College STEM majors opting out for other degrees

When 19-year-old Lesley Wright entered her freshman year at the University of Florida -- Gainesville, she dreamed of being a pediatrician.

But she quickly realized she faced an uphill battle.

"Everyone already had volunteer positions at the local hospital by the time I got to UF, so there weren't any even left when I applied," Wright says. "Chemistry 1 is also a weed-out class, meaning it's extra difficult and meant to determine who is cut out for the pre-med life. I failed first semester."

Wright eventually dropped her health-science major in favor of a degree in public relations.

Wright's path highlights a larger trend of undergraduates who begin college with STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — majors and switch to liberal arts.

"According to our work and our research, we've seen that the interests in pursuing a science major has actually picked up in the last 10 years, and we're up there at the high point," says Mitchell Chang, a professor of higher education and organizational change at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The problem is the rates of persisting in STEM have not changed and improved. Forty percent of students are leaving the major within four, five years."

Chang believes that ultra-competitive fields — such as pre-med, engineering, and science — foster competitive "sink or swim" attitudes.

"We found that institutions that are highly selective are even more likely to have this 'sink or swim' culture," Chang says. "It's about weeding out the unqualified and letting the qualified rise to the top."

This STEM undergraduate culture, Chang says, ends up discouraging unprepared or struggling students, many of whom are minorities.

"If you go to a historically black college or university that graduates the largest numbers of black engineers and black science students, they have a very different culture there," adds Chang. "Their culture there is: 'We're going to support you as much as we can to get you to finish.' "

Clemencia Cosentino de Cohen, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research and STEM expert, agrees. College freshmen, after being big fish in a small high-school pond, often enter undergraduate school inadequately prepared for the rigors of STEM, and crash, failing introductory courses such as chemistry and calculus.

"You would think both men and women, by count alone, would have equal chances of being adequately and inadequately prepared," added Cosentino. But the research shows otherwise: Women are more likely to drop out.

"If women get a B, they think they're failing. A man gets a B, and he's happy. They say they're acing the class," Cosentino says. "Women who go into hard sciences, they're very driven, they're very high achieving, and if they're not performing at that very top level, they become discouraged, and they think that it is not for them."

Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, released a study in 2010 indicating that a "grade gap" exists between science and non-science courses. Grade inflation within the humanities leads to STEM attrition, with STEM students leaving for higher grades in other fields.

Foreign students appear more likely to stick with STEM majors, especially at the graduate level. They commit more readily to long hours in the laboratory and are less likely to neglect research for vacation or other commitments, Chang says.

Dean Gregory Crawford, a physics professor at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., counsels many STEM students wrestling with their majors. He notices many undergraduates drop STEM because of weakness in introductory mathematics or chemistry.

"When speaking with a student on the fence, … thinking about leaving STEM, I often have the conversation about the opportunity cost of leaving," Crawford says. "The opportunity is all the options afforded a science or engineering graduate — industry, start your own company, teach, go to graduate school, attend business school, pursue law school, or attend medical school.

Not many other majors outside of STEM can provide a student with so many options."

STEM majors appear to have more job opportunities post-college. Some of the hottest fields in terms of salary — such as chemical or petroleum engineering —are only available to STEM majors. "They will be swooped up into six-figure jobs," Chang says. "These areas are dominated mostly by men."

Wright, however, never regrets her decision to switch to public relations. "For public relations, pay is important and can be low to begin with, but I honestly feel like my passion is reignited, and with that, I can go as far as I want with it," she says. "I wanted to switch to a major I both enjoyed and excelled at."

Cara Newlon is a senior at Brown University.