What makes kids want to become engineers?

December 7, 2011, 8:41 am

Many indicators are pointing to a critical shortage of engineers among the current high school generation. What’s the cause of all that? A study (PDF) by the nonprofit organization Change the Equation (with backing from Intel), focusing on 1004 students between the ages of 13 and 18 with computer access, suggests two things: a perception of difficulty coupled with an overall lack of knowledge about what engineering really is in the first place.

The Intel survey showed 63 percent of the students ages 13 to 18 have never considered the career despite having “generally positive opinions of engineers and engineering.” The perception that engineering is difficult also played a part in the lack of job consideration.

But the teens were especially interested when they learned about the potential for engineering to help others, such as saving the Chilean miners who were trapped in 2010, delivering clean water to communities in Third World countries.

Whole article here.

The students who are not interested in engineering are most likely to use the word “difficult” to describe engineering, which suggests that the perceived difficulty contributes to the lack of interest. But once those students were told about some specific ways engineering contributes to their lives and the well-being of the world, they still perceived engineering as difficult but then also indicated that there was now interest in the subject and an indication that learning more would change their minds about studying the subject.

And among the students who are considering engineering as a career, the words “difficult”, “collaborative”, “cool”, and “gratifying” are used with more or less equal frequency to describe engineering. Difficult and cool, not difficult but cool.

This goes back to what I said here about STEM subjects generally. It’s not the perceived difficulty of those subjects that drives students away or keeps them out. Students are willing to take on difficult tasks as long as they know there will be some payoff — for themselves or for the world, or both — at the end of it. Motivation and information about where students’ work is headed are the keys to getting and keeping them in the STEM subjects, it seems.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joodi/

This entry was posted in Engineering, Engineering education, High school, Student culture and tagged Change the Equation, Engineering, Intel, Motivation, STEM. Bookmark the permalink.

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sciencegrad

Thanks for this blog entry. I have enjoyed my limited experience in engineering outreach and am glad to find a study that shows that I’m probably not wasting my time!

In response to the difficulty hurdle, obviously we as a society need to change the common misconception that STEM = difficult and humanities = easy. There is no fundamental reason why one should be harder than the other. I believe the root of the misconception comes from the fact that grade inflation (or lowered standards, if you wish) appear to make the humanities much easier than engineering. This, I believe, comes from the more objective nature of STEM grading. For most engineering assignments, there is a single, objectively correct answer to the problem. But humanities assignments are often in the form of responses and essays. Even when asking a question that should leave little room for variability as to the validity of the answer, I think students perceive grading of written assignments as very subjective.

Grade inflation is easily noticed in many humanities courses because the assignments often have such low standards anymore that any half-decent argument with few grammatical errors will receive an A. This is simply the way it is and it isn’t questioned by students. But it is rarely the case that a STEM assignment has an A on the top of the paper, but has 40% of the problems incorrect. Obviously the grade inflation in STEM takes the form of end-of-course curving. I believe this is why students perceive engineering as more difficult than the humanities. After all, if these high school students have siblings in engineering programs, they likely hear constant comments about how they feel like they’re failing because they have an exam average of a 60%. Of course, they end with a solid B or higher (usually) in the end, but the relief at the end doesn’t come close to outweighing the impact of all of the complaints throughout the semesters.

Since grade inflation isn’t going to go away anytime soon, I suggest that engineering professors consider explaining what percentages generally constitute what final course grades, and that they state this to the students regularly. This way, the students will feel less stressed about failing and will probably complain about the difficulty a bit less. This may sound like I’m calling for professors to baby their students, but I am sincerely believe that this would make a noticeable impact in decreasing the perceived difficulty of engineering by high school students.

prof291

I believe there is also a perception that engineering and science faculty relish flunking students or abusing them for their lack of brilliance.

sciencegrad

Sometimes I have that perception.
graddirector

Perhaps that is the perception. However, in reality the biggest issue is that science is hard and unless one is totally a genius, requires alot of work/studying to succeed. I deal with students all of the time that “like” science, and never had to study to do well in it in high school. Suddenly that is different in college and these bright students do not have have the study skills to excel. In some cases they are motivated enough to figure out how to actually study. In others, they blame the science professor for being unreasonable and change majors to a humanities discipline where the perception (and perhaps the reality) is that they can keep their old high school study behavior and do fine. In some cases, I have seen that happen at the transition from college to grad school as well. The student is actually brilliant but is now among others who also know how to work hard and they again do not have the study skills to keep up.

In the last 15 years, I have only had one student who was so brilliant that everything in science was easy. The rest of my best students were the typically bright college student who were also extremely motivated to work hard.

At least in my institution, one of the biggest concerns of my colleagues is that students who are struggling tend to not come to class, not come to office hours and not come to review sessions. The vast majority of science faculty I know want students to do well and are generous of their time to ensure that. Unfortunately only a small proportion of our students take advantage of that help.

rhoccrim

Once again the fundamental issue of education is how student self motivation meets opportunity. Students object if you don’t teach the book, spoon feed them, have fireworks and dancing bears to keep them entertained, curve the final, give them a detailed list of the things they have to know for the test so they can ignore the rest, teach to the mid level competencies of the class……. It may be counterintuitive, but in an age where the last place team gets a trophy, maybe the courses need to be harder. I would rather have a motivated, hard working, damn the intensity - I will do whatever I can to master this, bridge engineer than one who barely squeaked by. It normally takes 5 years to get through engineering programs. You have to be committed from the start. Like med school or chemistry, the weeding out process serves its purpose. Teach to the top level, provide opportunities for those who seek help and keep the filters in place. Those with ability but no motivation won’t succeed in the profession.

http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines Robert Talbert

Good points.

Maybe what needs to happen is a shift in the way STEM subjects are assessed in the first place, with a radical de-emphasizing of “percentages” and point accumulation being the first step in that direction. Many innovative engineering courses are project-based and, while they maintain traditional grading schemes, the grades are based on things other than exams, quizzes, and the usual lot and more on things that — in keeping with the spirit of this study — have some direct connection to real-world engineering practice.

sciencegrad

I’ve always found project-based courses to be the most educational and, if they are designed properly, can help fill the internship gap some students may have if they choose to only do research in undergrad. My cynical side likes to say that projects are uncommon in undergrad because they are difficult to grade, but I assume most engineering professors would agree that they would be the ideal type of assignments when practical.

csgirl

Sorry, I teach in a field related to engineering (computer science), and I am going to have to disagree. Engineering and computer science are subjects that are difficult for many people. Every semester, I teach a section of introductory computer science, and watch a third of the class either drop or fail. It isn’t a question of changing my grading standards or methods to accommodate them – they cannot even complete even the most basic steps of a program. Many of them, for example, have trouble with the idea of doing steps in order. Meanwhile, another third of the class gets A’s without seeming to even try. There is something fundamentally different in the way these two sets of students are wired. I have seen this split for many years, and many of my colleagues have seen it too.

http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines Robert Talbert

The study points out (and I emphasized this above) that nobody seems to disagree about whether STEM subjects are difficult, or at least can be difficult for some. The question is what students do with that difficulty. This study is pointing out that students who are disinterested in STEM fields can become interested them despite the perceived difficulty if they are sufficiently motivated. I can give my own anecdotes of many students who struggle with calculus but who stick with it once they see what it’s for and what a person can do with it. The difficulty doesn’t go away for them — they just approach handling it differently.
paxton

Perhaps the article addresses the middle third of your students: the ones who are capable of doing the work but for whom it is not easy.

You also say the students are “wired” differently. What kind of information do you have about their backgrounds? Is it possible that the students who get it without trying have some programming background or friends/family in cs? Both could make a big difference in how well they do in an intro cs course.

unusedusername

Engineering takes a certain personality type: one that is comfortable dealing with impersonal systems. The bridge will stay up or fall down. Black or white. You can’t talk a bridge into staying up because you really need it to.

Giving people practical applications and case studies are good teaching methods, but telling people that they should be engineers so they can save the world is counterproductive. A touchy-feely type may decide to major in engineering to help give drinking water to the poor, and then realise that he doesn’t like to be spending his time doing math and making sure this metal piece fits into that one.

There will always be people who like building things. And the pay is pretty good, too. I would not worry too much.

cwm4c

I concur. This reminds me of the recent article about whether Math is too hard. My colleagues and I discussed this, with some students as well, and we feel the answer is, as you’ve stated, that a certain type of person is attracted to it. Many find math/science very straightforward and having little room for innovation, some even said it was too easy for that reason and they were not challenged. I found many of the students with high grades who have left for other disciplines feel that way.

academicentrepreneur

Another difference between engineering and the humanities is that the definitions of success and failure are much clearer in the former. You build a bridge; it collapses; it’s clearly failed. You can’t argue that it succeeded within a particular cultural context or redefine a collapse as a success.

That hard line requires a different way of thinking–not necessarily better, but different.
dxg197

The problem is the teachers. When you have K-12 teachers that graduated in the bottom 1/3 of their high school class and never considered becoming engineers themselves (for any number of reasons: lazy, not smart enough, etc…), why are you surprised that they can’t convince kids to do what they didn’t want to do. Solution, better teachers who are not afraid of solving difficult problems. Put former engineers in the classroom. Our teacher certification system makes it difficult for anybody who needs a mental challenge to become a teacher (our state requires a 3 credit hour class for teachers on how to use a graphing calculator!), that needs to change.
bscmath78

The article leads off with, “Many indicators are pointing to a critical shortage of engineers among the current high school generation.” What is the basis for this claim? Variations of which have surfaced periodically since WW II, typically followed by a glut, large-scale layoffs, unemployment and underemployment. But I have yet to see the average bottom-decile engineering grad being offered $100K to start. That would be a sign of an actual shortage, instead of the perceived shortage promoted by interests that would like to see 10 fully qualified (on 50 detailed metrics), top-decile engineers clamoring desperately to work for each $30K engineering job.

How stupid do you want engineering students to be? The article talks about an “overall lack of knowledge about what engineering really is,” so do high school students think that iPads, iPhones, Twitter, Facebook, bridges, clean water are brought by Santa or the Stork? If they are that ignorant, incurious, lazy and stupid, they shouldn’t be attempting engineering or any STEM project.

Does anyone show them the film of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge? It sure was “cool” to see Galloping Gertie twist, gyrate and dance in the wind. It seems incredible that it lasted that long under such punishment. Or do they know the role of engineers in signing the death warrants for the crews of Challenger and Columbia? Or how the engineers were experimenting at Chernobyl? How “cool” was that when the fallout spread? The kids had computer access but I doubt they know to look these things up or that many have someone to tell them about these things.

Engineering should be seen as a difficult and heavy responsibility with life and death consequences. Some engineers help decide how many will be killed, maimed or injured (see the Pinto). There is no need for more mediocre or poor engineers, especially when so many engineering positions have moved offshore, along with the factories or when there is an enormous global supply that is available for importation.
bscmath78

“The Intel survey showed 63 percent of the students ages 13 to 18 have never considered the career”

Given that a recent Georgetown study found only 4.4% of jobs were STEM jobs, it seems very odd that there should be ANY concern about this, if there was ANY concern about the fate of students. If you aren’t fascinated by Math, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science and maybe building robots and solar cars in your spare time, then why should you be considering engineering? It would be much better if 95% never consider engineering as a career. It seems best for students if no more than 5% of them go into any STEM subject. Please see my comments and the comments of others at:

http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/11/08/is-math-too-hard-or-just-not-interesting-enough/#comment-358706512

There is an impending shortage only if you want more slaves as MIT’s David Kaiser indirectly describes in “Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower, and the production of American physicists after World War II.”

“Piore had phrased things differently to an advisory group to the Pentagon: ‘Graduate students working part time are slave labor.’”

This was regarding physics grad students, but is more generally applicable across STEM.
bscmath78

It would be nice to know if one could predict to some degree what students have the best odds of becoming successful engineers. It is important to define “successful engineer” since most engineers don’t actually end up using much of their engineering training. Many go off in technical sales, technical marketing, management etc. Which is economically “successful” but not really engineering success, though one cannot downplay the likely benefit of having engineers getting MBAs when two MBA students (who were MIT engineering graduates) came up with VisiCalc, the killer app for the Apple II and the start of the spreadsheet revolution.

College admissions do not seem designed to admit potentially good engineers, especially the use of SAT/ACT. In a 1984 paper, SAT-V (SAT Verbal) was almost completely useless in predicting the GPA of the first 3 semesters of computer science majors at one university. SAT-M (SAT math) alone predicted 6.336% of GPA. SAT-M combined with SAT-V predicted 6.34% of GPA. High school Math, Science and English marks were over 3 times more predictive at 20.46%. Data from the paper “Predicting the Success of Freshmen in a Computer Science Major” is used as a case study in a Statistics textbook co-authored by a co-author (a Statistics professor) of the paper (Chapter 11 of at least some editions of “Introduction to the Practice of Statistics”, including the 2006 5th edition). Very similar case study analysis material appears here: http://bcs.whfreeman.com/tps3e/content/cat_060/Chapter%20B.pdf

The high school marks only predicted 20.46% of GPA for the first 3 semesters for computer science majors, which is only impressive when compared to SAT. The first 3 semesters may or may not be a proxy for 4th year, but it is important to know. It is also important to know what if anything GPA predicts in terms of engineer success or economic success. It has been observed previously that in general GPA tends not to be very predictive of real-life success, though manoflamancha has previously written that companies recruit from the top 20% of the engineering class and graddirector has said employers are after the top 5-10% (I think in a general STEM context).

Then there is Thomas Edison who had something like 3 months of formal education. His teacher thought he was “addled”. He was home-schooled by his month. He got on-the-job-training as a telegraph operator. He never went to college.

rogue_academic

“It would be nice to know if one could predict to some degree what
students have the best odds of becoming successful engineers.”

Oh, yes. This predictor is called aptitude. More precisely it is the willingness on a part of individual to spend long hours doing what he’s chosen simply because he derives pleasure from it. Can’t beat it with making STEM “no harder” than gender studies or communication, as some of the above commenters shamelessly suggested.

bscmath78

virtue_is_boring, you wrote, “This predictor is called aptitude” which things like SAT/ACT claim to measure, yet they do not as illustrated by the analysis I referred to.

You interpreted aptitude as willingness to, “spend long hours doing what he’s chosen simply because he derives pleasure from it”. But you see there are lots of people who do that without doing much of value. In fact, some of those people actually make the group less productive. Also, there are mercenary and glory-hound types who are able to perform well. That high school marks predict only 20.46%, seems to indicate that something is missing.

Then there was the ex-Brooklyn garage mechanic who told General MacArthur that army trucks could be cut in two, flown north over the mountains in army transport planes and then welded back together so that the Japanese could be surprised in northern New Guinea. There is a certain benefit to applying knowledge and creativity to solve new problems. This was a variation of what was done in his Brooklyn garage where they would take 2 half-wrecked cars to create one “good” car.

rogue_academic

SAT scores/school marks mean nothing when measuring aptitude. A 10000 hour rule for becoming a master in one’s field is a better mark, at an earlier stage that means working around the clock. Almost unheard of among high-school students nowadays with so many distractions like community service, strive for well-roundness, Facebook, etc.

5768

“…a perception of difficulty coupled with an overall lack of knowledge about what engineering really is in the first place”

Really? So people don’t play Chopin because they have a ‘perception of difficulty’? Endless hours of practice. When did that stop them? Engineering and science students have no corner on the hard work required for success and at least the former group has a stellar monetary payoff awaiting at the end of the tunnel (which alone must not be the sole factor in studying engineering–how many times I have seen it so, with the student burnout that ensues). A student who unrealistically dreams of performance is soon sobered by the challenges if ever admitted to a music program if they are all thumbs and find they have met their match. Clearly, they had an “overall lack of knowledge about what music really was in the first place” as far as what is required to be competitive in the performance arena let alone matriculate into a quality program.

Attitude and aptitude coupled with preparation, perseverance, and payoff are multiple factors at work. We tell ourselves nonsense when we speak of perceptions of difficulty as principle determinant of any discipline. And engineers tend best toward such monolithic answers to complicated problems. Thanks, Robert, for calling into question this misperception as widely promulgated as it is which circulates widely within the STEM community.

bscmath78

5768, your Chopin point is probably very valid for about 10% (?) of the population who relish a challenge, who relish mastery of certain types of things. But I would guess more kids relish the challenge of “Grand Theft Auto” and others of its ilk, rather than Chopin. A certain number of Chopin players are driven by Tiger Mom indoctrination or coercion.

Institutions have largely achieved their objective of creating a large oversupply of Chopin players resulting in very poor working conditions and pay for most classical musicians. Please see Blair Tindall’s memoir “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music.” At one point she realizes that all her music jobs have been obtained through sexual relationships with those with some degree of control over positions. The extent of the excess supply is indicated by her difficulties even when much of her potential competition was dead or dying of AIDS.

There are those who are willing to exploit the hard-work and dreams of the young, regardless of the dream. Students would be better off if fewer were exploited. The perverse thing is that the mediocre student is rejected by the classical music trap. They are the lucky ones. Attempting a classical music career is a trap for at least 99% of students. It is wrong to create similar traps for other subjects.

5768

As of 2008 there were 1,571,900 engineers in the United States with a projected employment in 2018 of 1,750,300 (Bureau of Labor Statistics), making the number of engineers in the US approximately 0.5 percent of the total population.

If it is 10% of the US population that relishes intellectual challenge they evidently are able to find it in something other than engineering.

bscmath78

5768, since I made the “10%(?)” in the context of Chopin, it was not intended to be a claim about engineers. Since in an earlier comment in this thread I had cited a claim of 4.4% of jobs being STEM jobs, according to a Georgetown study, your statistic does not seem out of line given that much of the total population doesn’t have a job (children, retirees, institutionalized, unemployed etc.).

I roughly doubled that STEM number to come up with 10%, though I didn’t restrict my earlier statement with “intellectual challenge”. I was including activities like fly fishing, forging traditional samurai swords, carpentry, baseball and Grand Theft Auto, which although they require brain activity, aren’t typically considered intellectual. Of course, in all those fields there are some who cheat or seek an unfair edge, just like some engineers and STEM employees, but I am not including them in my 10%, keeping in mind that the number was pulled out of the air in order to support your Chopin point.

http://DrThomasHo.com Dr. Thomas Ho

Have you seen innovations such as Ohio Northern’s engineering education program to step up advocacy of engineering:

http://www.onu.edu/academics/engineering/programs/engineering_education