STEM Education

Calls to improve education in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math have taken on fresh urgency in recent years. With U.S. prospects for prosperity increasingly seen as tied to performance in the STEM fields, the education community has stepped up efforts to rethink and revamp how U.S. students are educated in those subjects and groomed for technical careers.

Think tanks, federally backed foundations and large nonprofits have proposed new state science standards, for example. Policymakers have looked to engage more students in STEM, especially the female and minority students who are underrepresented in science and engineering. Adult learning programs and projects to produce better-trained STEM teachers have been coupled with funding from federal incentive grants and big-ticket public-private partnerships.  A key goal is to produce more Americans capable of creating the technological innovations that undergird economic success—and stable careers for adults. This Topics section examines what the emphasis on STEM education means for reporters who cover schools.

According to one study from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, the STEM world is subject to high degrees of attrition at all levels. Only 25 percent of STEM-capable K-12 students actually pursue a major in science, engineering or math when they enter college. Only 38 percent of students who start with a STEM major graduate with a STEM degree. Slightly more than half of those take on a STEM-related job, but – by the 10-year mark in their careers – nearly half of those workers are out of the STEM workforce. 

The center attributes that churn to various complex causes. They conclude, though, that a constant demand exists for new talent within the technology industries, fields in which employment opportunities generally have fared well despite tough economic times. And those job prospects appear likely to grow. By 2018, it is projected some 2.4 million STEM job openings will be available, according to the CEW research (The National Governors Association puts the number at 8 million), and 92 percent of those positions will require some postsecondary education and training.

STEM Growth Initiatives

Policymakers see statistics such as these as a battle cry to boost the nation’s performance – and productivity – in teaching and learning science and math. Indeed, in his 2011 State of the Union speech, President Obama declared the need for better STEM education a “Sputnik moment,” a direct reference to the impetus that the launch of that Soviet satellite during the Cold War gave to America’s scientists and technology-based industries in 1957. With STEM education, the challenge is not how to send a man to the moon and back, but how to improve the ways STEM fields are taught so that students maintain interest in them throughout the course of an education and career.

For his part, Obama has called on the private sector and large foundations to support STEM projects, such as the 100Kin10 initiative. The project, founded in 2011, aims to train and recruit 100,000 new STEM teachers over 10 years. For example, one partner in the initiative, the California State University system, intends to graduate 1,500 STEM educators a year through 2015, half of whom would teach at high-needs schools for a three-year period.

The 100Kin10 project has gathered more than 100 partners from the private and public sectors, and the partners will contribute to the initiative in differing ways. Google, for instance, will design a program to recognize the top 5 percent of STEM teachers nationwide, while the University of Chicago will study the efforts of 100Kin10 to propose best practices for future top-tier teacher recruitment and training.

Initiatives such as this recently have bloomed around the topic of science and math education. Like the state-led efforts to create Common Core national learning standards in English language arts and math, the Next Generation Science Standards initiative aims to produce science and technology standards. The standards are  designed and supported by organizations including the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Change the Equation, and Achieve. The groups have cited a need to revamp the ways science is taught in light of dynamic Internet tools that could aid instruction, as well as new research on how students learn.

Learning Science

How students learn matters, of course. The Center on Time and Learning determined fourth-grade students who approach science lessons almost every day through “inquiry-based” learning– or projects-based instruction – scored 16 points higher on the 2009 NAEP science assessment than those who were not taught through the use of hands-on projects. But access to costly science equipment and lab time is not always a given. And in the No Child Left Behind era, elementary schools have cut instructional time for science: According to a 2009 Center on Education Policy report, half of all districts cut elementary science instruction by 75 minutes a week or more.

Getting younger students more interested in science and math is a central challenge. How students view their science courses can have a substantial effect on whether they’ll pursue a STEM college and career trajectory. Studies indicate that merely generating more buzz about science classes can be effective. A 2011 University of Virginia study found that, “student interest and self-confidence in science and math in high school are strongly associated with students continuing STEM studies through college,” more so than achievement factors. Interest in math and science appears to be growing according to at least one indicator: The number of students taking an Advanced Placement science test grew from 134,669 in 2001 to 313,452 in 2011. In math, test-takers jumped in number from 166,624 to 330,296 over that same period. 

STEM advocates are particularly interested in getting more women, African-Americans and Latinos to pursue science and math education, fields in which they have been historically underrepresented in both higher education and the workforce. Only 23 percent of STEM jobs are filled by women, according the Georgetown analysis. African-Americans, Native Americans and Hispanics represented only 9.1 percent of college-educated Americans in the science and engineering workforce even though they accounted for a rapidly rising 28.5 percent of the U.S. population in2006, according to a 2010 report from the National Academies.

One explanation for the shortage of female STEM graduates in higher education is that the perception that the sciences are biased toward men. A study by the American Association of University Women found that females are less confident than males in math and science courses; are likely to feel they must outperform males to gain equal footing; and are more likely to view their talents in a negative light even if their scores are on par with that of males.

The reasons for the underrepresentation of some minorities in the STEM world are just as complex. Policymakers are proposing some initiatives to boost the participation of these groups. For example, U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) introduced a law in spring 2012 that would enable the National Science Foundation to give grants to colleges to “increase the number of students from underrepresented minority groups receiving degrees in [STEM] fields, and to recruit, retain, and advance STEM faculty members from underrepresented minority groups.” As of June 2012, the legislation had not moved forward.

Some critics of the push to ratchet up STEM education argue that the STEM-skilled worker shortage is a myth; they note that only 40 percent (2.7 million) of men and 26 percent (0.6 million) of women with STEM degrees work in STEM-related jobs, according to 2009 federal figures. The problem is not educating students, they say, but rather keeping STEM-skilled employees in their respective fields. Many STEM-educated workers pursue higher-paying careers in finance and management – even though STEM jobs pay well above the average for college-educated workers. The migration of math and engineering students to high-paying jobs that demand sophisticated number-crunching skills is well documented.

Critics also question whether the United States’ opportunity to develop homegrown STEM talent is being affected by the presence of foreign nationals in postsecondary education and the workforce. About 59 percent of Ph.D. recipients in engineering programs in 2009 were foreign-born, and 17 percent of STEM workers were born abroad, compared with the overall workforce average of 12 percent, according to the research from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Whether foreign nationals are pushing out U.S. candidates, or filling in holes left by low domestic interest in STEM, remains an unresolved debate.