Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

This article starts by noting that students are more likely to switch out of science or engineering majors if they are at selective schools, while students in less selective schools are actually more likely to complete science or engineering majors.  The article then goes on to talk about how project-based teaching makes the difference.  However, I don’t recall the article actually making the case that the less selective schools are more likely to adopt project-based teaching.  Yes, yes, somebody out there knows this one elite school where the engineering profs are horrible, and their friend at Nowhere State had a great project-based curriculum.  However, I don’t know that these anecdotes are representative of trends.  If anything, major curricular overhauls are (usually) easier with the sorts of resources one usually associates with more selective places.

I’d like to offer a few observations as a person who studied science at an expensive private school and now teaches science at a public school with a lot of economically disadvantaged students:

1)  When I was a freshman at that fancy school, I was surrounded by aspiring scientists and engineers and medical doctors.  When I was a sophomore, I was surrounded by a good number of aspiring businessmen, film-makers, accountants, lawyers, historians, poli sci types, etc.  A lot of these aspiring politicians and lawyers and business leaders got their asses handed to them in freshman chemistry, calculus, biology, and physics.

Where I teach now, OTOH, I notice that even my introductory courses have a good number of people in their second and third years, and a look at their transcripts shows that they’ve been flailing, getting a lot of C’s, the occasional D, the occasional B.  Many didn’t even start in calculus at the beginning of freshman year.  Many were advised to only take 3 courses instead of 4 in their first year, and many only took 2 science courses instead of the 3-4 that my cohort took.  I’m not saying that my cohort was tougher.  I’m saying that my cohort figured out, very early on, whether they should do science or switch to something else.  At the end of freshman year, either you had ample confirmation that you need to do something else, or you had validation for your decision to be in science.

So I concur with the observation that less selective schools probably have a lower rate of students switching out of science and engineering.

2)  Going on to hypotheses for why this might be:  If you are at an elite school, well, first of all, in some sense it doesn’t matter what you major in.  If you have a degree from a selective school with a good alumni network, between intelligence signalling and networking connections you’ll be OK no matter what you major in.  OTOH, if you are at a less selective place, there is less signalling value in your diploma, and the alumni network is (usually) less tight-knit and connected, so there is less networking value in your diploma.  I don’t want to start a humanities vs. science food fight, but I think it’s obvious that many students perceive science or engineering as more employable than history or English.  If your diploma isn’t going to tell the world that you’re part of the elite, and isn’t going to get any secret handshakes from well-connected alumni, at the very least it should have something Employable stamped on it.

3)  As much as we talk about the economic hardships faced by students at less selective state schools, tuition is (usually) (relatively) cheap, and so taking 5-6 years to get out, while working part-time (or sometimes full-time) is not necessarily the end of the world.  So what if you’re going to have to retake calculus?  That extra semester is worth the (usually) (comparatively) low tuition if you wind up in an engineering job.  (Or so the freshman believes.)

OTOH, at an expensive school, there are huge financial incentives to get out in 4 years, and there are (usually) pushy parents who will not look kindly on the decision to flail away in something forever.  If retaking a few freshman science and math courses pushes the engineering degree back a year, that is simply not acceptable.

On the institutional side, yes, there are huge pressures to increase graduation rates here.  OTOH, the chatter I hear from the world of expensive schools is that, one way or another, they have always liked to get kids out more-or-less on time.  The pressure might not come in the form of splashily-announced initiatives in response to bills in the Legislature, but it’s there.  If you don’t hear them jumping on the bandwagon of graduation rate initiatives, maybe it’s because they have quietly ensured that, one way or another, they deliver a degree in 4 years in exchange for the tuition paid by alumni parents.  And that is much easier to do if kids who are flailing in freshman calculus are encouraged, one way or another, to try something else as a sophomore.

Where I am now, by contrast, yes, there is pressure to get them out ASAP, but there is also some often-justifiable pride in producing more STEM graduates from the sorts of backgrounds that the expensive private schools don’t produce.  I’m not going to say that we go soft because of political correctness (the very fact that I see students having to retake classes, and students with lots of C- or worse grades, should be ample proof of that) but perhaps we have some political incentives to encourage the students to try over instead of encouraging them to try something else.  I don’t think that this is the only factor, or even the most important one (see the other stuff I listed above) but it’s there.  Our Graduation Rate Initiative will not include any substantial component that can be summarized as “encourage the freshmen who are flailing in STEM courses to switch majors.”

Anyway, these are just hypotheses; I don’t claim to have exhaustive studies to back them up.  But I don’t think I’m entirely off the mark.