The year 2020 should have been enough to convince Florida’s policy-makers that providing students with opportunities to pursue STEM careers must be a high priority for the state’s educational system.
The development of the mRNA technology powering the COVID vaccines that Pfizer and Moderna are delivering to millions of people this month (and that will be delivered to hundreds of millions more in 2021) required collaborations between biological scientists and engineers. Engineers are addressing the problems of producing and delivering those hundreds of millions of doses around the world.
Meanwhile, the era of practical quantum computing – the next industrial revolution – is bearing down on the world. Physicists, engineers and computer scientists are all involved in the work to bring the promise of quantum computing to fruition.
The Zoom conferencing platform, run by an army of engineers and computer scientists, has changed the way America meets.
Those are just a few of the more visible examples of how the role of science and technology has grown in our lives in 2020. And they point the way to the opportunities that may be open to Florida’s students in the future, if only we prepare them properly for those opportunities. That preparation must begin long before these students set foot on a college campus for the first time.
Unfortunately, Florida has not done a good job preparing a broad range of students for such careers in the past. In 2019, Florida was ranked 39th among the states in the percentage of its employed workforce that was working in science and engineering occupations (according to the National Science Foundation). In 2018, the state ranked 37th in the number of bachelors’ degrees in science and engineering conferred per 1,000 18-24 year-olds (once again, according to the National Science Foundation). So from a STEM point of view, Florida’s workforce is relatively weak, and its young people aren’t any stronger in this regard than older workers.
These problems appear at the pre-college level, too. In fall of 2019, the rate at which students in Florida’s public high schools enrolled in calculus classes was 35% below the national rate. In physics, that deficit was 55% – that is, the state’s public high school students enrolled in physics less than half as often as students around the nation do. Florida’s public high school students were even behind the nation in chemistry, enrolling in chemistry at a rate that was 15% below the national rate (national rates from NCES, Florida rates from FLDOE).
Even in Florida’s weak STEM education ecosystem, Black students get the worst of it. Even though 22% of the state’s public K-12 students are Black, during the 2018-19 academic year Black students were awarded only 6.4% of the engineering bachelors’ degrees, 3.6% of the physics bachelors’ degrees and 8.0% of the computer science bachelors’ degrees awarded by Florida’s State University System (from IPEDS).
Now Florida’s institutions of public education are facing significant budget cuts at the same time that the needs for remediation and mental health services are increasing dramatically in both the K-12 schools and postsecondary institutions because of the impacts of the pandemic on students. Will resources be taken out of the advanced math and science courses high school students need to prepare properly for college STEM majors? Will Black students be even more neglected than they already were? The answers to those questions will be determined by leaders at the state, district and school levels in the coming months.
Bridge to Tomorrow 