Educating Future Scientists and Engineers

Posted on December 21, 2008  Comments (1)

Texas in danger of losing global race

American demand for scientists and engineers is expected to grow four times faster than all other professions over the next decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet today, only 5 percent of U.S. college undergraduates earn degrees in science and engineering, whereas in China, 42 percent of students do.
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Not only are highly qualified Texas science and math teachers in short supply today, but we’re losing literally thousands each year. In 2007 alone, approximately 4,000 math and science teachers left Texas classrooms, costing our state an estimated $27 million to replace them.

Fortunately, there are programs already proven successful in preventing the loss of highly qualified math and science teachers, such as UTeach, a teacher training and support program launched at The University of Texas at Austin in 1997.
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The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas — made up of Texas’ Nobel Laureates and National Academies members — has proposed four practical, actionable recommendations for state leaders to adopt, putting Texas on the path to world-class math and science education for our children, and a prosperous future for our state.

Related: $12.5 Million NSF For Educating High School Engineering Teachers – The Importance of Science Education – FIRST Robotics in Minnesota – USA Teens 29th in Science

One Response to “Educating Future Scientists and Engineers”

  1. Mom of science nerd
    January 1st, 2009 @ 1:11 pm

    Speaking of education future scientists and engineers…I’m a typical mom to a science nerd kid, in total despair over the state of the science education. My son is 7 years old and in a private school with a minimal science curriculum, so we bring home broken printers and vacuum cleaners for him to take apart, do Lego Mindstorm programmable robots, call up my physicist father to explain antimatter, bought him a drafting kit for drawing his creations, go to radio shack to buy parts to build them…this is a kid with a 99+ percentile IQ and I’m basically homeschooling him in science because school has nothing to offer him. We’d even move to put him into a good science/engineering oriented elementary school but I can’t even find a listing of schools anywhere on the web. So frustrating…I feel like I’m holding part of our future in my hands and resorting to blogs in hopes of finding help…

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