From the latest issue of the American Economic Review: University Differences in the Graduation of Minorities in STEM Fields: Evidence from California We examine differences in minority science graduation rates among University of California campuses when racial preferences were in place. Less prepared minorities at higher ranked campuses had lower persistence rates in science and took longer to...
Studying STEM turns you into an Islamic terrorist
Gambetta and Hertog painstakingly gather together data on individuals belonging to a variety of terrorist groups in the Muslim world. Where they are able to get the data, it displays a compelling pattern – engineers are much more prone to become members of violent terrorist organizations. More than twice as many members of violent Islamist organizations have engineering degrees as have degrees in...
Is there a shortage of STEM workers?
Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times recently reported on the much-talked-about shortage of STEM workers, or workers in fields that predominantly deal with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). He notes that many studies indicate that the shortage of STEM workers is imagined. He also discovered that many of the companies that complain about their inability to find STEM...
Zakaria on the bullshit of STEM
In truth, though, the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that...