SCIENCE CAREERS

Voting with their Wallets

Science Can’t Compete for the Ablest Grads, New Study Shows

OK, it’s official. A new study funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has now confirmed what professors have been saying privately for years: the brightest American students aren’t going into science and engineering careers nearly as often as they used to.

But the reason is not, as some people say, that young Americans lack the smarts or the skills to succeed in those fields. Instead, it appears that longstanding U.S. policies have destroyed the incentives that used to attract many of the nation’s best young minds into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM fields). And that means that as the United States faces increasing technological and scientific competition from abroad, the country isn’t getting the full benefit of the brainpower it is paying to educate.

“It’s a labor market story,” not an education story, says one of the report’s authors, Harold Salzman, of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Rather than staying with STEM for graduate studies or a first job, many of our most able college graduates are now opting out of the pipeline that the nation used to count on to carry gifted students into STEM careers.

The new findings contradict the argument that some high-tech employers have been putting forward for a decade now: that American education doesn’t produce enough high-quality science and math graduates. This purported talent deficit, they insist, means that the nation, to stay competitive, must import more technically trained workers and massively overhaul K-12 scientific and math education.

But the data suggest something completely different. They show no such deficit. Earlier studies by Salzman and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University establish that American schools turn out very large numbers of students who score at the very top of international math comparisons (while also producing large numbers who score at the bottom, resulting in mediocre averages.). Statistics from the National Science Board indicate, furthermore, that the nation’s colleges each year produce several times as many homegrown holders of STEM degrees as can find work in those areas. And among the STEM graduates of former years, unemployment of American engineers is at historic highs.

But the new study reveals an ominous trend among the scientifically gifted. Although the numbers of young Americans studying STEM in high school and college are as strong as ever, the very best of those students, as indicated by their SAT scores and college grade point averages, are less likely than in decades past to stay in STEM when they leave college.

But the answer to the problem may not be complicated. Higher salaries and more stable career tracks have lured these grads away from scientific jobs, and those same incentives, an author of the study suggests, could draw them back into STEM fields.

A generation gap

In the new study, Lowell, Salzman, and co-authors tracked three cohorts of American STEM students through their educations and early careers. Using standard government data sets, they focused on what young people do at the crucial transitions of their lives. How many of those who study science and advanced math in high school proceed on to college and continue to study STEM fields when they get there? How many of those who earn a STEM degree get a job in a STEM field? How many are still in STEM fields ten or more years later?

The results show that young Americans are as likely as ever to major in science. “On average,” the new report states, “there has been no substantive change in the proportion of high school graduates who go on to complete or enroll in a STEM field of study.” And, encouragingly, “ the highest performers are significantly more likely to major in STEM than the lower performers.” But then, in the late 1990s, the percentage of the students in the top quintile of STEM ability who chose to major in STEM fields took a “striking” drop—from nearly 30 percent to under 15 percent, while the percentages of those in lower ability groups who chose STEM majors remained essentially unchanged. The percentage of the highest performers who earned STEM bachelor’s degrees fell from 43 percent in the classes of 1992 through 1997 to 29 percent in the classes of 2000 through 2005.

But if the drop in high-scoring STEM majors were not discouraging enough, the news from those who did get STEM degrees was even worse. The percentage of those holding STEM bachelor’s degrees who went on either to work in or study a STEM field rose steadily and sharply from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, from 31.5 percent of the 1977 through 1980 classes, to 52.8 percent of the 1997 through 2000 cohort. But, in the late 90s, the percentage begins to fall, particularly sharply among the most able, from 52 percent to 48 percent.

“Given what we know about the state of the economy and the exploding field of STEM occupations in the 1990s”—the period of the runaway tech boom—“it may seem puzzling to see a decline in retention,” the report states. “It is common knowledge that the STEM job market was expanding in the that period, so the drop in retention might seem surprising because the jobs were available for the taking.” And looking farther out along the career trajectory, the data show “declining retention among the top performers” in STEM careers ten years out from the bachelor’s degree. The late 1990s, they say, “marked a turning point…at least for the best students”—and the “decline seems to have come on quite suddenly.”

These results “strongly suggest that students are not leaving STEM pathways because of lack of preparation or ability,” the authors conclude. Instead, the data “suggest that we turn our attention to factors other than educational preparation or student ability” to explain what is going on.

The Rhodes advantage

And, as it turns out, STEM fields are not the only traditional employers of the nation’s ablest young people that appear to be losing their attraction. The Rhodes Scholarship is by far the most prestigious, and probably the most competitive, academic award that a young American can win. The winners, drawn from a broad range of college majors, study a subject of their choice at Oxford University and then return home “with virtually any job available to them,” writes the Rhodes Trust’s American secretary, Elliot Gerson, on the Washington Post op-ed page. For almost a century, these ultimate achievers “have overwhelmingly chosen paths in scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service, [reaching] the highest levels in virtually all fields.”

In recent years, however, increasing numbers of the consummately accomplished Rhodes alumni have eschewed those traditional vocations in favor of “Wall Street, finance [or] general business management”—fields previously considered rather beneath the horizon of America’s most promising young leaders, Gerson continues. Only three of the 320 American Rhodes scholars chosen in the decade of 1970s, for example, opted for the world of commerce. But fully 6 of the 32 chosen in one recent year made that choice. “This break in an almost century-old pattern coincided with great increases in occupational earnings differentials, which have continued to grow, seemingly exponentially,” Gerson continues. “It seems quaint, if not unfathomable, that just three decades ago the differentials in earnings—generally two- to fivefold between business leaders and doctors or lawyers, or five- to tenfold with professors, scientists and public servants—were often rationalized by Rhodes scholars as reasonable additional compensation to balance the lower standing of business jobs among their peers.”

The Lowell-Salzman team doesn’t yet have complete data to show that many of the ablest STEM students who abandoned the pipeline have followed suit, but Salzman strongly suspects that Gerson has at least part of the answer. “Go to top level schools and they’ll tell you of a huge shift at the school level into finance” and related fields, he says. Elite colleges represent a relatively small proportion of the nation’s students, he continues, “but they pull disproportionately from the very top,” presumably many of the students capable of doing topflight science. Meanwhile, he adds, “everything shows that wages and working conditions and career prospects have stagnated and sometimes gotten worse” in STEM occupations in recent years, “and there are other job prospects” for students able to do higher math.

Mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and others with advanced STEM training have, in exchange for incomes many times those available to postdocs or professors, or even to industrial engineers and scientists, become the “quants” (quantitative experts) behind the many elaborate investment vehicles of recent years. The financial collapse may have reduced the number of the ablest students headed straight to Wall Street, but even so, “management, law, medicine, all those fields pay better than technical and science fields,” Salzman says. They also provide greater career security. Students aiming for STEM careers in academe now face daunting prospects. Qualified applicants vastly outnumber faculty openings, and in many fields, a would-be researcher must first spend an average of seven years earning a Ph.D. and several more as a low-paid postdoc before he or she can even apply for one of the hard-to-get academic posts. And in a number of high-tech industries, students worry about work being moved offshore or, in many cases, the need to compete here at home with often lower-paid foreign workers on temporary visas.

Stopping the talent drain

How great a threat to the nation’s innovative capacity—and to its competitiveness—does the loss of these scientifically able students to other occupations represent? It’s impossible to say, Salzman believes. “Innovation is not well understood,” and “no relationship” has been demonstrated between the number of a country’s scientists or engineers and its ability to make major breakthroughs. “Innovation comes out of a small group of people…. if there are small areas of innovative activity, then these broad trends may or may not make a difference,” he says. Some major technical advances have been made by people who would not show up in statistics as scientists or engineers—including college dropouts tinkering with electronic components in their parents’ garages and bicycle mechanics convinced that they could build a machine that would fly. But it’s very likely that at least some of the high-caliber brainpower lately devoted to devising elaborate investment models could just as well have created advances in various scientific or technological fields.

If the nation believes that this threat is real, the answer, Salzman says, appears to be simple market economics. Increasing the size of the scientific pipeline is a highly inefficient way of getting more STEM workers, because the best students are falling off right at the end, not dropping off the middle. “To the extent that they’re leaving the pipeline, they’re leaving when they get to the labor market. It’s not high school or college.”

“Imagine a manufacturer is able to get only 60 percent of this product to market because 40 percent falls off the assembly line,” Salzman continues. “If you know that you’re getting sixty percent off the line, you’d say, ‘Gee how could we get 70 percent?’ ….We’ve got to get more of them coming out of college rather than trying to double the numbers going in.”

And an effective way to do that, he says, is also simple market economics: improve the incomes and careers that STEM fields offer the best graduates. “If the nation really values these fields, show them the money, show them the stable careers,” he says.

“This is one of the areas where we should believe that markets actually work. Let’s be capitalists about this, free market capitalists, and understand that we need to provide market incentives to get the results we want.”

Beryl Lieff Benderly, a regular Science Progress contributor and prize-winning Washington journalist, writes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column about scientific labor force issues for Science Careers, a feature of the website of Science magazine.

Tags: science careers, STEM Education

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