January/February 2017

Communities: Education
Interest in STEM Careers Is One Thing; Preparation Another

The good news: Many high school students are interested in science, technology, engineering, and math careers. The bad news: Few are prepared for introductory college classes in those areas.

According to the latest annual STEM report from testing and research organization ACT, about half of US high school graduates who took the ACT test indicated an interest in STEM majors or careers.

But only about a quarter of the interested graduates met or surpassed the organization’s new STEM readiness benchmark, an indicator of whether a student is well prepared for first-year classes such as calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics. As The Condition of STEM 2016 notes, research indicates that students who met the benchmark were more likely to earn a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher, persist in a STEM major, and earn a STEM-related bachelor’s degree than those who failed to meet it.

The findings are virtually unchanged from 2015. “Our data continue to show a big disconnect between students’ interests and their actual preparation,” says ACT CEO Marten Roorda. “While the level of interest we are seeing in important STEM majors and careers is encouraging, the lack of readiness for STEM college coursework remains troubling.”

And the news is even worse for underserved learners with lack of access to high-quality educational and career planning opportunities and resources. Those students’ interest in STEM careers and majors was similarly high, but readiness was substantially lower. That was particularly true when a student met more than one of the three defining characteristics (racial or ethnic minority, low-income, and first-generation in college), with only 3% of students exhibiting all three of those characteristics meeting the STEM benchmark.

According to ACT, helping these students succeed in STEM subjects and fields requires a better understanding of the relationships among those characteristics and removal of the barriers that they create both alone and in combination with each other.

Another important data point from the report: the low rate of interest in teaching STEM subject areas. Although the Department of Education indicates that math and science are high-need fields with teacher shortages in many states, less than 1% of the two million 2016 graduates who took the ACT noted an interest in teaching in those fields.

There were a few bright spots in the findings, however. The average ACT science score has gone up over the last four years among students meeting the STEM benchmark (although the math scores have stayed flat). And students with an interest in STEM continue to show higher levels of college readiness than test-takers overall.

Access the full report at www.act.org.