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That's interesting. A professor at Berkeley told me once that Berkeley Engineering, along with a bunch of other universities, once threatened to withdraw from
by geebee 10y ago
That's interesting. A professor at Berkeley told me once that Berkeley Engineering, along with a bunch of other universities, once threatened to withdraw from ABET, largely because they felt that the requirements were getting so heavy that students were no longer able to remain well-rounded. There is also some support for making Engineering more of a 5-year or graduate program. Sounds like that wouldn't have worked for you because of scholarship requirements, but at UCSD, many students who had the choice simply took 5 years to graduate in Engineering. It is truly difficult to manage the rigor of these classes while giving proper time to general requirements.
On a related note, what you've described in terms of graduate preparation is also a serious problem for domestic (US) students. I think there is merit to the more generalized approach to undergraduate education in the US, but we specialize very late in the US compared to other educational systems.
This becomes a problem when combined with the high attrition rates in PhD programs. When I enrolled in a PhD program at Berkeley, I noticed that the coursework seemed like review for many of my fellow students who had degrees from overseas. Some would chalk this up to superior mathematics education outside the US, but I do think that the late specialization plays a big role here as well. While I was taking those classes in literature, theater, arts, history, and so forth, my graduate classmates were specializing in mathematical optimization and stochastic processes much earlier, and in much greater depth.
I don't think that this would be an issue if attrition rates weren't so high, but PhD programs in STEM fields typically have attrition rates between 35%-50%. If you aren't ready to hit the ground running, odds are very good you won't survive the first two years. This isn't an issue in graduate programs in medicine and law in the US, which don't expect undergraduate specialization (and, at the elite level, have vanishingly low attrition rates anyway, typically below one half of one percent). Nobody is expected to study law prior to law school or medicine prior to medical school, and the overwhelming majority of students who start elite programs in these fields do finish (again, 99.5% or more typically do).
Unfortunately, the result is what the RAND institute already identified - top US students behave rationally by avoiding PhD programs in the sciences in favor of professional degrees in law, medicine, dentistry, etc. This is only one factor, but I do think the situation you faced - less specialization at the undergraduate level - also plays a role here.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago>Sounds like that wouldn't have worked for you because of scholarship requirements, but at UCSD, many students who had the choice simply took 5 years to graduate in Engineering. It is truly difficult to manage the rigor of these classes while giving proper time to general requirements. That's exactly what a lot of my peers did. It's what I should have done, if not for the money. >Unfortunately, the result is what the RAND institute already identified - top US students behave rationally by avoiding PhD programs in the sciences in favor of professional degrees in law, medicine, dentistry, etc. This is only one factor, but I do think the situation you faced - less specialization at the undergraduate level - also plays a role here. I think the financial factor at the undergraduate level is just as strong. If it takes five years, or an inferior curriculum, to finish a degree in the sciences, and students have to pay large sums for each semester (and often face "bonus charges" from loss of financial aid after finishing four years without having completed a degree program), then as it occurred to me when summing up: we are paying people not to study science, and penalizing them when they try anyway.
- geebee 10y agoAnother interesting factor just occurred to me, that supports what you've said here - at UCSD, by the time you'd done your two year undergraduate survey and year of upper division regional focus through the history department, you were only six courses away from a history major. So yeah, if you were limited to four years, the system definitely pushed you away from science or math or engineering. It's not just the rigor, it's that you can apply general ed requirements to a major - and if those requirements are much more substantial in the humanities, then absolutely, that would deter people from majoring in the sciences. If undergrad general requirements included two years of science track calculus, a year of upper division science or engineering, and so forth, then it would be the humanities majors who would have to find some way to cram in all that extra coursework instead. The reason this drives me batty is that my elected officials (and silicon valley execs) constantly talk about a terrible "shortage" of STEM students, but our universities really do an amazing job driving people away from these fields, and it's not just the rigor of these topics, it's structural. I hadn't thought of it this way before, but yeah, our undergraduate general ed requirements, while worthy in terms of getting a well-rounded education, probably do increase the attrition rates from science programs (and, because they reduce the amount of undergraduate specialization in math and science, may also increase the attrition rates from graduate STEM programs). Damn. Quite an accomplishment for universities in a nation that constantly frets about a "shortage" of students going into STEM.