The worst possible way to push kids into studying science, math and engineering
A 1961 reform doubled the number of Italian students graduating with STEM degrees.
It’s an old debate in education: what skills should we be teaching students? In some circles, it’s not a debate at all; President Obama has perennially championed science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) as key fields for the economic success and competitiveness of the economy. This, too, is an old faith, one that dates to the Sputnik anxieties of the Cold War.
The tech industry, of course, is a huge booster of STEM education efforts. By their account, the nation suffers from a dire drought of technical workers, and in addition to training more at home, we should also lift the caps on importing engineers from China and India. A Brookings report from July found that openings for STEM jobs indeed seem harder to fill. The postings stay up for longer, especially those that call for specialized programming knowledge.
Since there appears to be a shortage of tech workers, what sort of market failures or policies are to blame? And how can we go about fixing them?
These days, for instance, it’s recognized that lack of opportunity holds back many students who might thrive in STEM occupations. The Obama administration has pledged to recruit more low-income students into STEM fields, which would also help them gain access to the middle class.
For some illumination, it’s helpful to look at how other countries have responded to the pressure to techify their workforces. A new study from Stanford looks at what happened in Italy, when a 1961 law doubled the number of students in STEM majors graduating from the country’s universities.
Italy’s big push on STEM
In postwar Italy, the obstacles were — quite literally — a set of fascist rules left over from the Mussolini regime. At age 14, students enrolled in specialized high schools. Only those in college-prep programs had full access to college; students in technical or vocational schools were limited to specific, non-science majors. A 1961 reform law loosened some of these restrictions, and for the first time, students from technical high schools could go to college for a degree in fields like math, physics and engineering.
To study the consequences, Nicola Bianchi, an economics PhD student, collected transcripts from public high schools and universities in Milan between 1958 and 1968. (At the time, students who went to high school in Milan overwhelmingly chose to stay in Milan if they wanted to attend college, so Bianchi got a full portrait of their academic lives.) Bianchi then used tax data from 2005 to see what these same students were earning at the height of their careers.
The first surprise: College seemed to provide no financial benefit to the students from the technical schools, who typically came from less-educated families. These charts show what happened (Bianchi calls people from technical high schools “Type B” students):
After they were granted the opportunity to major in STEM fields, students from the technical high schools signed up for university courses in droves. It used to be that about 8.2 percent of them finished college. The lifted The worst possible way to push kids into studying science, math and engineering - The Washington Post: