Rethinking STEM Credentialing
Should we reform the way we train a high-tech workforce?
Alexandra Seymour, an up-and-coming policy analyst who recently became a Professional Staff Member for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, takes to War on the Rocks to argue for a new approach to American STEM competitiveness. After the familiar litany of how the country who put a man on the moon has fallen ever further behind in the field, creating a huge national security risk, she gets to her proposal:
[T]he United States must not only improve its STEM pipeline, but also reframe the STEM worker production problem. The United States has historically maintained a bias towards four-year university degrees. President Obama repeatedly emphasized how 60 percent of occupations would require a college degree. But given that in 2021, 62 percent of the U.S. population above 25 years old did not have a Bachelor of Arts, it is clear that obtaining a four-year degree cannot remain the only viable path to success. With many states already beginning to remove degree requirements for positions, the United States can seize this moment and harness the roughly 200 million individuals considered working age, including those without college degrees. This pool of people includes 27 million Americans who are untapped talent and therefore could extend prospects for well-paying jobs to veterans, caregivers, relocating partners and spouses, and less-advantaged populations.
Instead of focusing on traditional degrees, the United States should offer a new approach to credentialing that emphasizes continuous learning and offers individuals upskilling opportunities at any point in their academic and professional journey. To stay ahead of China, which has prioritized its domestic talent pool by largely focusing on STEM education, the United States should pursue a technology workforce strategy focused on three key credentialing methods: micro-credentialing, apprenticeships, and dual enrollment. These three methods are particularly effective for capturing and developing talent because they quickly and inexpensively teach new skills, provide hands-on experience for students, maximize scarce educational resources, and address deficiencies in the United States’ current approach to STEM education. A new approach to credentialing would enable the domestic workforce to adjust to technological changes without fear of their skills becoming obsolete. This is especially important as AI is adopted more widely, which some estimates suggest could replace 300 million jobs.
Now, the oft-cited stat about 62% of over-25s not having at least a four-year degree is both true and misleading. With minor blips, that percentage has been steadily increasing over time; Only 14% of men an 8% of women had a bachelor’s degree in 1970; it’s 37% and 39% now. Currently, 46% of women and 36% of men between the ages of 25 and 34 have one.
Regardless, Seymour’s idea makes sense to me. Not only because it potentially allows people who can’t afford to pay for or take the time away from working to pursue a four-year degree to get useful credentials but because it provides a mechanism to keep those with perishable STEM skills current.
The obvious caveat is that there’s surely a ceiling on the number of folks with the cognitive tools to be useful STEM contributors. And even many of us with the math and science capacity to succeed in the training program are simply better suited for other fields.
For more than four decades now, the modal field for students getting a bachelor’s degree was business, followed by the health professions. (Presumably, the latter qualifies as STEM but I don’t know that it helps solve the problem Seymour identifies.) Given the effort to encourage students to go into the STEM fields, one presumes there’s a reason most aren’t doing so.
Then again, the Chinese are managing. Seymour again:
China has focused on cultivating its domestic talent pool through STEM education for over two decades. In 2001, the Chinese Communist Party implemented curriculum reform for science education throughout K-12 and for specific subjects, such as physics and biology. China’s Ninth Five-Year Plan then made education a priority, with its budget comprising over 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2015. Now, as China continues implementing its 2029 Action Plan for STEM education, it is leveraging STEM to directly drive the country’s economic growth. All of these steps are captured in President Xi’s 2021 public statement about the need for science and tech professionals: “At the end of the day, the country’s overall competitiveness is the competitiveness of its skilled personnel … National development depends on talent, and national rejuvenation depends on talent.”
China’s STEM pipeline efforts are impressive. The Chinese government also knows it must make these investments because it struggles to attract talent, either from local graduates or from abroad. To address this, the Chinese government has offered incentives such as high salaries, housing support, and signing bonuses to Chinese nationals studying overseas to return home. China’s primary program is the Thousand Talents Plan, which targets early-career students that receive doctorates in STEM fields. While China has surpassed its initial recruitment goal of 2,000 people within ten years, the country’s most talented researchers still often move and stay abroad.
Obviously, we lack the coercive power of an authoritarian state and—as Seymour readily admits—we have offset some of our STEM deficit by being attractive to immigrants, including Chinese nationals with STEM degrees.
A new approach to credentialing that emphasizes micro-credentialing, apprenticeships, and dual enrollment will enable the United States to stay ahead in technological development. Micro-credentialing offers specialized tracks that build, bolster, or level-set specific competencies. For example, universities such as Florida International University offer micro-credentials in over 30 different disciplines. Depending on the topic, a credential can be earned over the course of a few weeks or after multiple semesters of instruction. These micro-credentialing courses can be taken at any point in an individual’s life. They are increasingly attractive options for career development during or after a four-year degree, or in lieu of one. Employers are increasingly valuing alternative learning methods that can directly meet their demands, such as massive online open course providers like Coursera and LinkedIn Learning, and corporate training portals. Some companies have even gone a step further to upskill their workforce. For example, Google launched its six-month “Google Career Certificate” to better prepare individuals for their jobs, and IBM committed to skilling 30 million people globally by 2030.
Considering 85 percent of STEM jobs are expected to come into existence by 2030, micro-credentialing can set individuals up for success by enabling them to pivot their careers or build new skills quickly. Additionally, micro-credentialing is a well-suited option for individuals experiencing tech sector layoffs as they assume new roles within their industry or increasingly shift to new ones that align with their passions.
This latter category—people who are already in STEM fields but whose careers get derailed by rapid shifts in the industry—strike me as a much more robust target for this program than, say, Amazon warehouse workers or underemployed Elizabethan Poetry majors.
Indeed, Seymour notes, we’re already making moves in this direction:
Instead of pushing college, which is becoming less attractive to individuals due to factors such as student loan debt and career readiness, the Biden administration has specifically highlighted and bolstered funding for apprenticeship programs to overcome critical talent shortages like in the semiconductor industry or cybersecurity, where there is a deficit of 700,000 workers. State governments have also recognized the value of these programs. Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, for example, advocated for federal and state governments to expand apprenticeship programs in industries such as cybersecurity, healthcare, and other skilled trades.
These opportunities, however, are often primarily discussed for trade jobs. To maximize apprenticeship programs, U.S. policymakers should apply this same model to building core STEM skills for entry-level positions. Likewise, apprenticeships can be a vehicle for work-based learning during K-12 schooling. This approach could better prepare students by incrementally building on-the-job training into student schedules either during the day or outside school hours.
A key benefit of apprenticeships is how they cultivate soft skills, which include communication, teamwork, and other interpersonal abilities. Soft skills lay the groundwork for an individual’s success in the workplace in terms of their ability to adapt, interact with colleagues, and be proactive problem solvers. They also enable students to rise to managerial roles in their organizations, which are as important as the technical expertise that the United States seeks to build.
While companies such as Google have taken the lead on creating and supporting tech apprenticeship programs, the U.S. government can play an important role in promoting these opportunities as career enhancers and ensuring they are expanded for critical STEM skills.
As someone with three college degrees and who makes a living teaching at the college level, I’m obviously in favor of college education. But I’ve long argued that we send too many people to college who either aren’t well suited for the experience (whether in terms of aptitude or maturity) and demand college degrees for jobs that don’t utilize that higher education. Revamping apprenticeship programs, trade education in high schools, and the like makes all the sense in the world.
There’s a whole lot more detail in the piece, which I commend to those who are interested.
Call me cynical, but why do I suspect that “micro-credentialling” is less about creating more STEM workers and more about creating a way for corporations to extract rent from existing STEM workers by forcing them to pay annual fees to stay employable?
Given my role as an administrator in higher ed, this issue of micro-credentials is one with which I am familiar.
On the one hand, I see the appeal as a general matter.
On the other, I have had a hard time truly operationalizing it–especially in STEM (but in other areas as well). It is underappreciated how much a given course, or set of courses needed for a micro-credential, requires competencies that a given potential student may not have (or may have forgotten)–such as math or writing skills. So while, maybe a 9-hour (3 course) micro-credential would be of use, a given person might need another 6 (or more) hours of prereqs.
Moreover, there is the time commitment that an employed adult may not have (or wish to expend). Ditto money.
Maybe if companies paid and provided time? But then we are talking very specific partnerships with limited shelf lives. I mean, sure, it would be great if Company X agreed to send Y students to my university for Z dollars, but if X only needs 3Y, the program will be shut down in a few years and will it have been worth the investment?
I am not sure why micro-credentials are superior to a standard continuing education model.
I may be misunderstanding the proposals, but there is absolutely no shortage of “micro-credentialing” in STEM, although the vast majority of courses are not offered through universities. (Here are the offerings from just one company, Microsoft. These are hugely popular, and actually required for many positions.) If the proposal is for universities to get a bigger slice of this pie, well, that’s a business discussion and not really relevant to whether we have enough availability.
@MarkedMan: This is kind of my point about continuing education.
q00% with everything @Steven L. Taylor said here about microcredentialling.
Also, I want to riff on this good point:
This. And it’s important to note that the rise of 4-year degrees as a baseline has shifted the training dynamic in many STEM fields. Prior to this, companies tended to bare a much higher amount of the training cost for employees (either via formal apprenticeships or on-the-job training). While some on-the-job training still occurs, it tends to be highly specialized. The base level of knowledge that graduates are expected to have going into STEM fields today is pretty high. And those graduates were expected to pay for that training themselves.
Even with that, finding that first job can be really difficult. Small organizations like mine rarely hire people directly out of school because we can’t bare the on-the-job training costs. We need people to be as productive as possible as quickly as possible to sustain our work. And we’re definitely not alone in this.
So that’s an aspect of the current system that really needs to be considered as well.
Except when they are looking for cash or trying to appear attractive to prospective students, the professor will always chime in about how college isn’t suppose to improve your job skills. College has intrinsic value.
Way back in the 1970s, I noticed the college commercials for teams playing always marketed their skills based majors and didn’t promote the English or history majors. But once on campus, the professors always denigrated those vocational majors.
But this “alternate path” is needed since the future is in “robot maintenance”
And a lot of it at the tech level is already being done in spite of those trying to profit off providing credentials by setting up choke points. There are a number of auto diag channels that are teaching how to fix things filled with sensors, actuators, control modules and the CAN networks. These individuals in the trenches making things work, not dealing with it academically. And it’s happening in the HVAC area as well.
See, hands on tech knowledge and academia are incompatible. The latter incentivizes good grades and cares little about actual learning (past the test) but the former demands knowledge and skills regardless of paper test performance.
Schooling is nice, but few graduate from any college or school with hands on skills. Maybe with theory that will help them learn OTJ faster, but there’s a difference between knowing how the internal combustion engine works and how to fix the one in front of you.
We really just need to dust off the now more than a century old, Mind and Hand movement. That movement, from which MIT came, was to teach the useful arts and have the academic work teach the theory. I haven’t found a direct link, but it is likely how shop classes were in high schools before the “educators” got their bright idea in the ’70s of getting rid of the icky useful schooling.
It’s a cycle in “education” and always has been:
A comment from a Nebraska farmer who had described all the screens and controls in his sprayer in a video, before have a tractor die with a “network down” problem while moving a hiller
Talking with my daughter and son-in-law who now live in China I think we largely dont understand what really happens there so I dont think it works well for comparisons. That aside, I think our high school education in math and the sciences could be better, but it’s not really clear that we have real, fixable shortages. If you look at our total output of engineers it generally exceeds the number of engineering jobs. The issue is needing specific kinds of engineers quickly when technology changes. If we suddenly need a bunch of computer engineers, an example, it takes a while to make them. Then there is the constant issue of companies using this as an excuse just to bring in cheap labor from overseas.
Steve
@JKB:
Who is it that goes to college to learn auto maintenance? Rather clearly, that’s something where vocational school or even an apprenticeship would be preferable.
My worry about micro-credentialing is that I know people who are trying to be generalists in a particular field and who are continually working to make sure they’re up to date on advances in the field not having the time nor the money to continually get more credentials. At some point, we have to assume that people are professionals in their field and will learn what they need when they need it.
Heck, I’m having enough fun because my background (theoretical solid-state physics) has been applied to everything from fluid mechanics to superconductivity to nanotechnology. Now I’ve been having to bone up on the mechanics of limited slip differentials, belief theory, data fusion, and machine learning. The most useful classes I seem to have taken in college were the courses on probability and linear algebra. The class I did NOT know that I would have needed is set theory.
Certain areas of STEM are advancing so rapidly that if you were to start learning them in college, by the time you would graduate your knowledge would already be obsolete. For these areas, the best background is a good all-round general-purpose STEM degree and developing the ability to learn quickly. The next target that we should have is to keep company HR departments from ridiculous requirements–like 5 years of experience in a computer programming language that has only been in existence for 3 years.
P.S. For those of you keeping track on “continued education”–I’ve got 6 degrees. Which I think is enough.
The US has been in this position before. In the decade following WWII there was huge deficit in engineering talent and a bottleneck in the number of seats in colleges* with engineering programs. While this deficit existed in all industries it was particularly a problem for defense contractors. Many companies responded by recruiting and training talented employees to become engineers, trained in company sponsored programs, in part conducted during the working day and at regular pay.
My father was one such recruit, a talented machinist, a high school drop out with a G.E.D. The company he worked for, Raytheon, trained dozens of engineers across multiple disciplines, the old man specialized in manufacturing processes, while an uncle became and electrical engineer. By the time I worked at Raytheon during college, summer breaks, there were only a few of those trainees left. Most had gone on to other jobs or started their own businesses, the programs worked for both the companies and the employees.
Somehow I don’t think they got hung up on credentialing and licensing fees.
*My alma mater was a college started as an engineering school to address this issue that later branched into the liberal arts.
@Stormy Dragon:
Considering the high costs of a college education, and how much debt graduates carry and how long they take to discharge it, extracting rents to remain employable is likely what we’ll end up with, even if that’s not the intent.
Now, considering again the costs and debt mentioned above, shouldn’t universities be required to cover additional courses for staying up to date as part of the tuition already paid?
@steve:
This, in various forms. Back in the day, it was sort of amusing to watch Bill Gates, and whoever was head of Intel at the time, bemoaning how they just couldn’t hire good engineers, at the same time their companies were laying off thousands of engineers.
@Kathy:
I honestly don’t understand this. Should Apple be required to give me a new iPhone every other year because they build in obsolescence? Should Firestone give me new tires every 50,000 miles because they wear out?
Auto Maintenance
Back in ’76 I spent some quality time with a gal who was an auto mechanic. She had graduated from what was then called the Vocational Technical Institute at Southern Illinois University and worked in one of the garages here in Sleepytown. At the time I believe the VTI automotive program was two years.
Today the SIU College of Health and Human Services, School of Automotive offers a B.S. in Automotive Technology.
@James Joyner:
You really don’t understand what happens in a modern engine, do you? They’re not something that any old grease monkey can work on anymore. Not only do you need advanced training on the mechanics of the engine, you need a plethora of computer skills to go with it–and continuing education to stay up-to-date with the software and electronics advances. I personally know a couple mechanics with decades of experience that have just given up and closed shop because things have gotten too complex.
@JKB:
Sure, Jan.
[Sorry to the room for being snarky af, but as a CPA who has to pay my own $$ for 40 hours of CPE per year *and* has an earned MS Accounting *and* has been Accounting faculty at a community college for the past 10 years, I can’t take anything in that post seriously.]
@Mister Bluster: @Mu Yixiao: Indeed. And the auto tech program at the local high school gets recruitment literature from half a dozen technical colleges, none of which include SIU. But people with degrees not understanding what people who are in other fields are taking for training has a looooooong history in the US.
@JKB:
Tell us more, oh expect on higher ed!
@Grommit Gunn: I had to go snarky, too. Not a great debate technique, but yeesh.
@James Joyner:
Apple doesn’t charge you tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a phone, nor does the price of a phone require you to go into debt for years and years.
Think of follow up doctor visits after surgery. I don’t know how common this is, but I saw my hernia surgeon several times post surgery for follow up, and he didn’t charge me for any of these. All I paid him was the initial consult and the surgery fee.
Or think of it as a guarantee. You’ll have a lifelong, up to date education, not an obsolete one.
Or universities could stop with their bait and switch marketing. Namely, that they provide direct economic value. True some courses do, such as nursing, accounting, but move to the liberal arts/social sciences/fine arts, not so much. Doesn’t mean there’s not intrinsic value, but the “getting a job” with such degrees is ambiguous at best. Not a new phenomena.
Here is a legend I found on a list published 5+ decades ago in Vassar’s campus newspaper
But if the illusion that a college degree is guarantee to a good job finally breaks the cult delusions, colleges won’t be able to attract as many lifelong debtors. There’s already evidence this is happening which is why we have this panic to create micro-credentialing chokepoints.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Would you like a reference from a century ago, by a professor who wrote the OG book exposing college? And yes, Dartmouth did run him off campus after publication of ‘The Plastic Age’
In the past, college had value. I use my problem solving learned in engineering and Physics pretty much everyday. But these days, learning how to order your thoughts is actively impeded by social justice and speech suppression. Instead, now we get hothouse flowers that see words as violence.
The knowledge is no longer trapped on campus. Exposure to great thinkers is more likely to occur on podcast than on a campus. All college have is the HR lady’s spreadsheet check off for a credential. But the bosses are increasingly finding that check off doesn’t indicate much in the real world.
@Steven L. Taylor: It is fair to say that this particular commenter is not worth the emotional labor of attempting to discuss in good faith.
In seriousness, one of my observations as someone who got a degree in a STEM type of field (Accounting) after getting a BA in a humanities field (English) was that my critical thinking skills were at least one tier above the majority of my graduate cohort, who mostly had undergraduate degrees in either Business or Engineering.
They would catch on quickly to the technical accounting components, but struggle once you had to do assignments like construct a memo for a client or document and draw conclusions about a tax or an audit situation.
I have seen this as well with my own students. Teaching them how to create a balance sheet is much easier than getting them to draw conclusions about what the information on that balance sheet means. And my experience with the international students from countries being lauded in articles like these is that they are only good at answering quantitative questions and sometimes get even actively hostile when you can’t/won’t hand them The One Correct Answer to a question or problem.
This always concerns me when I see these types of articles and initiatives towards what I think of as “STEM in a vacuum.” Knowing how to calculate a derivative or write a journal entry without understanding why they are important is how you end up with thing like Enron or bridges that collapse once the weight of the cars in rush hour traffic get included.
You must be a conservative. 🙂
You don’t have to be a genius, or even particularly smart, to be useful at STEM. Apart from a small percentage of the extreme tail of the intelligence/aptitude distribution, nobody is born without the cognitive tools to be useful STEM contributors. The idea is a veiled version of “we shouldn’t bother to educate [those people] because it wouldn’t do them any good”. That so many of our kids are clearly never going to be fit for STEM careers by the time they finish primary school is a failure of our economic and education system, not an intrinsic fact about aptitudes.
We would have plenty of potential STEM talent if we weren’t stunting most of our kids in poverty and bad primary schools while quietly pushing the female half away from STEM. Even Andrew Carnegie understood that part.
@DrDaveT: I did reasonably well on the Math portion of the SAT and the Math and Natural Science portions of the ACT, somewhere in the 85-88 percentile range. I was considerably better in English and Social Sciences. Could I have ground my way through the Engineering degree I assumed I’d get? Probably. But I’d have been mediocre at best and fairly miserable my entire working life.
Clearly, more Americans could pursue STEM degrees than currently do. I doubt the Chinese have that much more organic talent than we do on a proportional basis. My suspicion is that, having the freedom not to, Americans without extremely high natural aptitude and fascination with the subject are just choosing more enjoyable paths.
Does she have any significant experience in STEM? Because her idea is very much something that someone who hasn’t worked in the fields would have.
I’ve worked in software for 25 years, and the technology is the easy part. Harder parts are effective communication and deciding on abstraction layers — and those tend to tie together.
Her proposal, from what I’ve skimmed, would produce a lot of junior engineers who cannot grow, and who require constant mentoring for their entire career — which is soft of fine, if that’s what you want. A lot of jobs are kind of that way.
But worse, she would be introducing micro-credentialing, which is a really easy metric to measure and filter on, but focused on the easiest part of the job. People love data, especially easy data, and they love to make “data driven decisions.”
If micro-credentialing ever took off, you would quickly see companies filtering prospective workers on skills that take a week to get reasonably proficient at — because the data is there and easy — and making it less likely that they will even see, let alone find, the candidates who can do the hard parts of the job.
And then there is the issue of moving the cost of training people to use technology X from the company to the employee.
But, I’m a bit of a crank when it comes to software and software interviews. I think there should be an essay portion (the LSAT has lovely essay questions that are fairly background neutral so it wouldn’t be putting in a lot of cultural bias beyond “can write in English” which seems like a job requirement).
Too many incompetent writers in tech.
@DrDaveT:
Somebody coming here to say something like, “I can’t do math so your belief that everyone can do everything is just progressive utopian nonsense” in 3…2…1…*
@steve makes a good point:
He’s right. But what the totally hypothetical person making the hypothetical statement I fake-quoted doesn’t seem to understand is they would be forced to defend some shitty positions to win that argument. e.g. Chinese people are naturally (read: genetically superior) at math. And maybe even have to defend that individuals are failing the system rather than the system failing individuals.
Ha!
James knows that and does his best recognize the risk of bias it presents. I’m skeptical that some others show that level of self awareness.
James also points out that we lack coercive power of an authoritarian state. It would be much more consistent to take this approach rather than going to down the road of an ultra wide band of innate capabilities. I agree it’s unlikely to be a band that indicates no difference. But I suspect the differences in cognitive abilities are much narrower than assumed by many.
*I don’t remember if you were around during the discussion of California’s curriculum proposal. I’m paraphrasing one side of the argument that got thrown around that day.
Also, good to see you chiming in round here.
@JKB: Well, then, color me chastised.
@JKB:Also:
Could you be any more cartoonish?
@Gustopher:
To quote some of my students from the past: “I feel really betrayed. I went into a two-year program because I didn’t want to take the fucking useless writing classes that they’re making me take.” 😉
@Kurtz: I agree; both on how hard he tries and how well he does at avoiding stupid bias compared to many other people I meet and talk to. Even so, the “how much education do people need to…” statements still pop up occasionally. (And I also think he doubles down on too many of them, but that may be just MY bias at work.)
Good discussion here, but I’d like to focus on the soft skills – where China is severely lacking.
I’m a liberal arts guy with a language and area studies degree now in a STEM field.
I work extensively with and analyze a tech market (the cellular industry) with a significant segment of China-based manufacturers. What I see, which may not be representative, are companies that can make inexpensive and functional hardware but not much else. Much of this equipment comes with bad user interfaces, bad firmware/software, poor support for the end customer, poor to non-existent things like user manuals. These are companies that consistently have difficulty integrating product engineering with all the other elements that make a good product.
The contrast is Apple, which leverages the advantages of overseas engineering and manufacturing with all the value-added that Apple provides regarding the end-user experience.
I also work with some US-based companies that buy Chinese off-the-shelf hardware and add in all the stuff to make it useful for the North American market – competent firmware, decent UI, marketing, post-sale support, etc. These tend to be, just based on my experience, more successful products long-term than the stuff that gets drop-shipped from Shenzen or Hong Kong.
So I’m not super worried about these educational STEM pushes by the PRC. We’ve learned many times throughout history that centralized planning comes with downsides, and the PRC’s focus on STEM comes with tradeoffs. I also remember the late 80’s when America was all a flutter about the supposed dominance of Japan, with explainers about how Japan would eat our lunch because their kids were smarter and more went into science and their test scores were so much better.
For US policy, I do think we have way too much credentialing. And I think we need to end the practice of allowing companies to bring tech workers from overseas at below-market wages via H1B visas. I’m not at all opposed to importing tech workers to help solve any tech worker shortages but suppressing wages like this is bad for a number of reasons. And high market wages due to a shortage of workers will incentivize more Americans to go into these fields, because people like to make money.
@Steven L. Taylor: Uh… yeah. The cartoonishness of the “hothouse flowers”-type statements is why I no longer read JKB except for comic relief. Sadly, there’s nothing comic or relieving to be had in today’s topic. It’s serious stuff, and although citations from a hundred years ago may well be relevant to the discussion, JKB neither has the gravitas nor the rhetorical chops to make the case. (Nor is he willing to invest more than a drive by in terms of making it.)
@DrDaveT:
Sorry, disagree. I have an IQ over on the thin end of the bell curve and I was never going to be a STEM learner, not because I was dull but because it bores the living shit out of me and always did. It isn’t just a matter of horsepower but of aptitude and interests and talents.
I know Americans have a deep distrust of the idea of natural talent – does not mesh with the whole Protestant work ethic thing – but it is quite real. I had and have no talent for numbers. But I have always been good with words. If I had been pushed into STEM I would have long since hanged myself.
@Michael Reynolds:
@Michael Reynolds: Nor was I ever going to be–despite being recruited by several colleges with engineering schools during my senior year (despite mostly Bs and Cs in math, too,–and no, I never got why either, but I suspect it had to do with scoring in the 99th percentile on one of the ASVAB math tests). Still, knowing that I am not a microcosm of the aggregate of people with high IQs, I can read Dr. Dave T’s comment, and even agree with his assessment even though it doesn’t match my interests. We probably do have more STEM candidates than we are identifying even though I’m not one of them.
@Kathy:
You did pay him. The surgery fee includes post surgery care. It is bundled in.
@James Joyner:
Based on current college admissions (from my vantage point with a son in college and another heading there in August), the most popular and competitive majors today are in STEM, particularly computer science. It is a far cry from 30-40 years ago when we all ended up going to law school. lol
@Jay L Gischer:
I think I’m with Daddy Reynolds on this one. I ended up with an BA in History (British & Russian Imperial History, huge market) partly because math makes my head swim. I can hold geometry in my head, but I can’t understand it. I only got as far as algebra in High School. It all just makes my head swim. There was a brief window when I thought about going into computer science, I’m really good at fixing things and intuiting how they work. The math requirements were entirely out of my reach.
It also amuses me how many people end up in law school because they are bad at/dislike math. Lazy type-A lunatics that can barely add. Hell, I suck at logic games and the actual step by step logic process doesn’t quite work in my brain. A lot of it is, this is the answer, its right, don’t make me explain it.
For what it’s worth, we should chop the last year off of law school and make it a two year apprenticeship. Law School is nothing more than a fancy trade school.
@JKB:
So, this is absolutely hilarious to me:
So, between lighting my parents money on fire for three years at community college and putting University of Illinois on my credit card for three years (you know, the good one where you can eat breakfast and look at the Loop and not live in a cornfield), I spent maybe 10k to get that Glorious Imperial History Degree. Immediately after that the Army offered me a 20k signing bonus to jump out of planes and fix ATVs, that would have been an relatively instant ROI. This was 2002. It also got me into law school, which, while being the worst economic decision of my life, was probably one of the best over all. If people would go back to buying and selling houses again, I’d be making buckets of money again, instead of lil’ beach pails. All because of a dorky history degree.
@Michael Reynolds:
There are such things as talent, aptitude, affinity, etc. that largely determine how good someone can be at certain things.
It is true that a normal person can learn anything, and perhaps even to do most things fairly well. But there are exceptions and limitations.
I’ve talked about my issues with math. I never did well at it, no matter how well I understood the underlying theory and purpose. The worst part was the belief by my parents, some teachers, and others in authority, that I could do well but wasn’t willing to put in the work or study or practice, etc.
Math being essential in physics and chemistry, I struggled there as well. I passed the latter two because exams included questions about theory, not just problem solving, and I nailed the theory down every time. I did well in biology, because there was no math involved, only theory.
So, no, I couldn’t have pursued a career in the STEM field (I tried, actually, despite knowing better).
@Beth:
In high school, math was divided in 4 parts over two years.
Math I was set theory and basic algebra. I did ok with the latter (hint: the answers to 90% of homework were in the back of the book), but set theory was a horror show. I failed, and had to take it again second semester.
Math II was equations. I took that in Summer school, 4 hours per day five days a week, weekly exams and a final exam. I aced it. Why? Because the exams were multiple choice, and if you substitute the options in the equation, you find the right one every time. So, no matter if they’re lineal, quadratic, polynomial, or simultaneous equations, you don’t need to know squat about any to get a good grade in the exam. I got a grade of 9.7 out of a possible 10.
Math III was analytic geometry. While there are a lot of equations involved, solving the exam problems was harder than merely subbing options. You also had to know what formulas to use and that wasn’t easy. Again, I failed and had to do it over in the 4th semester. I barely made it. In fact, I failed with 6.9, one tenth point short of the minimum passing grade of 7. The teacher passed me anyway for some reason.
Math IV, again in Summer school, was calculus. That wasn’t so hard, until it was. I did well with inequalities (where X+1>2 for example), since they are really the same as equations in the test, and we never got past quadratic ones. Derivatives were ok, though I can’t recall either what they are or how to solve one. And then integrals were like the 8th circle of Hell on a bad day (analytic geometry is the 9th, 10th, and 11th on the worst day in Hell in all eternity). I muddled through with a 7.1
I also failed Chemistry II, organic chemistry. Looking back on it, I’d have passed it on the first try if 1) I’d thought to get some tinker toys to model carbon chains, and 2) I had been any good at math (lots of reactions to “balance”). the school allowed one extraordinary exam only for the last subject needed to finish high school. That was it for me.
@Kathy:
Sounds similar, if way harder, than what I had. My class had about 260ish people in the whole class. Freshman year we had 60 people in the remedial math program across two classes. I don’t know what we did the first two years other than somehow I passed. Junior year was geometry. Senior year was algebra. The teacher was like “you are the best! You have finished the program.” At this point there were 12 of us left. The only thing I remember was I sat next to two girls that were nice to me. I desperately wanted to be one of those girls. She was pretty and popular. All I ever wanted to be, lol. That’s the total sum of what I remember about math class.
My son can do division in his head. He terrifies me.
Lol, I also had similar tenth of a point experience. I’m pretty sure a couple of teachers took pity on me and gave me the barest passing grades in their classes I should have failed. That and getting into two honors classes in senior year meant that I was the cut off. Everyone worse than me had to do it again.
@Kathy:
I used to teach a class for displaced industrial workers who were getting state money for retraining. They were always nervous about the entrance/placement exams the school gave. I always told my students that multiple choice testing was more about being able to recognize the wrong answers than it was about knowing what the correct answer was. Several of them asked me why I was the first teacher that had ever told them that. (I don’t know why considering that my 5th grade teacher was the one who taught us that–and did wrong answer drills to get it to take better.)
My SAT score was 1530 long ago. I’m very smart. I’m so smart that I know that my score only reflects book smarts and that street smarts, people skills, and work ethic are also very important and hard to measure. The actual achievements and productivity of people are not easily captured. This is true in many fields. In athletics for example, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, and Nicola Jokics were late first round draft choices. There are lots of things we can measure, but lots of things that are also important are not measurable.
@Beth:
I’m pretty sure we had to have had trigonometry and logarithms in there somewhere, but I can’t recall any of it at all. I do remember both from junior high school, including the little book with the tables of base ten logarithms and trigonometry functions.
Trigonometry got me to hate triangles, as analytic geometry left with a deep dislike of all things related to Descartes (the man was an evil genius if there ever was one).
Classes in high school were 20-30 people per subject. From the second semester onward, you even got to pick your schedule. I learned two things from that: 1) leave the easy classes for later in the day, 2) you can’t schedule too many free periods.
@James Joyner:
Are you seriously claiming that this was somehow independent of your upbringing and education?
@Michael Reynolds:
“Always”? I doubt you really remember back that far, Michael. Who knows what would have bored you, or not, if you’d been in a Math Circle at age 6.
But it’s a strawman anyway, because I didn’t say that everyone will want to do STEM — I said that the scarcity of STEM talent is an artificial by-product of our crappy early education.
@DrDaveT: I don’t have a Control James with a different upbringing and education to compare myself to, so who knows? Was there an environment wherein I’d have been doing calculus at 7? Maybe? But I wasn’t in it.
As I’ve recounted many times before, my Dad dropped out of high school and got his GED and Associate’s while in the Army and got his BA in political science eight months after I got mine. He majored in poli sci partly because it required no more math classes than he’d taken with the Associate’s.
I was pretty good at math (even on the Math Team) through Algebra and Geometry. I took two semesters of calculus (required) at West Point. I got a C in the first one and failed the second. I literally have no idea what calculus even is. Would I have done better in those courses in a less pressured environment? With professors who were professional math teachers instead of Army captains fresh out of a master’s program? Probably. Would I have gone on to get a PhD in Mathematics, Organic Chemistry, or Nuclear Physics? Not likely.
Most of the discussion has been about math related STEM areas (engineering, programming), but as someone in a non-math area, I suggest that most of the problem is $. College costs are through the roof and pay is quite low unless you have an advanced degree. And a lot of the entry government jobs are temporary.
@JKB:
To be brutally honest, no, I wouldn’t.
In all honesty, I am not sure what relevance it would have to this conversation.
I was one of those enamoured with languages and history and all those wonderful liberal arts area until a year when I was 10 and got plonked directly into the French school system. Then I very quickly learned to love math because it was something I could at least understand while struggling with the Imperfect Subjunctive, how to decline the verb ouir, and memorising all the exceptions to the standard plurals in French.
(I did however learn penmanship with dip-ink pens and which part of a hillside on which your vintage was planted would produce le premier cru, le deuxieme cru, and le troisieme cru. The French have their priorities in order.)
James, if you are interested in understanding the guts of Calculus, look for a used copy of Professor E.McSquared’s Guide to Calculus. It’s written in cartoon form, is great at teaching the seminal ideas behind calculus, and is hilarious, to boot.
There’s also now a huge number of really good explanations (with animation) all over YouTube for all areas of math. I’m another one who prefers pictures in the mind and was able to track down a great explanation for covariant and contravarient vectors which I always had trouble with.
STEM, vocational, and other trade school certifications should be afforded some level of college credits. This would allow these certificate holders to leverage their applied knowledge into less cumbersome time investments and cost constraints associated with collegiate undertakings. Thus, it would create an incentive among these certificate holders to pursue continous learning opportunities later in their careers in the form of higher education degrees. If history can teach us anything, just look at the technological advacements brought about by the National Defense Education Act of 1958. From that point forward humankind has witnessed unprecedented advancements in technological progress and innovation, while also lifting all facets of post secondary education. Expanding meaningful pathways into the higher education rehlm will serve to improve our prospects for a better future.
@grumpy realist:
Ce sont les meres des hiboux
Qui désiraient chercher les poux
De leurs enfants, leurs petits choux
En les tenant sur les genoux…
I feel your pain.
@James Joyner:
Then why are you so confident that it’s nature and not nurture that decides?
@DrDaveT: There’s really not much debate that both are important. Freddie DeBoer’s Cult of Smart makes a pretty strong argument, though, that we way oversell the degree to which “good schools” and “good teachers” make a difference.