Science And Math For The Future | The ongoing struggle to keep the STEM pipeline full
Massachusetts is a center of biotechnology and medical research, but it may not always be so unless a lot more high school students pursue scientific and mathematics degrees and careers.
As one of the nation’s centers for biotech, drug and medical device companies, we may end up choking our economy if the supply of workers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, collectively known as STEM workers, doesn’t keep up with demand.
Filling Vacancies
Employers, policy makers, politicians, teachers and educators are all very aware that “the pipeline” isn’t full enough. It’s not just undergraduate, master’s or doctorate degree holders. There aren’t enough high school graduates with the right technology, science or math skills to hold lower level jobs in scientific areas either.
A group of business people, educators and state officials are part of the STEM Initiative, coordinated by the University of Massachusetts, and have been toiling away on a plan to fill the pipeline. They’ll be holding their fifth summit on Oct. 28 in Sturbridge. It will cover all manner of topics about the plan and ways to reach students and teachers.
Among the plan’s goals is a 35 percent increase by 2012 in high school students working toward a STEM career, and an effort to expose students as early as preschool to these subjects. Over the next five years the plan also calls for 10 percent annual increases in qualified STEM teachers.
In 2003, the state legislature passed an economic stimulus bill that included programs to beef up STEM education. But with the recession and resulting cuts in federal and state aid it became difficult to get the programs off the ground. There are a number in place, but nowhere near what is needed to make change statewide.
Some programs have been started in different towns but there’s a long way to go.
Just as fewer students are going into science and math, fewer teachers are willing to teach those subjects. They can easily make more money in industry, so that’s where they go.
A section of Gov. Deval Patrick’s education reform proposal includes the idea of a statewide teachers’ contract that would include higher pay for science and math teachers.
Here in Massachusetts everything is political and revolves around local control by individual communities — two things that make system-wide changes difficult propositions.
Perspiration And Inspiration
Massachusetts is not alone in trying to encourage more kids to study math and science. As a nation we are woefully behind in graduating folks with bachelor’s degrees in science, engineering and math and there are more foreign-born than native-born students in doctorate programs in science and engineering.
Making high school a more rigorous exercise is fine, but somehow we have to capture their interest earlier if we want them to pursue math and science as careers.
A funny thing happened in the late 1950s when Russia was the first to launch an unmanned satellite named Sputnik into orbit. Americans in general were stunned that another country beat us at anything, and U.S. officials were determined to catch up.
That determination, coupled with a charismatic president who outlined a vision that included the U.S. landing a man on the moon within a decade, did more for science and math than just about anything else. Every third kid wanted to be an astronaut or some kind of NASA scientist in the early 1960s. Being smart was suddenly cool.
I don’t deny that years of science fiction in movies, books and comic books played their part in defining space as the last frontier and romanticizing space travel. But think about what a nationwide call for scientists and mathematicians to work on the biggest problems of our time — curing cancer, birth defects, defeating poverty — and some way to make doing this work be the one of the coolest work you could pursue.
And if parents took as much time exposing their very young children to basic scientific principles and fundamental math facts as they do in reading stories and encouraging them to play sports, we’d be all set.
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