America disrupted : dynamics of the technical capability crisis

This study investigates the cause of the nearly twenty-five year decline in the percentage of U.S. born undergraduates earning degrees in engineering. This dramatic decline has occurred despite incredibly high pay and low unemployment among individuals holding engineering degrees. On the surface, this situation appears to be violating the basic laws of labor-market 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 highly quantitative knowledge that constrain its transmission, and factors determining the overall quality of STEM education in our schools. This work presents a theory that high industry pay for STEM workers and low pay for STEM K-12 teachers directly cause long-term labor shortages that are self perpetuating. A scarcity of STEM workers will cause wages to rise as employers bid up the price of those skills in the short-term. Schools are left with fewer qualified and lower quality teachers. This makes labor shortages worse ten to twenty years down the road. The fact that mathematics knowledge is highly sequential with strong dependencies on past-performance exacerbates the situation. Students who fall behind in mathematics find it nearly impossible to catch up.

Department dc:contributor.department

System Design and Management Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Sturtevant, Daniel Joseph

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• J. Bradley Morrison.

• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47876

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47876