This study investigates the cause of a nearly twenty-five year decline in the percentage of U.S. born undergraduates earning engineering degrees. This dramatic decline has occurred despite incredibly high pay and low unemployment among engineers. On the surface this situation appears to violate the laws of supply and demand. A system dynamics model was created to represent the institutional forces and feedback loops present in the real-world system. This model internally represents the economic forces governing the choice to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, distinguishing features of quantitative knowledge that constrain its transmission, and factors determining the quality of STEM education in our schools. It is shown that high industry pay for STEM workers and low pay for STEM teachers can cause long-term self perpetuating labor shortages. The fact that mathematics performance has strong dependencies on past-knowledge exacerbates the situation. Policy proposals are simulated to test their ability to positively influence the system. The model is shown to exhibit “tipping point” behavior. Small reforms will have negligible impact while significant reforms could make the system move into a fundamentally better pattern of behavior, but only after considerable delays.

This is the whole item.

Date created

• 2009 July 26-2009 July 30

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
  Contact Us for questions or additional rights.

ITEM CONTEXT

Part of

4818cb531cdd68d6ec6af3f291216fc7

Scope and Contents

Part of

b3584c6b53c3f58e0202549d7d851f84

Scope and Contents

Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

Scope and Contents

Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

Scope and Contents

Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives