I have no idea if the average school where I work is typical in this situation, but we have a requirement that writing has to be taught in every single class. This includes gym, math, foods, art, etc. Absolutely everything. Some teachers balk still, but the kids are used to it.
This doesn’t mean they write well.
My theory about the decline? Outside of school kids rarely write anything. They may text or post things, but they don’t really write. Going through my mom’s things after her death showed me (and my family) just how much things have changed over the years. She kept oodles of letters about all sorts of things from friends/family to companies contacted. I also had a lot from my youth stored in her house. I had totally forgotten mine were there! Some letters were from my grandfather to my dad, so it wasn’t just the ladies writing. My kids were amazed. Outside of thank you notes (or school) I don’t think they’ve written a letter in their life, much less multiple letters to family/friends. They text. Even e-mails are short.
School can only teach so much when real life does so little.
I think writing instruction is hit or miss in high school because you need teachers who can really teach writing. We have three in our large high school who are incredible writing teachers. Our S19 had one of them for AP Lang and then for an honors writing seminar senior year. The teacher was an English major at Michigan and then got his masters at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Man, can that guy teach writing. The other two teachers who are really good graduated from Northwestern for both undergrad and graduate school. These types of teachers are hard to find at the high school level.
I recognize that some studies have shown that, but they’re outliers—a meta-analysis has found that the overall data is pretty clear that colleges do successfully teach critical thinking. For evidence of this, see:
Huber, Christopher R. & Nathan R. Kuncel. 2016. Does College teach critical thinking? A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research 86. 431–468.
@homerdog
The question becomes even more complicated when you consider the number of college students that decide to change their major before even declaring. Even students who enter college with a clear plan, sometimes change their minds. Nearly 1/3 of entering students will change their major at least once.
This information is a few years old, but illustrates my point:
I can’t tell you how many times I have advisees that come in freshman year certain they want to major in “X,” and then a course or two in decide they want to do something else. Even if your D had a clear major in mind, there is no guarantee she would stick with it.
Our STEM S has benefited by many required writing classes. He was however able to write/analyze in areas of his interest. I think that’s a sound approach.
I am going to push back a little about biology majors making low salaries. While I do agree that this may happen (and often does)…it doesn’t have to.
My D was the dreaded biology major who just graduated in May and is earning close to $70,000 a year at her gap year position (option to stay but she won’t). Her friend was the dreaded sociology major…earning the same salary at the same gap year position. Yet another friend…the dreaded history major…yep…similar salary…same organization.
As with everything in life…it really just depends on a wide variety of factors.
She was offered a few other entry level jobs assisting in labs etc…salary in the low to mid 40’s.
It’s interesting but not surprising to me that math is the most frequently abandoned major. But I think the proposed solution in the linked article is a fool’s errand:
“You would never want to water down the rigor” of math and other fields, he said, but it does make sense to redesign the classes and improve the nature of instruction.
In my experience math is the subject where hard work has by far the least potential to match or beat natural ability, because a very talented student may be able to complete a problem set in 30 minutes that a less able student makes little progress with in 2 days. And that’s true even at the very highest level (look for example at the distribution of Putnam scores).
So a large number of students (particularly those in the bottom half of any math class) at any university are going to feel overmatched and discouraged. That’s just not the case in other science subjects, where hard work is required by all and helps to equalize the outcomes somewhat. And students coming in to university have learned that usual path to success in high school is to do the busy work (to get a high GPA), rather than just excel on tests (A 5 on Calc BC won’t get you very far if you got a B grade because you didn’t hand in your homework in class), so I suspect that college math is even more of a shock to their sensibilities.
Regarding writing instruction. I think a lot of it has to do with organization- teaching kids how to organize paragraphs, write a strong topic/thesis sentence, provide support for their argument, close with the last paragraph and cite sources properly. But many high school kids don’t get enough if any instruction with this or are limited to writing papers in only English classes, vs writing across disciplines. So many enter college, without strong writing fundamentals, and this includes bright, high stats kids:
I guess we were lucky that my D had excellent writing instruction in HS. She had the same teacher for H english 10 and AP language and comp. He coordinated with the AP Euro/APUSH teacher (which D also had both years) and they worked on the same concepts in all of their classes so there was a lot of reinforcement on what makes a good paper, across disciplines. She was able to place out of her written communication class in college but has taken a series of oral communication courses as well has her required honors seminar which is all interdisciplinary writing.
There are plenty of exceptions. I’m sure some biology majors pursue 6 figure IB jobs after graduating. However, those are the exceptions, not the rule. Every source I have ever seen suggests lower than average median salaries for biology majors who do not pursue graduate or professional degrees beyond a bachelor’s. This includes both selective and less selective colleges, and both start of career and mid career. Some example specific numbers from the CollegeScorecard database is below. This database uses tax reported earnings of federal FA recipients (either loan or grant). Biology majors appear to have approximately the same starting salary as English majors in this sample, both of which are well below average.
Median Recent Grad Earnings by Major, College Scorecard Database
CS: Ivy League = $110k, Other T20* = $104k, All Colleges = $66k
Engineering (all): Ivy League = $70k, Other T20* = $73k, All Colleges = $63k
All Majors: Ivy League = $60k, Other T20* $57k, All Colleges = $41k
Biology: Ivy League = $36k, Other T20* = $34k, All Colleges = $28k
English: Ivy League = $36k, Other T20* = $34k, All Colleges = $27k
*Top 20 USNWR Nationally Ranked Colleges that are not Ivies
The reasons for this trend are less obvious. For example, many major-related fields that biology majors pursue typically give the higher salary positions to persons with graduate degrees or many years of experience. New grads with biology BS degrees might instead get research/lab assistant positions that are associated with lower salaries. Surveys of recent grads often show this as the most commonly listed job title, such as the Cornell survey at https://as.cornell.edu/biological-sciences-major-minor . Another factor is biology majors who do not pursue graduate degrees are often weaker students within the biology pool, in many cases students who were not academically competitive for med school.
I also feel my kids got very good writing instruction in high school across subject areas.
We were lucky when we purchased our house in a strong unit school district. I do believe coordinated instruction from K through 12 can be a very good thing.
Surprised that writing is that bad in schools. Frankly, while I hated common core, they did get kids writing in 2nd and 3rd grade. They wrote across all subjects and all kids were better for it. When my kids jumped to private schools the writing was even more closely examined. Kids really have never had a class where writing wasn’t an important component.
I think it’s sad to think of a University moving kids through the pipeline without written expression being a large part of the grade. While, I’m not a huge fan of a large formal core curriculum, I do believe no one should graduate from college without a couple of writing intensive classes and the ability to write well.
I’m not. I worked in a finance job that was fairly high paying. Many of my co-workers were fairly well educated, bright, and often business/finance majors. Lots of strengths among this group but many expressed themselves poorly on paper, which thankfully wasn’t needed that often in their daily job duties. I was constantly surprised by the lack of writing skills many showed and quickly became the in house expert on grammar and proof reading. I attribute those skills to my private high school where we had to write a lot and the more writing intensive of my two college majors.
I don’t necessarily think sub-par writing ability is a new thing.
Not surprised that math majors get weeded out after S19’s experience. Math is HARD. I think he’s somewhat gifted in math but he’s met his match and more in college. He worked so hard that it was almost embarrassing, going to office hours every time and had private meetings with the prof as well. He set himself up to study with some of the super bright math kids so that helped too. Pulled out an A- in linear algebra as one of only two freshman in the class but it was stressful. If his prof hadn’t been extremely supportive and positive, he would be done with math already. But he’s moving on to the nutty Math Reasoning class that everyone says is the hardest one for the major. If he were at a big school, I’m sure he’d already be looking for another major.
I’m sure those who read my posts know I’m a huge fan of LACs and I am. For STEM kids, they don’t get weeded out or at least not nearly at the percentage they do at a giant school. And, for the humanities kids, they get to discuss and write and discuss even more in those small classes.
So I guess there are those who can regret their major but it seems to me that LACs give the best chance for kids to stick with what they want to study and they don’t have to compromise as often and go to a different major that is “easier”.
Not sure kids at many “giant schools” automatically get weeded out any more than at LAC type schools. . Some kids think they are cut out for math or engineering type degrees but struggle, regardless of college. There is, believe it or not, support at many big schools as well.
DC22 just finished Linear Algebra at UMich, so big school, but classes aren’t huge. Did fantastic, but math courses there seem to be set up for kids not to do very well. Average score is about a 70, but that’s for kids that don’t withdraw and remain until the brutal end. At least at UMich there’s support available, if needed, although it gets thinner when the math level goes up.
Linear algebra may come in different forms. A course meant for a more general audience of those who need to use the material for other things (e.g. engineering majors) may not be significantly harder than other frosh/soph math, although it is different from calculus (so some students have more difficulty because it is different).
But an upper level or honors lower level course primarily meant for math majors could emphasize proofs and logic and be significantly more difficult for many students. Reaching the proof and logic heavy math courses may be where prospective math majors are likely to self weed out.
It’s quite common for large intro college classes to be curved, so the average grade prior to the curve has little meaning. For example, while in college, I had an intro chem class in which median grades on exams were in the 30-35% range. The most common exam grade for that class was a A. Hardly anyone received exam grades below B-. A different professor who taught the class in the subsequent year had exams with median grades in the 80-90% range. Again the most common exam grade was an A, with very few below B-.