Free Republic

U.S. innovation fuels our economic strength and is vital for our national security. Released last earlier this month, the National Science Board’s congressionally mandated State of U.S. Science and Engineering Indicators report shows that an accelerating science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) talent crisis is imperiling America’s economy and security.Let’s start with a bit of perspective. The U.S. STEM workforce is now one quarter of the total U.S. workforce – 38 million people at all degree levels who use STEM skills in their jobs, including 19 million skilled technical workers without a bachelor’s degree. That number will only rise as...

The declining interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields among women and girls is an ongoing discussion, and researchers have had knowledge of the gender gap for generations. The gap continues to exist today, with a 2023 Gallup survey finding that Gen Z men are nearly 20 percent more interested in pursuing STEM careers than Gen Z women. Why is the gender disparity in STEM interest and career choice so apparent? Studies suggest the lack of interest may not be the only problem. As of 2021, women make up a third of the STEM workforce in the U.S.,...

The University of North Carolina system oversees 16 state universities. Campus locations include Chapel Hill, Wilmington, Charlotte, Asheville, and Greensboro. UNC-Chapel Hill, originally called the University of North Carolina, was founded in 1789 and is one of the oldest public universities in the United States. According to Wikipedia statistics, some 245,000 students attended UNC system universities in 2021. One of the schools in the UNC system, UNC-Greensboro, is in the news these days because of a decision by Chancellor Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. to cut undergraduate and/or graduate programs in physics, mathematics, computer science, anthropology and nursing, citing “university direction,...

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. (Gray News) – A 14-year-old from Virginia was crowned America’s Top Young Scientist for inventing a soap that treats skin cancer. According to a news release, Heman Bekele, a ninth grader at W.T. Woodson High School in Annandale, won the 2023 3M Young Scientist Challenge last week. Heman developed Melanoma Treating Soap, a compound-based bar of soap designed to treat skin cancer. Over the next five years, he hopes to refine his innovation and create a nonprofit organization that will distribute this low-cost solution to communities in need. The final product came out to a shockingly cheap...

After a year of remote algebra, Diego Fonseca struggled with advanced algebra. Despite a week at George Mason University's Math Boot Camp, the would-be computer science major failed the math placement test to qualify for calculus four times. He didn't know the basics. Across the country, more students are placing into pre-college math, reports AP's Collin Binkley. "At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents." At George Mason in Northern Virginia, fewer would-be STEM majors are getting into calculus and more are failing, he writes. “We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and...

ZOMG! Have the brainiacs followed the yellowoke path to diversity, equity, and inclusion mediocrity?Caltech drops calculus, chemistry, physics class requirements if your school doesn't offer them, allowing you to take Khan Academy instead. Doesn't seem that crazy. Until you notice they also got rid of the SAT, so it's all about diversity over merit. https://t.co/NcCtGXSC2u— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 31, 2023Ehhhh…not quite yet. Jury’s out.What they’re planning sounds like a reasonable work-around for particularly gifted, but educationally deprived students who aspire to greater things. The young lady the reporter begins the story with went to a school that didn’t offer...

Some students wrote that their gender was “Apache attack helicopter” in response to a survey about “engineering culture,” which prompted accusations from the academics that “fascism” is on the rise in America. The researchers wrote a paper that described their experiences while working on a survey about LGBT students in STEM in the Summer 2023 edition of the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, housed out of Northwestern University. Titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interesting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences,” the paper reported on “individuals exercising discursive power in their...

Crucial science topics will no longer be taught to a large swath of Indian students, according to new government guidance. Most young learners in India will no longer be exposed to key science topics in school textbooks — unless they voluntarily major in science in higher classes. On June 1, India cut a slew of foundational topics from tenth grade textbooks, including the periodic table of elements, Darwin's theory of evolution, the Pythagorean theorem, sources of energy, sustainable management of natural resources and contribution of agriculture to the national economy, among others. A small section explaining Michael Faraday’s contributions to...

The medical school at the University of Buffalo earned high marks for its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion from the Association of American Medical Colleges and has incorporated aspects of critical race theory into its curriculum. The University of Buffalo's Jacobs School of Medicine's responses to the AAMC's diversity, inclusion, culture, and equity survey were obtained by the medical watchdog group Do No Harm ... The replies to the survey show the school achieved a score of 90%, indicating "substantial diversity, inclusion, culture, and equity efforts." The medical school affirmed that it ensured a "diverse" student body by implementing...

In September 2022, three researchers published the provocatively titled article, “Do Introductory Courses Disproportionately Drive Minoritized Students Out of STEM Pathways?” That article got loads of social media publicity for its conclusion that unequal withdrawal rates from STEM degree tracks are due to systemic racism. Co-authors Chad Topaz (“Data scientist/mathematician and activist” and co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity) and Nate Brown (“Math faculty like me can be a major barrier to diversifying STEM fields”) added to their scholarly research an opinion article that provides a guide for “How STEM Faculty Can Fight...

The increasing use of “diversity statements” in hiring and faculty evaluation has provoked considerable concern from free-speech advocates and defenders of academic freedom. An American Enterprise Institute study last November found that these statements were required for 19 percent of academic jobs and were especially common at prestigious universities. The danger of the trend is perhaps best illustrated by a University of California, Berkeley, search that filtered applications in the biological sciences for “contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion.” This eliminated 679 of 893 nominally qualified candidates on DEI criteria alone. Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression...

A new paper in PNAS Nexus, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that minority students who earn low grades in introductory science, technology, engineering, and math classes are less likely to earn degrees in these subjects than similar white students. There is a persistent disparity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education outcomes in the United States. In 2018, women earned 58% of bachelor's degrees, but only 36% of STEM bachelor's degrees. In 2017, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people comprised 30% of the U.S. population, and 34% of STEM-intending incoming college students, yet they earned only 18% of actual...

Are STEM students from the People's Republic of China jeopardizing our economic and national security...The number of students from the PRC at U.S. universities has skyrocketed in recent years to 317,299, representing more than one-third of all foreign students.

Intel has produced some unbelievable graphs in its time: projected Itanium market share, next node power consumption, multicore performance boosts. The graph the company showed at the latest VLSI Symposium, however, was a real shocker.While computer science course take-up had gone up by over 90 percent in the past 50 years, electrical engineering (EE) had declined by the same amount. The electronics graduate has become rarer than an Intel-based smartphone.Engineering degree courses are a lot of work across a lot of disciplines, with electronic engineering being particularly diverse. The theoretical side covers signal, information, semiconductor devices, optical and electromagnetic theory,...

Contrary to popular belief, the wars of tomorrow won’t be fought in the trenches. They’ll be fought in labs and lecture halls around the world. Powerful minds, rather than powerful machines, will prevail. And if powerful machines are to prevail, then powerful minds will be required to create such machines. China, the United States’ biggest rival, is busy creating a new generation of individuals with powerful minds. In fact, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a think tank dedicated to examining international security and emerging technologies, based at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, China is fast...

If you just narrowly focus on the media news, economics, human morality, and politics in general, then you may prematurely conclude that America is plunging into corrupt decadence, which also ended the Roman Empire, and that there is just too much wrong with America and no easy fix in sight. If you focus on the vanguard of developments in education, science, and technology, then you may conclude that there are a lot of good things going on and that there are a lot of right things going on that offer a lot of hope for many in the near foreseeable...

Teachers Unions Gave Guidance to CDC Director on School COVID Restrictions Judicial Watch Seeks Evidence in Lawsuit against U.S. Capitol Police for January 6 Videos U.S. Invests Millions to Bring Racial, Ethnic “Equity” to STEM Education Teachers Unions Gave Guidance to CDC Director on School COVID Restrictions The all too powerful teacher unions have been throwing wrenches into efforts to reopen schools amid the pandemic, making all manner of demands with little regard for the students or parents. Now we know how they have exerted their influence on public officials, particularly in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

With low labor-force participation, declining immigration levels, and the looming retirement of baby boomers on the horizon, the U.S. labor market is tightening and driving up wages. Over the next decade, the country will experience a labor shortage that will disproportionately affect some industries and professions, predicts an April 2016 report from The Conference Board. “We may see policy or other changes over the next 10 years that could influence us greatly,” says Phil Noftsinger, CPA, the creator of the CBIZ Small Business Employment Index (SBEI), which has tracked small companies’ hiring trends since 2009. He cites pushback on free...

We all remember the endless hours spent in our school classrooms learning about declensions, trigonometry or the French future perfect tense. But it turns out that adults really wish they had been taught practical life skills such as how to change a tire, write a CV or plaster over holes and cracks. Money worries headed up the top 20 list of what parents wish they had learned at school — namely how to save cash, advice on budgeting and how to invest. The survey of 1,000 parents revealed that how to cook everyday meals and how to start a business...

America's STEM classrooms are devolving — wasting valuable class time with toys, barely applicable coding games, and victim-mentality nonsense.If you ask any administrator about the future of education, he’ll likely mention the blending of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: STEM. Indeed, it’s so attractive to schools, billions of dollars are spent every year by corporations, startups, and the U.S. federal government in an 1850s-style “gold rush” of gadgetry and glittering lights. To stand out from the competition and get into classrooms, curriculum developers, policymakers, and advocacy groups have begun to scam the education market by forsaking common-sense STEM principles in...