Spellings Commission Report Misses the Boat on
Undergraduate Science and Mathematics Education
Daniel F. Sullivan, President, St. Lawrence University
August, 2006

The federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education—the so-called “Spellings Commission” since convened by Margaret Spellings, our current Secretary of Education—has just released its report, meant to be a bold outline for how higher education in America should be reformed to meet the needs of students and the nation in the 21st century.  Astoundingly, because it misses critical positive trends that are revealed through careful analysis of undergraduate science, mathematics, and engineering baccalaureate degree production over the last two decades, the report fails to point the way to further improvement in these critical areas. 

Much of the report is critical of both the system of higher education in America and the performance of the thousands of individual institutions that make up this system:  “American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive.”  Its most important observations and recommendations about science, mathematics and engineering education follow:

• “We urge these institutions to develop new pedagogies, curricula and technologies to improve learning, particularly in the areas of science and mathematics literacy.”  P.8.
• “Reports from those working at the grassroots level in fields such as teacher preparation and math and science education indicate that the results of scholarly research on teaching and learning are rarely translated into practice.”  P. 16
• “Fewer American students are pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine and other disciplines critical to global competitiveness, national security and economic prosperity.”  P. 16
• “We recommend that America’s colleges and universities embrace a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement by developing new pedagogies, curricula and technologies to improve learning, particularly in the area of science and mathematical literacy.”  P. 24 (a repeat of the first bullet, above)
• “The United States must ensure the capacity of its universities to achieve global leadership in key strategic areas such as science, engineering, medicine, and other knowledge-intensive professions. . . . . . . . The Commission supports increasing federal and state investment in education and research in critical areas such as STEM fields . . . . . . ”  P. 25
• “In addition to these competitiveness trends, the racial and ethnic diversity of our citizens is also changing.  The U.S. must respond with public policies that encourage and channel capable students from diverse populations into . . . . the pipelines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).” P. 26
• “The Commission recommends that foreign students who graduate with an advanced STEM degree from a U.S. college or university should have an expedited path to an employer-sponsored green card and also be exempted from the numerical cap for green cards.”  P. 26

A seeming paradox in all of this, however, is that higher education leaders like me and large numbers of their faculties—especially faculty members and leaders of the nation’s selective liberal arts colleges—have been working on this problem with a high level of energy and increasing success over the past two decades.  We have been together in a national movement to attract and retain in science, technology, engineering and mathematics majors a growing number of students, especially women and members of underrepresented minorities.  We have reformed curricula and pedagogy to make them more hands-on, experiential, and research-rich; we have built and renovated science facilities so that they will support and accommodate the new paradigm for science and mathematics teaching and learning; we have dramatically expanded the opportunities undergraduate science and mathematics students have to do research with faculty members so that they catch the spirit of investigation and discovery and then want to continue on to science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers; and we have been engaged in increasingly sophisticated assessment to be sure that our reforms indeed have positive effects on learning and retention outcomes.

As I see the data, how bad or good the situation in baccalaureate production in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) looks depends on where you start your comparisons and what you compare.  Below in Table 1 are trends from 1985 by half-decade up through 2005 (See Table 1). 

Table 1

Number of Science Degrees and as a % of All Degrees
(including 1st and 2nd majors):

All Institutions:         STEM                                       Science Excl. Eng.

1985                            195,211           19.7%                          117,640           11.9%
1990                            160,764           15.1%                            96,343             9.0%
1995                            178,161           15.1%                          114,680             9.7%
2000                            191,634           15.2%                          132,140           10.5%
2005                            225,785           15.5%                          159,385           11.0%

% Change:     85-05:              16%                             85-05:              35%    
90-05:              65%                             90-05:              66%      
00-05:              13%                             00-05:              20%      

 

The data in Table 1 show that if you make the comparison from 1985 to 2005, the increase in total science, mathematics, engineering and technology undergraduate degrees is relatively modest:  16%.  The increase from 1990, however, is huge, because 1990 is a low point, almost looking like a crash from the 1985 point.  Not only did the total number of STEM baccalaureates decline, but the percentage STEM degrees were of the total also plunged from 1985 to 1990.  What happened between 1985 and 1990? 

Higher education leaders of my age recall with great clarity the huge decline in the 18-year old population that occurred in the 1980’s.  To counteract the potential college enrollment impact of that decline, colleges and universities, and all of America, really, worked to increase the college participation rate—the percentage of a cohort of high school graduates who went on to college—and attracted non-traditional students back to college or to college for the first time.  Indeed, we all did so well at this that the number of bachelors degrees earned overall in America never did decline, despite the huge decline in the college-age population.  It was important and very positive for the nation that college-going increased, but these new students, who in prior years wouldn’t have attended college, were far less well prepared to do science, mathematics and engineering in college and didn’t choose to major in one of those fields anywhere as frequently.  Hence the precipitous decline in the percentage of baccalaureates with STEM majors from 1985-90 that we see in Table 1.

The good news in this, however, is that the percentage of these now larger-than-they-otherwise-would-have-been cohorts of college students who chose to major in a STEM discipline began to increase from 1990 on.  If one excludes engineering from the data, as the right side of Table 1 does, the increase in the percentage majoring in STEM is substantial.  I can’t help noting here that the beginning and continuation of this recovery coincides in time with the origins and ongoing efforts of a number of key national efforts to reform undergraduate science and mathematics education—most important among them, in my view, Project Kaleidoscope, in which I have been involved in a leadership capacity since its inception in 1989 and in which the nation’s liberal arts colleges, including St. Lawrence in a major way, have played the leadership role. 

So the first major conclusion I want to highlight is this:  I believe the precipitous decline in the percentage of baccalaureate degrees in STEM in the U.S. was an artifact of a largely very positive response by colleges, universities, and the nation to the steep decline in traditional college-age students in the 1980’s.  The greater inclusiveness we accomplished together brought us students who, while obviously prepared well enough to earn a college degree, were not prepared well enough or motivated enough to major in a STEM discipline.  The recovery beginning after 1990 was substantial, and continues.  More students are majoring in STEM disciplines at American colleges and universities today, both in absolute and percentage terms, and I believe it is evidence of the success of the reform efforts that began at roughly the same time and continue today.

At the same time, it is absolutely clear that the improvements we have seen and are seeing would not have happened if many more women students had not been attracted to and chosen to major in a STEM discipline.  The figures are stunning, actually.  From 1985-2005 the number of male recipients of bachelors degrees at American colleges and universities increased 27%, while the number of female recipients increased 66%.  The number of males majoring in a STEM discipline increased only 4% over that 20 year span, while the number of females majoring in a STEM discipline increased 42%.  Excluding engineering, the increase was 27% for men and 48% for women.  While we are still a good distance from overall gender equality on the matter of majoring in a STEM discipline, the transformation has been huge.  Without such a transformation the overall picture would be bleak indeed.

Project Kaleidoscope began as an initiative among selective liberal arts colleges.  In the last decade it has broadened its focus and sought to help collegiate institutions of all kinds who want to improve undergraduate STEM education, but it is selective liberal arts colleges like St. Lawrence that remain at the very center of undergraduate science and mathematics education nationally.  In Table 2, below, we see that if you exclude engineering (because so few liberal arts colleges teach engineering), the liberal arts colleges are by far the most productive:  liberal arts colleges award a higher percentage of their bachelor’s degrees in natural science and mathematics than any other kind of American college or university.  In addition, liberal arts colleges and Doctoral/Research Extensive institutions have recovered the most in percentage terms since 1990. 

Table 2

STEM Degrees as a % of All Degrees (including 1st and 2nd majors)
By Institutional Type

  Doctoral/Research          Doctoral/Research              Liberal Arts
                                  Extensive                          Intensive                        Colleges
           
                        STEM Sci. Excl. Eng.   STEM  Sci. Excl. Eng.   STEM  Sci. Excl. Eng.

1985                25.2%              12.2%         21.8%       11.4%              19.2%        17.8%
1990                19.4%                9.3%        16.0%         8.2%              14.8%        13.9%      
1995                20.5%              10.8%        15.1%         8.5%              17.2%        16.3%
2000                20.5%              11.7%        15.6%         9.9%              17.4%        16.6%
2005                20.6%              12.0%        15.0%         9.7%              17.1%        16.3%

I credit Project Kaleidoscope and other reform initiatives, and the sheer determination of college and university science and mathematics faculty members and leaders, for these very positive results, which were totally missed by the Spellings Commission.  I am pleased that the Commission has recommended increased federal and state investment in undergraduate science and mathematics education.  What I fear is that the emphasis in the report on cost-cutting and efficiency—the report seemingly has a vision of higher education that is like a cafeteria, a “grab and go” system that is about as far removed from intentional, serious, dedicated, and demanding study as one can get—will cause policy-makers to miss the message of my analysis.  Our experience is that students are attracted and become committed to an undergraduate science and mathematics education that is hands-on, experiential, and research-rich.  This kind of science and mathematics education is efficient, because a far higher percentage of students who begin the pursuit of a science or mathematics baccalaureate degree stay through to the end, but it is also expensive because introducing undergraduates to the excitement of discovery by involving them in real science and mathematics inquiry cannot happen on the cheap. 

The devil, here, is in the details.  The Spellings Commission has not paid anywhere near enough attention to them.

All of the data reported in this paper are downloads from the federal IPEDS system provided to me by Ms. Christine Zimmerman, Director of Institutional Research at St. Lawrence.

In Table 2 we break out majoring in a STEM discipline for three different kinds of institutions:  Doctoral/Research Extensive institutions, Doctoral/Research Intensive Institutions, and Liberal Arts Colleges.  As a percentage of their bachelor’s degrees, these kinds of institutions are the most productive of STEM baccalaureates.