Inspiration, Funding Cited as Top Needs for Math and Science Education

“I mean think about it,” Greene said. “Through the power of thought, through the power of calculation, we have been able to figure out how stars shine, how black holes form, how space expands, how time elapses. We’ve been able to peer back to a mere fraction of a second after the beginning to try to understand how the universe began. We have pried apart the atom and been able to understand its constituents with absolutely fantastic precision. This is fantastic material. This is material to die for.”

“And yet,” he added, “if it is taught in a way that we usually teach it, where we focus in so quickly on the details in order to get kids to solve the equation, know the parts of the cell, balance the reaction, without a commensurate focus on the big wondrous ideas, the ideas that get us up in the morning … what we do is we leave science lifeless.”

First off, let me say I am on board with the message. But I saw a statistic that had me wondering what it really meant:

In 1995, the U.S. ranked second in college completion rates, and it now ranks 15th.

This is followed up by

Competitor countries, [Hockfield] said, “are doing a better job of recruiting, training, compensating and celebrating highly qualified teachers of math.”

One might conclude from this that it’s a problem with a drop-off in the quality of the teachers. Not that paying teachers better and recruiting better talent is bad, but let’s take a closer look at the numbers. 1995 graduates probably entered school in 1991 (or 1990), and there were 1.11 million freshmen entering 4-year institutions that year. In 2005, that number was 1.56 million — an increase of 41%. The us census population data I found doesn’t break down by year, so we have to make do with 5-years sums of 15-19 year-olds; the increase in that span was 17.25 million to 21.2 million, or an increase of 22.5%. So attendance at 4-year institutions increased significantly faster than the traditional target population. Since college isn’t getting any cheaper, I’m going to argue that the attendance boost isn’t driven by the affordability of college, though I’m certain that students are more likely to drop out due to financial considerations as tuition has risen faster than inflation, and this contributes significantly to the lower completion rates. I suspect this increase is fueled by people being pushed into college by the notion that a college degree is the only way to make real money, and a corresponding drop in quality of the students attending school, where “quality” is a combination of motivation and ability. If we have lower-quality students, or ones who run out of money, this is going to contribute to a reduction in graduation rates, as students drop out because of lack of desire, cash, or substandard grades. I’m not sure how much schools have lowered admissions standards or how widespread this is, but to the extent they have, they are complicit in this as well for accepting higher-risk students.

The other issue I have is that the ranking of the percentages of high-school and college graduations are given, but not the rates themselves. The dropout rate from high school went down from ~27% in 1960, to 15% in 1970, to less than 11% in the 2000s. If we look at the percentage of Americans with college degrees, we see it is generally going up over time, while high school seems to have topped out in the upper 80’s but is definitely higher than in the 60’s.

I think what this means is that graduation rates may not be the right metric here. We’re doing better in terms of the fraction of people with degrees, it’s just that other countries must be getting better too, and faster than we are. What we can do is also look at where we rank worldwide in citizens with degrees, and see that we are 12th in the 25-34 age group, and this ranking is lower for these recent graduates than it used to be. I you look at the countries above us in the list, you’ll see Canada, Japan, and several European countries, where college costs are heavily subsidized by the government — their students aren’t fighting the same battle of trying to pay exorbitant tuition costs. I wonder how much of the difference this accounts for.