By: David Bressoud @dbressoud

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As I briefly reported in my April 15 column, Talking about Leaving Revisited is the long-awaited sequel to Talking about Leaving, which was published in 1997 and had a profound effect on our understanding of why many undergraduates who enter a STEM track do not persist. An all too common misperception is that they simply do not have the ability to succeed in what is an intellectually challenging program. The reality is a combination of factors that include poor teaching, a biased and unwelcoming environment, and inadequate high school preparation in both subject and study skills.

In addition to building on the rich body of research into undergraduate STEM education that has been created over the past two decades, the current volume presents a detailed and comprehensive view of how students perceive their own undergraduate STEM education, what encourages them to persist, and what turns them away. It is based on institutional records, classroom observations, surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews undertaken over the period 2012–2017 at six institutions, four large public R1 universities (undergraduate enrollments over 24,000, with one over 35,000), one private R1 university (undergraduate enrollment above 5,000), and one liberal arts college (undergraduate enrollment just over 2,000). The work was conducted by researchers at the University Colorado Boulder, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

 The most common complaints, both from those who dropped out of a STEM track (switchers) and those who eventually received a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field (persisters) were

• Poor quality of STEM Teaching, 96% of switchers and 72% of persisters

• Difficult transition to college, 89% of switchers and 57% of persisters

• Competitive, unsupportive STEM culture, 81% of switchers, 42% of persisters

• Low grades in early years, 79% of switchers, 44% of persisters

• Inadequate high school preparation in subject and study skills, 64% of switchers, 34% of persisters

Two of the most important and insightful chapters examine what students perceive to be bad teaching and what they see as good teaching. These chapters are so rich that they will be the subject of my next column.

All of the complaints intertwine. Inadequate high school preparation, not just in what is taught and how it is taught but also in preparing students for the heightened expectations when they get to college, is a major contributor to the difficulties students encounter in the transition to college. Grade shock and reliance on grading on a curve contribute to the perception of the culture as competitive and unsupportive.

Many of these complaints come together in what students—and even some faculty—describe as “weed-out” courses. This study categorizes them as Severe Foundational Courses, courses run in classes of 100 or more students in the first or second year, that have existed for at least four years, that are required and/or a prerequisite for a STEM major, and in which the percentage of students receiving a D, F, Withdraw, or Incomplete exceeds 20%. Calculus and General Chemistry are foremost among these. As the MAA’s calculus studies have revealed, a success rate above 70% is almost always aspirational. The teaching style in these courses is generally lecture-based and impersonal, grades are low, and these grades are often assigned on a curve with an implicit—and sometimes explicit—expectation that a certain percentage will fail. This leads to a highly competitive environment that discourages many students, especially women and students from underrepresented minorities who are already struggling against stereotype threat.

Inadequate high school preparation is a very real problem, especially for students from under-resourced schools. Many of these entered college having been at the top of their class, assuming they were well-prepared. They enroll in the demanding “weed-out” courses, often taking two or more of them in their first semester, and are broken by the experience. In one of the most striking passages from this book,

Focusing on race/ethnicity as if it were a significant independent variable appears to be inherently, if unintentionally, racist. The characteristics that create what appear to be issues related to race/ethnicity are more accurately issues of socio-economic and educational disadvantage. (p. 439)

In the concluding paragraphs, Elaine Seymour points to the need for state and national policies that address these inadequacies. She does not absolve our colleges and universities who have a responsibility to institute or reinforce “ameliorative interventions.” On the state policy level, the kind of work that is needed is represented by the Launch Years project (see my columns from February 1 and April 15, 2020). Nothing illustrates what is needed at the post-secondary level better than the chapter titled “Getting an A” from Paul Tough’s important book, The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. This chapter brilliantly demonstrates how devastating it can be for a talented and capable student from an under-resourced high school to encounter one of these Severe Foundational Courses. Tough’s chapter also illustrates what it takes to make it possible for her to succeed. The solution is not to lower standards, but rather to meet the essential need for proper guidance, support, and encouragement.

The losses are real

While I will return to many of these themes in future pieces, I want to conclude this column with some data on the very real losses of STEM majors that we are encountering. Talking about Leaving Revisited (TALR) cites a 48% loss. This is based on a longitudinal study run by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), BPS:04/09, that followed students who first enrolled in a four-year college program during the 2003–04 academic year. Among the students who at any point declared a major in a STEM discipline (defined as Engineering or one of the Biological, Physical, Mathematical, or Computer Sciences), 48% failed to earn any degree or certificate in a STEM field within six years.

This is actually comparable to attrition rates in other disciplines over this period, but it misses an important phenomenon that began as the NCES study was ending, the incredible take-off in interest in STEM careers that began during the Great Recession. Figure 1 shows the number of students each year who began as full-time freshmen in a four-year undergraduate program and who identified one of the STEM areas as their most likely major (blue). The orange graph shows the number of students who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field that year.

In fall 2003, approximately 307,000 incoming first-year students declared a STEM field as their intended major (blue dot in Figure 1). Four years later, about 220,000 students graduated with a STEM degree (orange dot). What is significant is that, beginning in 2008 as the Great Recession was getting underway, STEM majors suddenly became very popular. While graduation with STEM degrees also picked up, we see a widening gap between intention and completion. STEM graduation in 2007 was 72% of the number who had intended a STEM major in 2003. By 2018, the number graduating with a STEM degree was only 64% of the number who had entered four years earlier with that intention, and the gap appears to be widening (see Note 1).

There is one other wrinkle to these data. From 1975 until 2007, the number of entering students intending a STEM major stayed remarkably consistent, dropping in the mid-80s, then growing by a bit over 50% over the next thirty years. From 2007 to 2017, the number doubled. The change in slope was so abrupt that the recession must have been a significant factor. We are now entering another recession that may prove even greater. I would expect an even greater rush of students wishing to enter STEM fields.

I believe that this is a good thing. A well-taught STEM program can prepare students for a wide variety of demanding, satisfying, and financially rewarding career paths, the kinds of positions that our economy will be creating at the fastest rate. Talking about Leaving Revisited demonstrates that our current practices seem custom-made to choke off this growth. Instead, we should take the lessons from this book to reform what we do to our students so that they can succeed.

 Note and References

Note 1: There is an apparent discrepancy between the BPS:04/09 data that show a 48% loss and the number of graduates in 2007, which is 72% of those who entered with the intention of majoring in STEM. A likely explanation is that the HERI data record only full-time students who first enroll in a four-year program. HERI does not survey part-time students or students who begin at a two-year college.

Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). Multiple years. The American Freshman. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Multiple years. Digest of Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Seymour E. and Hewitt, N. M. (1997). Talking about Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Seymour, E. and Hunter, A.-B., Editors. (2019) Talking about Leaving Revisited: Persistence, Relocation, and Loss in Undergraduate STEM Education. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.

Tough, P. (2019). The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Download the list of all past Launchings columns, dating back to 2005, with links to each column.