40% of STEM majors end up not obtaining a degree in their field

I read a little bit of this, didn't have time to read all of it, but I can't help to think that the fact that it's way easier to get a higher gpa with a non-stem major factors into a lot of these decisions... I mean, I understand that employers tend give stem majors maybe .2 more leeway for their gpa, but still... a lot of engineering schools curve to 2.8 and even then, that's the average of the students that actually stick around. So much weight is put on gpas. I've read from somebody on this site saying that they majored in a stem subject and realized that they messed up their chances at a great grad school because the gpa wasn't exactly spectacular... which is sad considering he stuck around in a tough field and is penalized when he probably could have majored in some bullshit field and gotten into a better grad school.

Interesting stuff. Check this out as well.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/college-majors-matter/

In the last 30 years, the number of kids attending college has increased 50%, but STEM majors remain flat. The number of visual and performing arts majors has doubled.

Its a shame too, since degrees are expensive, and careers in STEM will be big money makers since supply is still low and demand will continue to grow.

^agree completely.

It's truly a problem at the uni level. joke majors and classes get curved upwards, while math and science majors and courses typically have no curve (at least where i'm at). it incentivizes people to which to easier majors so that their options out of school are better (whether it be grad school or a job). but it's a hard problem to fix because at some level it's inate; of course some hippy who is teaching you about dildo carving in the 16th century will be more lenient than your no-bs eastern european CS prof.

The only C of any kind I ever got was in a hardware eng. course. My final GPA is about .2 lower because of the ComSci major.

I understand there needs to be some sort of quality control in engineering/sciences...you don't want the guy who barely pulled a 3.0 in Communications building a bridge, for instance. But by putting so much downward pressure on GPAs, kids are inclined to major in fluff, to the detriment of society.

You almost have to evaluate engineering GPAs on a different scale, especially at good schools. There needs to be an effort to boost the median GPA of STEM courses to near those of social sciences/humanities.

I understand why people don't want to major in STEM fields. The GPA factor is huge. Although every says how STEM majors get the jobs, but I now realize that's bullshit. You're no better off being a STEM major with a mediocre GPA than being a non-STEM major with a mediocre GPA.

Exactly^... If I'm going to college to get a job, I go for a non-stem major, if I'm going to college to learn stuff that I can't learn anywhere else (at least nearly as easily), I go with the stem major

Not trying to imply that everybody who's non-stem is doing it just to get a job, but if you had to choose between getting a job and learning and you were leaning more towards getting a job, non-stem would actually probably be the smarter move... unfortunately

You guys do realize if you want to learn anything, you can learn it on the side by sitting in a class and 'audit' it? (dunno if that's the term, but at some colleges, i'm pretty sure you can just go into the 300+ student classes and just sit and hang out and learn things with no pressure of acing the next exam." again...if that's not true, then i apologize.

Furthermore, we have access to the greatest tool in the world: the internet. Just go google shit and you can learn from there, of course that's not a formal education, but beggars can't be choosers.

Basically my point is, you can take a non-stem major and attain a really high GPA, while on the side attend those engineering classes to satiate your interests.

The main reasons for people leaving STEM: 1. It's difficult and requires a lot more time and effort. 2. People find out that the work isn't as interesting as they had always imagined 3. It doesn't pay THAT well.

There's a reason why such a high percentage of MIT engineering grads end up on Wall Street rather than doing engineering.

I'm double minoring in accounting and business with a STEM Major, my chem professor in gen chem said he designed the tests with an average gpa between 2.2 and 2.7 in mind, I worked my ass off for a B in gen chem In a class of 32 there were 3 As and 4 Bs. In comparison for business courses a pulse equals an A. The reality is that business is much easier, the salary not significantly different from what you'd get in many STEM majors coming out of college.

I think what alot of STEM majors find out later in scholl is that their job oppertunities are huge right out of school but then they significatly drop off once you are past the entry level. Jobs that follow the engineering path are structured to a rigid caste system. You can only move up after x years of service, and at every level there are y% less jobs. So the advancement is tied more to lucky timing then actuall performance. Sure 65 to 70k is good money for a non finance job but it sure as hell sucks when your friends who did not STEM majors are making a good 15k more a year then you are after 5 years.

Its not just the grading system that drives people away, it is also the general structure of the engineering industry.

Yea I've got to chuck alot of it up to the opportunities and structure for STEM people in this country. We seem to place a lot more value on financial serices for god knows what reason. Someone else said it, you can see t with tons of engineers and physics people coming over to try and make a killing on wall street, its a shame really

It's not a shame, it's called economics. Why would I want to work extreme hours at some engineering firm for $60-90K when I could make multiples of that on Wall Street? Besides, engineering is overrated anyway -- it doesn't add THAT much to the general economy or society. Most engineers are basically checking boxes.

Michio Kaku speaks first about the H1B visa and then MIT professor talks about why american students dont get through introductory courses. Pretty much because they are "flunk out" operations or weed out courses.

very relevant:

I started out as an idealistic chemical engineering major-> 6 weeks-> In business school filling out change of major form.

Petro engineers are an outlier, and the argument doesn't really make sense. No petro engineers make ten million a year. The lifestyle on Wall St. is a precursor to bigger and better things IF (and only if) you continue to make the cut. No other field outside pro sports and some entertainment "jobs" can claim that. Engineering isn't even on the map.

I still don't think it's a shame. If some engineer goes to Wall St., that just opens up another engineering job for someone from an emerging country (to move to the US, or increasingly. offshored work from the US). I haven't personally seen that many engineers on Wall St. anyway.

Anyway, I'm not really trying to defend Wall St. as the paragon of anything, but as someone with an engineering degree coming from a family of engineers, I can tell you that engineering is overrated in terms of payout. You work extremely hard in high school and college and get a low return on that time. Personally, I'm all about maximum return on invested time. There's this argument of "do what is best for society" but that doesn't hold much water in the real world, especially when society doesn't return the favor very well.

I think you guys are looking too deep into this.

Engineering and Math and Science majors are hard and leave little time for a social life.

Business majors are easy and is practically majoring in having a social life.

A huge number of kids go to school to party and figure since they were smart in HS they will be able to pass the hard classes and still party with their friends in easier majors. Once they fail their first Chem test they switch out of Chem/Bio/Any math harder then college algebra and join the rank and file in Marketing 101.

Always interesting to get people's perspective on this stuff. I'm graduating in December with a degree in Chemical Engineering and I have been looking for opportunities in finance (energy trading, IB, etc) for the sole reason of earnings potential down the road. Probably going to end up taking my engineering job offer though, work for a few years and go the entrepreneurship route.

People in STEM usually aren't particularly ambitious or creative. The least creative people I knew in college are in Ph. D. programs with plans on becoming professors because they fear the real world.

Also, an MIT graduate out of STEM will work with STEM graduates from lower-tier state schools. MIT electrical engineers don't make more than Tufts engineers or NJIT engineers. The same can not be said for my business/finance minded fellow students who are working at banks.

At the end of the day it comes down to simple economics. The cost-benefit of doing STEM is not very favorable. Why sit and do homework on friday nights and huge problem sets while the acting / writing kids are out partying? Why lug through huge amounts of work when you can only really earn $150,000 at best 20 years out of school while the guy who partied all day and worked his way up the corporate / finance ladder is making many multiples of that? I think STEM is a very venerable profession, and certainly more stable in some areas than careers in business / finance are, but quite honestly I think a lot of kids just don't see it being all that lucrative. Outside Bill Gates / Mark Zuckerberg (and they didn't even graduate and had only a year of college) / James Simons and a few others, the top end of the industry just isn't there. The lawyer / banker 30 years out of college can afford a few nice BMWs , a nice home, and a college education for his children. The engineer? Not so much....

There are a lot of STEM kids here, and I think its a noble profession, but the adventurous need not apply.

I have a buddy (Petroleum Engineer at XOM) that pulls in $150k and lives in Baytown, TX. He's single and lives like a Pharoah. He does this while pulling a strict 9-5. Doesn't have to worry about the Manhattan rat race.

Another issue is that the marginal increase in salary/increase in major difficulty is not as much as in fields like finance, for instance. Yeah, engineers have the highest average salaries coming out of college, but a lot of people would rather major in management and earn somewhat lower salary for doing coursework that is much less strenuous. Like previous posters have said, Wall Street professionals are not the only ones thinking about "exit opps". Engineering grads I know are already thinking about going to business school and switching to potentially more lucrative fields, evidently believing that they've milked their technical major for all the upper 5 figure and low 6 figure salaries they can manage. In my opinion, this trend isn't so much of a worry for kids going to top schools, but rather the ones going to crappy schools. Sociology majors from top schools can have the opportunity on Wall Street, sociology majors from Fresno State can't (as easily).

Most of you hit the nail on the head. The maximum salaries for 95% of Engineering Fields are going to max out around 150k. The other 5% of salaries are executive/high management level. However, you can live comfortably at 150k/yr, working 40hrs/week.

A lot of STEM grads, like myself, chose to do the coursework because they enjoy a challenge, and it will always be considered a legitimate degree. You can get a "business" degree from any establishment that calls itself a university. In terms of sacrifices, my social life wasn't nearly as colorful as an art history majors, however, with time management a STEM student can pull off a lot. Plus, to claim that successful bankers have a social lives is Iaughable. STEM majors can do anything with their degrees (in terms of analytically) by learning the industry, whereas the reverse of that isn't true.

It comes down to this: If you want that slow-paced, guarenteed 150k with your toyota camry driving out from the burbs for a mere 40 hrs/week, do engineering. If you want to make the big bucks and compete in a cuthroat environment, hit up vegas and hang wiith the big boys. In hindsight, probably should have just killed it with a finance degree as I'm still trying to make the transistion myself.

A lot of engineers here. I figured I'd chime as a former pre-med student for 3 years. This maybe extreme but one thing that I hated about pre-med was that your undergrad years you don't really learn much about medicine. I know one can do B.S in nursing but why not have a major that teaches the qualities to be a doctor. Have classes specifically tailored to becoming a doctor. I enjoyed my bio and chemistry classes but knowing physics was not necessary. Instead of having to volunteer at a hospital, make it a class or internship. I learned a lot more as a volunteer at a hospital about medicine and interacting with all kinds of people than I did in some of my pre-med courses.

The idea that engineers only work a 40 hour work week is a bit of a misconception. I interned at a large engineering company this past summer and probably averaged 45-50 hrs/week. The FT guys probably 50-60hrs per week.

jj1188:

Interesting article:

STEM

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

I entered college as a bio-engineering major with the intention of either going into engineering or med school. I switched to business admin after one semester. The sad part is that I now earn at least 2x what an engineer my age makes, and my lifetime earnings will probably be more than a doctor's and an engineer's combined, assuming that my comp keeps growing at its current rate.

Little aside on the whole premed thing. I have 4 friends that are either doctors or are currently in med school. None of them were premed. 2 were English majors that just took the classes required by medical schools and prepared for the MCAT and the other two have BAs in science type stuff. All about the GPA preservation.