Quote:First, the high dropout rates are not only far from surprising; indeed, they should be expected, and we should rejoice that someone in higher education is trying to maintain standards of academic excellence. Second, for well over half of a century, STEM advocates have cried “shortages of key personnel” and “crisis” when none really existed, showing a lamentable lack of scientific objectivity and intellectual honesty in the process. I fear this may be happening again.

For starters, engineering and physics courses are difficult—they take a lot of thinking, a lot of time to master concepts, occasionally a good bit of frustration, etc. No one (at least in my acquaintanceship in more than 50 years in higher education) has ever said that about courses given by, say, colleges of education.

About the time of Sputnik (1957), Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler and David Blank wrote a monograph for the National Bureau of Economic Research on The Demand and Supply of Scientific Personnel that dared to say that, based on wage data, there was no shortage of scientific personnel. The Princeton University Press on the urging of an engineering professor demanded the offending statement be removed, and Stigler and Blank refused, forcing them to produce the book elsewhere