally, as others have pointed out there's the grade inflation
differential. When your class work tends to be things like homework problems,
lab assignments, and in-class quizzes where answers are either right or wrong
then your scores tend to be directly numeric. Grade inflation is a lot easier
in "softer" classes where most of the scores are subjective. Though that can,
of course, vary depending on the school, but the average certainly seems to be
that way.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Followup: additionally I think there's the general problem that most
undergraduate degree programs just aren't that good. It's a lot easier to
concentrate on rote memorization and "covering" a lot of material than
actually instilling a substantive knowledge of a complex technical subject.
The difference is that college can easily afford to suck at providing a
quality education or experience. In K-12 if the students aren't graduating the
school stops receiving funding. At the college level the difference in revenue
between a student who graduates and one who drops out after 2 years is less
than 50% (because 100 and 200 level classes are typically cheaper to teach).
And if the student merely switches majors, the school still makes money.

There's a catch-22 of sorts. If you got a bad education in HS and you get into
a good technical college program you'll be in way over your head. If you get
into a bad college program you'll be facing a lot of boring work with little
meaning. The best case scenario is to win the lottery and have gone to a good
HS and get into a good college. But even then you'll still have a crap ton of
hard work in front of you.

------
ktrgardiner
The math-science death march. Now that is a perfect name for it. It's exactly
what I lived through and why I changed my major halfway through college from
chemical biology to art and technology. Why, you might ask?

\- being pushed through a system that treats you like a number (In two years,
I never met my advisor or received any guidance from faculty)

\- having your entire college career already planned out with no wiggle room
or a chance to explore other interests (until the very last semester where
there was one free elective)

\- professors who spoke English poorly

\- classes that were taught straight from books with no added knowledge or
insight

And the list goes on and on. For all those who managed to make it through,
more power to you. But it wasn't until I switched majors that I started
enjoying the academic aspect of college.

~~~
kd0amg
I "made it through" with a double major (CS and math), but the issues you
bring up in your post do not really describe my experience with either
department (though when I was looking around at universities during high
school, I did write off those that looked like they would have such problems
-- #2 is the easiest to detect).

------
bh42222
I think this is BS. It's not that it's hard, it's that is too hard for what
you get for it, in both money and social respect.

Actually even that is not correct.

It's harder compared to other things (Law, MBA, etc.) which can pay more and
come with higher social respect, especially in America.

~~~
Rariel
Law school is actually extremely hard, there is no grade inflation in law
school, if anything grades are deflated because there area maximum number of
As (and B's) given out (usually around 10-15% is the max for A/A- and 20% for
B's) for each and every class. So you end up with a bunch of liberal arts
majors who have never gotten a C and suddenly they're getting a whole heaping
lot of them. They get complexes.

~~~
geebee
I'm just one data point, but I did spend one semester in law school (at
Columbia) before taking a leave of absence (in good academic standing, B's in
everything) and enrolling in a PhD in engineering (Berkeley).

Law school was not hard. At an elite school, it's very easy to get B's in your
courses, which won't get you on law review, but will generally land you a job
at a top firm from an elite school. Failure rates are astoundingly low. I
would guess 97+% of the class gets a B or higher, and failing out is almost
unheard of (again, at elite schools). Lower ranked schools, from what I've
heard, do grade on the harsher scale you mentioned.

My PhD program at Berkeley, on the other hand, was a horror show of attrition
and failure. It was so much more brutal than law school it's completely silly
to compare the two. My dept at Berkeley said that 40% fail to get the PhD, but
that's not counting people like me who were awarded masters degrees and so are
considered to have achieved their degree goal. I'd guess that the failure rate
is well above 50% - and keep in mind, this is for a very elite program that is
extremely selective.

Graduate programs in math, science, and engineering are littered with the
broken dreams of exceptionally smart people. It's exceptionally unusual for
med, law, and mba students to fail out at elite programs. It's commonplace in
top PhD programs.

~~~
Rariel
I would agree with you for the most part. Top schools ("T14" for us law nerds
and "the Top 14 law schools" for the lay people!) are fairly easy to get B's
in given effort is extended, but A's are still hard to get. I don't know many
T14 schools that have curved and capped classes. I wasn't in an extremely
lower ranked school (top 30) but it was a hardcore school in terms of the
curve. They've since relaxed a bit (now A's are capped around 18% I believe).
I do know people that went to Boalt and got D's so it's possible but failing
out is pretty unheard of in law school, period. Also the legal job market has
shifted dramatically in the past 4 years so those B students at high ranked
schools can't bank on an offer from a big firm based on the name of their
school anymore--I know too many who are unemployed for that to be the case.

Funny thing is my husband did his UG in ME at Berkeley and that department (
and the College of Engineering in general) was a sheer nightmare. The
unimaginable things that took place and the workload he endured (while working
20 hours at LBNL) blew my mind and that was just a BS. I can imagine a PhD
would be insane.

But my point wasn't that one is harder, just that law is hard and it's not an
easy thing to grasp because they ask you to learn and be tested in a way that
is very non-traditional, at least in my experience. It makes babies out of
people who thought of school as a cake walk. It was actually funny at times to
see the emotional breakdown over their first B or C because they were so
dramatic about it.

But I commend you on your choice to leave law school, probably smartest thing
you ever did! ha.

------
curt
My undergrad took this to the extreme. Our lowest level math class was Calc 1
and to get into the class you had to either take Calc AB in High School or
show up to school a couple months early and take it before Freshman year
started. I knew people that would fail out of our engineering program and go
to another and get a 4.0.

Me personally, I had to unlearn all the bad crap my Physics teacher in High
School taught me. It took an entire semester to get back on track but was well
worth the hard work.

You can see how much harder Engineering and the Sciences are, from my own
experience I thought getting my MBA was a breeze compared to studying
engineering. Nearly everyone else struggled and worked their asses off, they
had zero preparation for all the math and logic problem you had to work
through. The solution is to force EVERY major to take a few REAL math classes
and REAL science course so people have a solid foundation.

~~~
forensic
Nobody wants to do engineering so your solution is to force them?

Maybe you should look into why nobody wants to do it. Like maybe the pay is
too low compared to alternatives for instance.

------
hmahncke
The title of this article is really misleading - it's not that "It's Just So
Darn Hard" it's that the teaching of science grinds everything that's
interesting about science out of the curriculum. That's the point that
everyone in the actual article makes.

>> But as Mr. Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized he had
already had enough. “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all
about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well,” he says. “It
was just like, ‘Do these practice problems, then you’re on your own.’ ” >>

Engineers build things. So engineering education should have a heavy component
of building things - that's what's exciting and motivating to engineering
students. The theory should be in the service of the practice, and most
classes get this completely backwards. So they lose students, and grump that
kids don't want to work hard.

------
wallflower
Engineering is hard, if you are not that smart and cannot optimize problem
solving. If you can't see the shortcuts (e.g. zero force members in Statics
problems), it takes longer. I struggled.

This is how engineering education was explained to me:

1st year: Well-defined problems, well-defined answers

2nd year: Less-defined problems (labs)

3rd year: Harder problems where part of it is defining what the problem is,
more labs

4th year: A vague problem like design a plant to process X and produce Y

I believe the purpose of engineering education is to teach you effective
problem solving. Yes,

~~~
Fliko
I may be biased, but I actually prefer the most elusive 4th year labs being
done in 1st year, as the projects to be built are much more easier and it is
way more rewarding when a teacher hands you a specification sheet and tells
you how to use (for example) an AND and OR gate with absolutely no mention of
the project.

You can truly call the creation your own, and if you really get stuck you can
go talk with the very helpful teacher (or other students) and they will lead
you into the right direction without directly giving the answer.

------
pixie_
The less support you have the harder it is. I have a graduate degree in
engineering, and it was hard, but a lot of that came from having to face
difficult challenges on my own. Classes are short, and the hours spent at home
studying are long. Getting time with the professor is difficult, and his hours
are limited.

We need to give students more support, don't let them stress out and drop out,
we need to be there for them. Sitting at home for hours staring at a badly
written text book is not productive and burns kids out.

Now how we do this... more teachers? higher costs? Can maybe technology be the
key to lowering costs while increasing support? I'm interested in working on
this problem.

~~~
Fliko
My school has teachers in their office for most of the week willing to help
you out with all the problems you have, and it certainly helps but it isn't
enough to fix everything (15% of students who start the program I was in end
up graduating)

------
aorshan
I concur that this is a very significant issue. One of the things they did not
mention was that the way the course loads are designed, it is very easy for a
student to get burned out. For example, pre-med students often take, in their
first semester of college, Biology, Chemistry, Calculus, and then usually some
fine art to clear requirements. Its the same thing the next semester. Then
you're onto physics, organic chemistry, higher level biology classes. These
are all incredibly difficult courses that require hours and hours of reading,
studying, and practicing. Many students get completely burned out and drop
pre-med because of it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If spending 30-60 hours/week on studies causes medical students to burn out,
that's a good thing. It's much better for them to burn out during year 1 of
(cheap) undergrad than in year 1 of (expensive) medical school.

~~~
aorshan
I certainly agree. There is also a different kind of burnout that comes into
effect. It is very hard to focus on all science, all of the time. So you get
burned out because you can't spend your time learning or doing anything other
than science (most of which is in no way interesting and is simply a
requirement that you have to take).

------
el_devo
It isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the students want to run before
they learn to walk.

I'm a 17 year old in high school right now and having taken Calculus AB and BC
(I and II) the teacher was constantly skipping material that I think was very
important to have a general understanding of Calculus. Needless to say, I read
the book to learn everything she was skipping, and I was also the only one who
got a 5 on the AP exam. My classmates weren't stupid, they had just learned to
solve very specific problems rather than actually learning Calculus. The very
specific testing curricula hurt actual learning.

Another issue lies in the fact that (at least at my school) calculus and other
high maths are seen as only for the very smartest kids. We need to change
that. If students are required to have been exposed to calculus they won't be
in as much shock when they get to college.

The availability of higher classes is a big problem as well. I was super lucky
to find a public school program that allowed me to take classes with a
community college, because otherwise there would have been no classes for me
to take past sophomore year and Calculus I. I'm taking Multivariate Calculus
next semester, and I doubt many high school students have this opportunity at
all.

I realize that I'm in the minority here. Not many high school students have
the opportunity to take Calculus III their senior year, and that really needs
to change.

------
geebee
Looks like the nytimes got scooped by the onion on this one... almost a decade
ago

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-science-
foundation...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-science-foundation-
science-hard,1405/)

------
vitaminj
"I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the
application, which they really didn’t teach too well" - Matthew Moniz from the
article

He's absolutely right, and no first year design project is going to fix this
if the rest of the degree is structured the same as before. I think the bigger
problem is simply that university is the wrong way to teach engineering.

I graduated 10 years ago with an EE degree (power systems major) and have
worked in the field since, so I'm going to pick on EE here. During my degree,
I was mainly taught theoretical models of electrical systems, interspersed
with contrived lab experiments.

Very few 18 year old kids are going to appreciate the standard equivalent
circuit of a transformer or a synchronous machine, less so more abstract
things like Fortescue's symmetrical components. Because no kid has ever had
much of a chance to look at power transformers or machines in service. Sure,
they've seen power lines, but how many have seriously looked closely at them?
Or maybe even asked themselves why there are strange, ceramic looking things
connected to them?

So the first time I saw a real synchronous machine was in a lab. But looking
back, it was really a contrived situation, with everything looking like it
came out of a Bob the Builder toy set, alligator clips and all. You would
never see a machine hooked up like that in real life... but only work
experience has taught me that.

When I graduated, I was clueless. And in the intervening years since, I came
across countless graduates just as clueless as I was. It's almost surely a
systemic problem. I only met one graduate who really had a clue, and it turned
out that he was a qualified electrician before he did his degree.

Which brings me back to my point - IMHO the pure university system is the
wrong approach to train engineers. Their premise is that you learn the theory
first, then apply it in context after you graduate (with some lame attempts at
"practical" teaching in between). This works for some, but I'd wager that for
most, it's a waste of time and you'll end up having to learn it all twice.

I would prefer to see a hybrid apprenticeship - university system, similar to
the way you train tradespeople, but with more coursework components. The work
is aligned with the study (or at least the student-apprentice gets exposure to
real environments) and modules don't necessarily have to be done in a set
order. It could potentially even be set up on a competency basis (like Western
Governors University).

I don't know if this scheme would work, but I sure know that universities
conceived for training academic researchers do not do such a good job of
training practicing engineers.

------
hemancuso
I also think it's quite difficult for an 8th grader (I'll argue few develop a
deep aptitude in math unless they start early) to understand why anything
beyond basic math is important and worth learning. Further, I think we would
be better off teaching the majority of students basic calculus and statistics
in lieu of calculus. Get some stats and probability under your belt and you
might even develop a clear motivation to learn calculus!

------
cafard
A co-worker, Asian-born, says that she knows an awful lot of ABC (American-
born Chinese) kids majoring in business. This I think is not uncommon for
groups either getting to the states or making their way into the professional
classes. One generation does the hard stuff to get a job that pays well; the
next generation notices that a) the business school is easier, and b) the MBAs
get to lay off the BSEEs and send their jobs offshore.

~~~
TDL
As an MBA I can tell you, that the degree is not as highly valued as it once
was. A STEM degree is much valuable even is rolls that were once filled by
business types (some finance rolls, operations, etc.)

A MBA is a relatively easy Masters, but I think it's relevance is rapidly
fading.

~~~
joejohnson
I'm glad to hear this. I often wonder what skills an MBA might have that
someone with a strong engineering background can't learn on the job.

~~~
TDL
There are plenty of "soft skills" and it is good to have some academic work
done in management, ops, marketing, finance, etc. However, this does not
necessarily mean that this knowledge & these skills can't be acquired either
on the job or through proper mentoring.

I'm not bashing my degree necessarily, it's just that there are too many MBAs
@ the moment. In the end, if you are interested in management you can do
better by reading Drucker than attending management courses, or read Porter &
Ansoff (side note: Igor Ansoff is great example of what I am babbling about)
if you are interested in marketing, etc.

~~~
msellout
Be careful. I once thought that the MBA degree was worthless, too. However I
recently found that a friend of mine is earning 30% more than me at the same
job, same company, because she has an MBA and I chose to get an MS Economics.
We were both hired directly out of grad school with comparable work
experience.

Whether or not the MBA teaches you anything, businesses still believe it does.

~~~
TDL
Agreed and a good point. Not worthless, just not worth as much as it once was.
Simple supply & demand, same problem w/ JDs at the moment.

Credentials still have market value.

------
dabent
I looked at the graph, and it looked like only 2.4% of students are majoring
in computer science. I would have thought that was much higher with all the
buzz about social networks, startups and VC money falling from the skies. I
guess I live in a bubble when it comes to that kind of news, at least to some
extent.

I'm used to seeing students follow the money, like they did with engineering
in the 1980's. I had to get a 3.5 GPA to get accepted to the EE program at my
school. The school used GPA as it's valve to restrict students, which had it's
drawbacks, but demand was so high for EE back then, they had to raise the GPA
that high.

I also wonder if it isn't the calculus the keeps CS majors from completing,
it's the recursion, pointers and such that really tied my brain in knots.

Likewise with EE, which was my major - I handled calculus, but eventually I
ended up solving systems of equations with complex numbers and doing math
beyond freshman calculus.

Of course, I gained problem solving skills that I use throughout my life and a
career that's been great. I'm not sure how to better communicate those
benefits to an 18-year-old in a way they'd understand.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Why would the legend of Facebook motivate someone to finish a degree in CS?
Zuckerberg dropped out!

Steve Jobs dropped out, Bill Gates dropped out, I believe Steve Wozniak saved
himself the trouble of dropping out by never going in the first place... Larry
and Sergey have big-time CS degrees, but they also aren't as famous.

Let's assume (apparently falsely, according to Alexis Ohanian's anecdotes)
that PG is universally famous among techie 18-year-olds. PG literally wrote
important books in CS. But does PG encourage everyone who applies to YC to get
their CS degree as a top priority? Methinks not. He wants you to build
something. To the extent that studying engineering and math doesn't feel like
building anything, it doesn't feel like a hot new SV startup.

There's a big demand for software talent, but how are teenagers supposed to
grasp that getting a difficult CS degree is the best way to acquire or
demonstrate that talent? Especially when we're not even very sure that's true?
On the one hand, I've got a lot of Ph.D.-trained colleagues in my job (though,
perhaps tellingly, none are in CS) but on the other hand several of our most
valuable colleagues have degrees in music or English, and others are too young
to have a degree at all.

------
telemachos
The arrogance of a lot of the comments is depressing. What would you think if
a Humanities major said that Math, Science, etc. were _easy_ because they were
simply formalisms. Simply gather the inputs, put them through a fixed series
of steps and receive your precious "objective answers". And remember a mere
computer (and we all know they are simply stupid, passive machines) can solve
math problems.

That position is a caricature - and completely wrongheaded, but it's not much
worse than many of the statements here about Humanities. There is no simple
move from "non-objective answer" to "easy", nor - even more - from "non-
objective and many possible answers" to "anything goes random subjectivism".
That's just sloppy thinking.

tl;dr If you find yourself comparing an entire academic field to a degree in
basket weaving, you've gone off the rails.

------
droithomme
When the article says, "We’re losing an alarming proportion of our nation’s
science talent once the students get to college", and the reason is they can't
hack hard math, it seems to me we are not "losing our nation's science
talent", because those students weren't part of the small number that are
capable of original research to begin with.

A better question to ask would be to look into why those who ARE capable
choose to do other things, like become Quants for Goldman Sachs.

Wringing hands over why those who were never capable to begin with give up
isn't worth worrying about any more than we should worry about the clumsy
overweight and weakling kids who didn't make it into the state football team
when they got to college.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
The problem may not be that you are losing those capable of original research
(though I am sure that many of them _are_ lost), but that not all scientists
need to be able to do that research. For each researcher, you need people
capable of assisting, people in factories making the tools and reagents and
measuring devices, etc.

These may be considered not as prestigious as research, but they are just as
valuable nonetheless.

------
harshaw
Great to see a reference to the WPI plan (my alma mater).

I think one of the advantages of an engineering school is that you are all in
the same boat with needing to get through the tough classes (and maybe are
less distracted by business majors with more time on their hands). I had a
tightly nit group of friends who helped each other get through the harder
classes like signals & systems, cryptography, etc.

WPI is quarter based so there is intense focus on each subject over a seven
week period. If things go truly off the rails and you snowflake it is possible
to recover (with semesters the concept of failing seems almost inconceivable).

------
nomdeplume
It could also be the pace at which the information is conveyed. The lovely
information is dished out at such a fast pace that students who would like to
absorb the info at a deeper and more intuitive level are left behind while the
equation-memorizers win even though they would not be able to describe WHY
something is so. Secondly, science has become so compartmentalized that
students with a "big picture" view of what science can do get turned off by
classes that start off by focusing on microscopic aspect of some part of
science.

------
waterlesscloud
It's probably telling that when I see the phrase "Science Majors" I don't
consider Computer Science to be a part of that group.

Of course, the article also includes Engineering, etc.

I started as a physics major, changed to computer science after 3 years.
Mostly because I knew physics would require a PhD to do anything interesting,
and CS would just take a couple more years.

Math wasn't really a factor, but there was of course a lot less of it in CS,
as compared to physics anyway.

------
eykanal
I disagree; I think the tl;dr is a combination of (1) Math is hard AND (2)
Teaching methods and student support optional are optimized for a minor subset
of the student population

Point 1 is fixed; for most people, math _is_ hard, and that's that. Regarding
the second point, though, I imagine that there is a certain aspect of social
engineering that could take place that would increase retention, without
changing the curriculum at all.

------
juiceandjuice
Yeah it's hard. Pre-med students dropped out of my physics classes because the
lack of grade inflation (higher risk = higher reward though)

I think STEM degrees should actively be subsidized a bit more than other
degrees, even at the cost of other degrees, at state universities for a few
reasons. First and foremost, they're probably the most likely to be retaken,
and secondly to increase the demand and attractiveness of a STEM degree.

------
kenjackson
There's also the problem that it's made to be intentionally difficult. I know
several very bright people that went to CalTech and transferred to "easier"
schools like UCLA, Berkeley, and Brown. These were often students who were
considered not only the top science/math students in their class in HS, but in
some cases considered the top sci/math student the school had seen in years.

~~~
Apocryphon
Rigor for the sake of reputation is completely unnecessary.

------
lutorm
"rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with
lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective
schools"

I wonder if this is a visible effect of the fact that the most "prestigious"
schools typically hire faculty solely on their research record and care not
one whit about how good or interested they are at teaching...

------
endtime
For CS, at least, the problem is that people arrive at college knowing
nothing, and the solution is to make CS/programming part of the core
curriculum in high school, alongside math and science (replace home economics
or something).

How many English majors would there be if everyone matriculated into college
illiterate?

~~~
bocmaxima
this makes no sense. english majors aren't majoring in how to speak english,
they are honing their reading analysis and craft of writing. cs students
aren't majoring in how to write computer code, they are learning how to apply
their mathematical skills cultivated throughout school.

~~~
endtime
That's almost exactly my point. Being an English major isn't about literacy,
but literacy is a prerequisite. Being a CS major isn't about programming, but
programming is a prerequisite. Literacy is taught from a young age;
programming isn't.

------
ekm2
Maybe i am just weird,but i double majored in Math&Computer science primarily
because it is easier to prove the teacher wrong.The arts are just too
subjective to be sure the teacher is fair.

------
michaelochurch
Math isn't "too hard". It's about grade inflation. When my parents were in
school, a 2.5 grade-point average was around the median, and 3.0 was good
enough to get into graduate school.

Math and science courses still give real grades, with Bs and Cs for average
work. Liberal arts classes have been inflated at most universities, to the
point that getting a C is essentially failure. People get this perception that
math is "harder" because of grading skew.

Also, with top employers refusing to look at resumes with GPAs below 3.5
(regardless of university, major, etc.) it makes sense that people would
gravitate toward the "easier" majors.

~~~
caseysoftware
I don't know that it's grade inflation.. I think it's the fear of being wrong.

Look at Moniz (in the article), he bailed on engineering and went to an
English/Psych where the classes are "a lot more discussion based."

In math, there are right and wrong answers. In physics, there are right and
wrong answers. In engineering - where math & science hit the real world -
there are "best answers given the requirements" but it's a similar concept.

In English & Psychology, not so much. There are points of view,
interpretations, theories, speculation, and working models, but there are very
few "right answers" and lots of "reasonable interpretations."

~~~
msbarnett
> Look at Moniz (in the article), he bailed on engineering and went to an
> English/Psych where the classes are "a lot more discussion based."

The impression that I got wasn't that he bailed for discussion courses because
he was afraid of being wrong, but rather that the discussions in English
classes at least gave him some outlet to feel like he was applying what he was
learning.

There's a very weird death march of lectures for 2-3 years in some engineering
programs during which you're expected to cram in a ton of knowledge but given
zero opportunity to see how it will be applied in the real world. Compared
with my own CS background it looks horrific; if I had been expected to spend
my sophomore and junior years doing nothing but sit in lecture halls doing
theory courses and "practical" courses in which I memorized syntax for
programming languages, or facts about OpenGL, or the ISA of a MIPS CPU, etc
without being allowed near a computer to actually build some kind of project
using that knowledge, I'd have fucked off into Philosophy or English, too. At
least it would have made time for me to make stabs at using what I was
learning to _do philosophy_ instead of simply regurgitate facts. But luckily
for my future employability, CS isn't so lost to bad pedagogy that it's thrown
out most of its practical learning opportunities.

My primary take away from this piece, and talking to people who have burned
out of physics and engineering programs, has been that a lot of said programs
are simply structured in a way almost guaranteed to try the patience of a lot
of otherwise bright people who just wanted to feel like they were making
progress towards being able to accomplish something more than regurgitate
facts on midterms.

~~~
dman
Science / Math courses force you to very objectively face how good you are at
the subject being taught. Fields which are more subjective leave your
expertise as a much less defined concept and hence do not force the student to
confront the limit of their abilities.

~~~
msbarnett
Sure, but that doesn't mean that everyone switching out of STEM courses
"failed to measure up" or was "afraid of facts".

If I attempted to teach Computing Science to people by having them sit in 400
person lecture halls while I read K&R and CLRS at them for 4 years, any number
of bright people who could succeed in comp sci would rightly get fed up with
the uselessness of my shitty curriculum and drop out or switch majors. And yet
a surprising number of Engineering curriculums are structured this way,
because it's cheap and easy for the professors.

~~~
dman
I recently started teaching technical subjects and here are some points from
the other side of the classroom a) Every class has outliers on either side of
the performance spectrum and teaching is a resource allocation problem on part
of the teachers time on how to deliver maximal benefit to the students at
large. b) The number of people who are simultaneously entertaining, inspiring
and educational is very few. Look around you and shortlist the number of
people whom you consider extremely knowledgeable about some subject, now
remove from that list the number of people who have great people skills. Of
course people skills can be improved over time but it takes real effort and
time. c) As a teacher the best one can do while teaching challenging material
is spend time in the first part of a lecture developing the motivation for
getting students interested. Usually that leaves little time for interactivity
in the latter part of the lesson. d) Classes where students ask no questions
are very hard to make interesting. When this is happening your teacher is
probably feeling like a comic doing an act where no one is laughing. Next time
youre stuck in a class which seems overly dull try to help out your teacher by
asking intelligent questions. e) In some challenging material there is simply
not enough time to do it justice. In those cases the best a teacher can do is
do a non interactive session where they do a brain dump hoping that students
will be motivated enough to follow up with the material in their own time. f)
There is also the philosophical question about who gets to teach - 1) someone
who is at the pinnacle of their field and hence can earn a livelihood by
teaching people so that they can contribute with original research. 2) someone
who is a great educator.

g) I think truly great teachers occur with the same frequency as truly great
comics because both fields have something in common.

------
nobody3141592
The secret is to make high school a lot HARDER. Not wanting to do a 'when I
was young rant' but I learned the calculus at age 15-16 US grade 9-10. Then in
our 'senior' high schools we only studied core subjects eg. maths+physics

Now I lecture to physics undergrads who have never been taught calculus. So
not only do we have to teach them intro maths techniques but they have never
really studied physics - they have been shown fun and interesting
demonstrations and given a simple hand-waving 'explanation' - but without
being able to follow the maths you can't explain it.

I'm sorry but the answer to fixing the science and engineering problem isn't
more fun science games in high school, or pretty computer demos of experiments
- it's concentrating on lots of hard boring maths earlier and earlier.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Why on earth would you want to make something HARDER when faced with a large
group of people who already think it's too hard or non-relevant? It's not a
weed-out contest.

I have an undergrad degree in EE. If someone could find a way to make today's
undergrads learn the same material, but have a much easier time of it, why
would anyone oppose that? Do I really need to feel bitter because I struggled
but a whole new bunch of kids breeze through the material?

Sure, we don't want to waste time, but if the "fun science games" can lead to
better understanding of the math behind it so much the better. I once used a
weight hanging on a long string held up to my nose as an explanation of
conservation of energy: "bet that this weight won't hit me in the face when I
let it swing out and back?" "Why didn't it hit me?" "What can I change so it
will smack me in the face?"

It's a "game," but they did learn something useful from it.

~~~
pandaman
Math is to brain what lifting weights is to muscles. We teach math not because
of some useful skills but to increase brain capacity. For the same reason
languages used to be taught in the past. As same as with weight lifting it has
to be hard to get results otherwise it's a waste of time.

