Students are increasingly switching or abandoning their science or math-related major as the number of those earning degrees in science, math and engineering continues to fall, according to a recent study.
The New York Times reported that about “40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree.” And, according to similar studies cited by the Times, when pre-med students are included, this number jumps to 60 percent.
Senior physiology major Rachel Natividad aims to defy those statistics. She will be graduating in spring 2012.
“I understand the difficulty of being a science major,” Natividad said. “I also tutor students.”
During her tutoring sessions, Natividad has observed that beginning science majors are often discouraged by the stark contrast between high school and college science classes.
This trend is part of what University of Illinois emeritus engineering professor David E. Goldberg calls “the math-science death march.”
According to Goldberg, middle school and high school students develop an early interest in science from simple, fun science projects. However, the workload and the competitive environment between students filter out many science degree-hopefuls.
“Struggling is normal,” Natividad said. “Don’t let your initial failure, in that you didn’t do as well as you thought you would, discourage you.”
Politicians and educators plan to combat the national decline in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degrees by further exposing elementary school and high school students to STEM subjects.
Cal State Long Beach, however, seems to be fighting the national trend.
According to the university’s Institutional Research and Assessment on-demand reports, 440 students were granted degrees from the College of Natural Science and Mathematics during the 2010-11 fiscal year. CSULB granted 214 science and mathematics degrees in the 2000-01 fiscal year.
Jeffrey Cohlberg, a biochemistry professor, described the reports as being nearly opposite of those on the national scale.
According to Cohlberg, student performance in his classes has declined compared to performance in his 1975 classes. But, Cohlberg attributes some of this decline to the increasing number of students interested in the sciences and the financial obstacles they face.
Cohlberg also said that students often set obstacles themselves by their lack of math preparation and a “decline in many students’ study habits” because of a reliance on technology and the Internet.
But for Natividad, science is a labor of love, a labor she said is partly responsible for her 3.95 grade point average.
The physiology major also attributes part of her success to being a President’s Scholar.
“I’m in a unique position where I’ve always had priority registration,” Natividad said. “That would have been an obstacle normally since science is so impacted.”
According to 1990s research from the National Science Board, students respond best to education through open-ended problem solving and not through lectures. However, lecture classes cost less to teach than labs.
In 2005, the Nation Academy of Engineering reputed some ways universities teach science and math, saying, “Treating the freshman year as a ‘sink or swim’ experience and accepting attrition as inevitable is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.”
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