How can we STEM the tide of science dropouts?

 STEM courses, as you know, are those in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and maths. Dropout rates in STEM are very high, and that’s across the board and across the world. But why? The Irish Times has reported dropout rates of 80 per cent in some of the rural third-level colleges. The European Union has a whole program set up to combat this attrition. In the US it’s been a matter of concern for years, one study showing that “a total of 48 per cent of bachelor’s degree students …who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009 had left these fields by spring 2009”.* My simple answer to why: the courses are boring and hard. But surely they’re not THAT boring, with modern techniques and awareness of student attention spans.

So is this because “the computers” are “the bank” of the 21st century? Whereas your mammy in the 1950s, 60s, even 70s, might have wished for you a nice safe job in the bank, are the contemporary parents seeing the same security and rewards in the IT industry? It’s not for everyone, but this is often overlooked when young Johnny or Evie doesn’t know what to do after school (and really doesn’t want to do anything). Become a programmer, a data analyst, a systems designer, the voices say. That’s where the future is. And don’t even think of a liberal arts course, Evie, because you’ll never get a job. 

 

I had a look at what jobs indeed.com (thank you) suggests for STEM graduates, and they range from dentist to actuary, with systems designers and computer programmers mentioned but not emphasised. Engineers are in there too. The range sounds broad enough, though I wonder how many STEMMies end up living the high life as an actuary. Proportionally, the internet does tell me that most computer science grads end up as software developers. A gent named Marcus Body, research chief at Work Group, declared pre-pandemic that “technical recruiters are just not making their opportunities sound exciting enough”. And that’s when the students have struggled through to complete the course – then walk away.

 

Perhaps only a few people are really suited to these child-of-STEM roles. I can do simple sums in my head but run shrieking if people start talking physics. And look at how many of us can work the platforms and programs we need for our job, but apart from that the intricacies behind the laptop or phone screen are a complete mystery. Maybe personkind needs to evolve for a few more centuries before our brains take easily to the calculations and ruthless logic of the mathematical universe. And by then, surely we’ll all have chips in our brains to do our thinking for us anyway.

 

*Chen & Soldner, 2013

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pity the pizza guy who is knocked off his bike and beaten

  Dublin’s north inner city is not a place you want to be assigned if you are a Deliveroo driver. These (mostly) young men of non-Irish backgrounds are finding it’s a war zone, where they are likely to be attacked, robbed, assaulted as they try, of all innocuous things, to deliver some noodles or a pizza.   The problem has been festering for some time, and appeared on the national news again this weekend. The chief elements are boredom and racism. Youths with nothing to do,  suffering from a large dose of Covid lockdown frustration, appear to have found the cyclists with the grey and green Deliveroo boxes on their backs a tempting target. Rocks are thrown, knives are drawn, money taken.    And now the Deliveroo victims, it seems, are fighting back. Simmering anger was stoked to a dreadful degree by the death of Brazilian man Thiago Cortes in August 2020. Although Cortes was killed by a joyriding car driven by teenagers, the suspicion that he was targeted as...
Read more

Guys, this orange creature is not thinking about you, but about securing a Trump dynasty

  I t’s this: how can a vast modern country choose for its leader a person who has no interest in their well-being and history, but only in his own power and cementing that for his family?   And the answer I give is – well, the people in that country cannot know what is going on. They can’t follow the news, or understand what their leader has done to the reputation of their nation. They must have low moral standards, because surely a person who announces without any compunction that unless they win, it must have been fraud is …. Rodrigo Duterte? The guy in Belarus? Vladimir Putin?   People might wonder why I care so much, but I’m not alone. Setting aside the millions of Americans (Joe is going to win the popular vote again) who are horrified by Trump, all over the world the disgust at his behaviour is widespread. And he is the leader of the United States, if not any more the City on the Hill, still a template, an example, a glorious place of achievement, variety and its o...
Read more

Yes, Minister, less is more

  Today, some pungent   advice to the Irish Health Minister   from a well-known communications expert: halve your media appearances.   A nation chuckled – the politician in question is in a first-time ministry, obviously keen as mustard to make his mark, but during the Covid nightmare has made some increasingly bizarre interventions, including last week’s when he suggested that the tortured vaccine rollout in Ireland be turned on its head by prioritizing the 30s age group. This reversed the previous wisdom that older age cohorts should get the vaccines first. Ah dear. The minister was “spoken to” by the Taoiseach, our prime minister. “Ah, Stephen, could I see you in my office for a few minutes?”    Setting aside the political embarrassment, the advice to be less visible brought up one of the conundrums of the online-all-the-time era: when do people get sick of you? Kim Kardashian’s legions of fans seem to want her all the time. I learnt yesterday that even ...
Read more