A new report from the National Science Foundation says that people who earned bachelor’s degrees in science or engineering consider that training to be “important to their job,” even if they didn’t end up in a scientific or engineering field. The report, which contains a variety of supporting details broken out by scientific field, also says that, while about half of the B.A.’s go on to receive advanced degrees, less than 20 percent do so in science or engineering. The rest earn degrees in business, law, and medicine, among other fields.
The report’s findings dovetail with calls in several other recent reports for higher scientific and technical literacy among Americans, even those not bound for careers in scientific research (The Chronicle, October 13, 2005, and February 8, 2006).
