Recommendation

The administration should hold universities and colleges accountable for biasing admissions and grading against STEM students.

Details

For example, at UC Berkeley, only 4 percent of transfer applicants are accepted for computer science, compared with 53 percent for art history majors. At the University of Illinois, students need much higher SATs to be accepted if they intend to major in engineering than in social sciences. For most schools, the average grade for STEM subjects is lower than humanities and social science subjects. For the most part, colleges and universities do not care about expanding STEM graduation. And they will continue that way until the federal government makes them care. The next administration should direct NSF to deduct negative “points” from the scoring of research grant applications coming from colleges and universities that do not work to favor STEM enrollment and graduation.

Keep reading:

▪ Robert D. Atkinson et al., “A Techno-Economic Agenda for the Next Administration” (ITIF, June 2024), https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/10/a-techno-economic-agenda-for-the-next-administration/.