Why U.S. Students Don’t Major in Science

July 18 (Bloomberg) -- In recent years, a lot of peoplehave been concerned about the relatively low numbers of sciencemajors among American college students. The percentage ofscience and engineering graduates in the U.S. has been far belowthat in China and Japan. On various math and science tests, theperformance of U.S. students has fallen below that of studentsin South Korea, Singapore, Japan, England, Finland, Israel,Australia and Russia.

This is a real problem, because science majors cancontribute to economic growth and because many of them end upwith especially good jobs after graduation. In the employmentmarket, students with degrees in STEM (science, technology,engineering and math) can be at a comparative advantage. Therelatively low number of American graduates in these fields hascreated what some people call “the STEM crisis.”