Pursuit of Higher Education in Science

Posted by Isra Anwar

June 15, 2014

Higher Education in Science

International competition is not the only area of concern for those who view American science education as troubled. In 1990, former University of California president and National Science Foundation director Richard Atkinson, in a well-publicized article in Sciencemagazine, projected “significant shortfalls” of scientists “for the next several decades” (Atkinson 1990, p. 425). This concern about recruitment of talented young adults to scientific education and careers has been echoed numerous times, leading to a popular view that there has been “a growing aversion of America’s top students—especially the native-born white males who once formed the backbone of the nation’s research and technical community—to enter scientific careers” (Benderly 2010). However, the claims of a current or impending shortage have also been challenged (Butz et al. 2003; Galama and Hosek 2008; Lowell and Salzman 2007).

To address these concerns, we document trends in American undergraduates’ pursuit of college-level scientific studies using longitudinal data on three cohorts of school-aged youth collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Each cohort was followed through high school graduation and for at least eight years thereafter, with several follow-up interviews during this period. The NCES datasets provide information about the high school graduating classes of 1972, 1982, and 1992.

We break down the process of degree attainment into two sequential steps: (1) attainment of a degree regardless of field and (2) attainment of college-level science education given a degree. In this way, we are able to distinguish trends in the pursuit of higher education more generally from trends in the pursuit of a science degree among all who receive a bachelor’s degree.

The first two rows of Table 1 show the unadjusted trends across the three cohorts in the likelihood of receiving a bachelor’s degree. The fraction of men receiving a bachelor’s degree rose modestly, from 27.8 percent in the 1972 cohort to 30.5 percent in the 1992 cohort. For women, the rise was more substantial, from 23.9 percent to 36.9 percent. Students with high mathematical aptitudes (defined as having scored in the top 25 percent on the mathematics test given in each survey) generally had high rates of completing a bachelor’s degree (above 50 percent). Men in this category increased their completion rates from 54.5 percent in 1972 to 64.3 percent in 1992, and women increased their rates by a larger margin, from 53.5 percent for the 1972 cohort to 75.9 percent for the 1992 cohort.

The next two rows present trends in the likelihood of receiving a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering (S/E) conditional on having received a bachelor’s degree in some field. For men, there is no clear trend: the fraction of college graduates receiving an S/E degree is between 28.3 percent and 31.4 percent. For women, there is an increase in the pursuit of science across cohorts, from 10.2 percent of college graduates in the 1972 cohort to 13–14 percent in the later cohorts. Even so, although women made slight inroads in scientific training over this period, male college graduates in the most recent cohorts were still more than twice as likely as their female counterparts to receive degrees in S/E fields.

There is little evidence that science suffers a “leaky pipeline” during the college years that steers students away from scientific fields and toward nonscientific studies. Using data from the same sources on 12th grade students’ expectations regarding their major in college, we find that, for the 1992 cohort, the share of actual S/E majors among bachelor’s degree recipients is slightly higher than the share of expected S/E degrees among youth expecting a bachelor’s degree. Among 12th grade boys expecting to attain a college degree, 27.5 percent expected it to be in science and 28.3 percent of male college graduates actually received a degree in science. For women the numbers are 10.5 percent and 13.2 percent, respectively. Thus actual science majors account for about the same share of graduates as expected science majors do of expected degree recipients.

These patterns of science study among young men and women also hold true among students with high mathematical aptitudes. The likelihood of high-achieving men receiving S/E degrees was 36.9 percent in the 1972 cohort and 38.8 percent in the 1992 cohort; for high-achieving women the likelihood rose from 15.7 percent for the 1972 cohort to 19.3 percent for the 1992 cohort.

We further disaggregate the trend data on S/E degrees by field and present them in the last panel of Table 1. There is evidence of declining pursuit of physical science degrees among both men and women. In the 1972 cohort, 7.4 percent of male college graduates and 3.6 percent of female college graduates received a degree in physical science, but the comparable percentages in the 1992 cohort were only 3.1 percent and 1.6 percent. Offsetting this decline was an increase during the same period in the fraction of bachelor’s degrees in engineering: among males it rose from 9.4 percent in the 1972 cohort to 15.6 percent and 12.4 percent in the later two cohorts, respectively, and for women the analogous numbers are 0.3 percent, 2.1 percent, and 1.7 percent. While engineering is the largest subfield of S/E majors for men, accounting for more than 10 percent of all male college graduates in the later two cohorts, it remains a far less common pursuit for women, never capturing more than 2.1 percent of a graduating cohort. Women’s gains in attaining S/E degrees were concentrated in life science, the most popular scientific field for women: the fraction of female college graduates that received a degree in life science rose from 4.6 percent in the 1972 cohort to 8.3 percent in the 1992 cohort. Pursuit of math degrees has always been less common among students of either sex, and the share of math degrees declined across the cohorts for women, while showing no clear trend for men.

Thank you.