Teaching Salaries: The Part Everyone Seems to Be Overlooking

For those who didn't know, I'm from Oklahoma City. Recently, there was a rather large protest at the OKC Capitol Building in response to budget cuts in the Education Budget. People were pretty upset because Oklahoma is 49th in the nation based on gross pay for its teachers and, while I don't really like that, I think it's worth noting a few things before we start foaming at the teeth:

1. Teachers are pretty much grossly underpaid across the country. Heck, unless you teach in Luxembourg*, the odds of you being paid anything close to the average cost of living is pretty slim.

2. Cost of living is actually what this is all about. And this is why. It's one thing to get paid $10,000USD every year as a salary and for your cost of living to be $15,000. You can make some cuts like paying for cable, or not eating out as much. It's an entirely different thing to be paid $10,000 every year and your costs be $50,000.

If you look at the distribution of teachers and their salaries across the United States, you can find some interesting things.

Things like this:

Fig 1. Teaching Salaries as a Percentage of Cost of Living by State

Oklahoma may be second-lowest when it comes to gross pay, but we're actually a lot better off than you'd think. We rank above 20% of the other states. Yeah, that's still a long ways to go, but think about this: teachers in New York are the highest grossing teachers in the country, coming in at an annual salary of just a hair over $75,000 per year. But they actually come in 7th when you compare their income to the cost of living in that state. That's barely in the top 15%

And Hawaii is actually the median (the 50% mark) income for teachers in the entire US. They make more than Oklahoma teachers do (around $54k per year, almost $10k more than teachers in my state), but the cost of living is so much higher in Hawaii that actually come in dead last. But even the teachers that are the best off in this country aren't very well off. Even in Michigan, the top state when ranked in this way, pays their teachers less than 65% of their cost of living. 

That's the real issue here. For me, it's not that teachers in my state are paid less than every state except South Dakota, it's that teachers in my country are never paid enough. 

And can we really pay teachers enough? Can anybody ever put a price on our futures? On the children we raise? 

And another thing. If the state and federal governments are so worried about funding, why wouldn't you want to keep paying teachers? If a government wants more money through income taxing, the best way to do that is to raise the average salary. While raising education funding would, technically, help that a bit with teacher salaries, it'd be pretty much negligible in the scheme of things. They key is that by giving a better education to the kids in our school systems now, you're equipping them to graduate, finish college, and pursue higher paying jobs. Do that across the country for every school and you'll get a massive jump in tax dollars without having to raise anybody's tax rates or even minimum wage. 

That's precisely why I will always support education funding and always oppose budget cuts to education. 

_____

EDIT: 

One of my good friends that is a local elementary music teacher informed me that teacher salary is only part of the issue, and that the 49th in the nation in based on spending per student. Though, teaching salaries are a small part of that. I also think it's worth adding in that even on the rally day, they made sure not too many people were gone so that the coverage in the schools was still there. Just a kind of awesome note. 

*in Luxembourg, teachers are paid pretty close to $100,000USD, which is actually right around the cost of living ($109k). 

Data: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.60.asp

http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/index.stm

Thoughts on the 5/20 Moore Tornado

As pretty much everybody with access to national news knows, there was a massive tornado that ripped through central Oklahoma recently resulting in the deaths of 21 people including 9 children at Plaza Towers Elementary. While there has been a lot of support and sympathy, I want to take a moment to address some of the issues I've seen pop up from other people and explain why, even with the rather ridiculous and extreme weather patterns we live with, this state really is a great place to live.

Let me preface this with a few things. I'm an Oklahoma native. While I grew up in the Northeast part of the state, I've been in the Oklahoma City area for about six years since I moved down here to attend college. So when I say that Oklahoma is the best place to live in the history of ever, I am a bit biased. Still, in an attempt to explain why people here are not insane for living here, and a bit out of a good, old fashioned desire to prove people wrong, here are my thoughts on some of the responses I've seen to the recent tornado in Newcastle, Moore, and Shawnee.

First, people saying that the reason they don't feel sorry for us is because we're basically asking for it by living here. 

I'm not sure why people feel like they need to feel sorry for us. We aren't soliciting their pity. Their pity isn't going to directly help us in any way, so most of us don't really care. My issue is with the idea that it's "our fault" for living here or that we were "asking for it" because this is such a tornado prone area. What is the most ironic to me is that most of this type of attitude is coming from areas like New England or the East Coast. Places that have their own natural disasters like hurricanes. When Sally caused so much destruction and damage in the Northeast, did anybody say that it was the fault of the people there because they live on a coastline? Or when Katrina effectively destroyed New Orleans, were the people there asking to lose everything when they decided to live in a hurricane prone location in a city that was built partially below sea level? Is it ever the public's fault when an earthquake hits in California? or a wildfire? or any natural disaster for that matter? Of course not. Nobody ever "asks for it" when a natural disaster hits. I don't understand why people blame others for something like this.

Now, if the people of central Oklahoma chose to live in this area and then take no precautions at all, I could see this point of view being partially justifiable. However, that is simply not the case. Let me give you some examples from my own life. Growing up, from the time I was in kindergarden, my school had fire drills twice a year like most other schools in the country. We also had tornado drills. Every school in Oklahoma does this for every grade. We leave the classrooms (they have windows and are often on outer walls that would be the first to turn to debris) and crouch down in a hallway on the first floor. We are literally educating our children about tornadoes from their first year of school.

Furthermore, the public sirens are tested every single Saturday at noon (provided there's not already a storm going on) to make sure they are working properly. And when I say every Saturday, I mean every single one. The siren tests went off earlier today while I was driving to go pick up some food for lunch. And they'll go off next Saturday too. This kind of frequency in testing would be over the top for almost any other kind of disaster. Other places test their sirens once a month or so, but Oklahoma takes tornadoes seriously and literally tests them once a week. Also, many of our public areas have designated tornado shelters. The shopping mall in my hometown has theirs clearly marked in the middle of the complex, and every shopping mall I've visited in Oklahoma City has them as well. We also have some of the most advanced weather tracking systems and best meteorologists in the country. When bad weather is coming in, we have Gary England (Oklahoma City's resident Weather Oracle). While he's one of the most authoritative figures on severe thunderstorms and tornados, the biggest reason he is so well respected in this area is because of how calm he stays during the storms. Gary England is able to give updates on the progress of a storm while keeping his voice at a level that would be more appropriate for crumpets and tea than telling people their lives are in danger. So when weather like the tornado on Monday come through, and Gary England's voice raises a bit, you pay attention and you do what the man says when he says it. Which is exactly what happened. That's a considerable part of why there were so few casualties. When Gary England says to get underground or out of the way, that's what people did.

This brings me to my next point: people wondering why there were "so many" casualties.

This issue is less frequent, and admittedly more prominent in the international community, but is still absurd.

Let's take a look at a few things real quick when it comes to tornado casualties. First, this list of the Top Ten Worst U.S. Tornados from The Weather Channel (go ahead, it's a quick read). You know what state doesn't show up on that list for the "Worst Tornados" ever? Oklahoma. Even though we have had some of the strongest twisters in history, including one that generated the highest recorded wind speed on the planet and literally redefined the scale we use to measure tornadoes, it didn't even make the list. Why? Because Oklahomans know what to do when a tornado hits the ground.

Let's take a quick look at the recent tornado and compare it to the very similar one that hit Joplin in 2011.

First, some similarities.
Both tornadoes were categorized as EF5 (the strongest possible rating on the Enhanced Fujita Scale)
Both tornadoes hit cities of approximately 55,000 people.
Both tornadoes grew to an excess of 1 mile wide at their peaks.
Both tornadoes affected heavily populated, residential areas.

But when it comes to reacting to storms, the people of Joplin** and the people of Moore are a bit different.
In Joplin, 158 people died. In Moore, 24 people died.

Why the difference? Because people here just know what to do. As mentioned before, children that are raised here are educated on how to respond to tornados. When people move here, there is a lot of education available for them as well. We have Gary England and some of the best meteorologists in the country that are able to give us almost twenty minutes of prep time. While I'm all for continuing to drive down the casualty rate on any natural disaster, I don't understand the attitude I've seen implying that twenty four casualties is unacceptable and that we are doing something wrong. The fact that people survived a tornado that literally cleaned buildings off their foundations is something that is amazing.

My final issue is people from out of the area suggesting that we are crazy for living here. 

This one is definitely the hardest for me to understand. Yes, we have some severe weather more frequently than other areas, but what people from outside the heartland don't seem to understand is this: we live here because we love here. There are some places I would never care to live because of the threats in the location, but I understand what it's like to love your home, and so I respect the decisions of people that live in areas I would not.

Still, people forget that Oklahoma is more than just bipolar weather. It's a community; the only part of us that is crazy is how much we take care of one another. When the tornado lifted, within minutes there were people headed to the area to volunteer for cleanup and rescue efforts. Virtually every volunteer in Moore on Monday evening put off eating dinner until after sundown because everybody wanted to make the most of the daylight that was left. The days following had such a surge of local people wanting to lend a hand that the Red Cross literally had to turn away two thousand volunteers because they couldn't handle that many people.

Local businesses like Cheasapeake Energy and Hobby Lobby, and local celebrities like Kevin Durant and Carrie Underwood made donations to the recovery efforts. Local country artists Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert organized a benefit concert that, after less than a week of advertising, sold out every ticket in the Chesapeake Energy Arena in thirty seconds. Not minutes. SECONDS.

Within the week, the mail was being delivered to the people in the area again. By a mail lady that delivered on foot to each home.

I guess that people outside the area just don't understand the kind of strength of those that live here. That's not necessarily anyone's fault, but it does seem that way. When Hurricane Sandy caused so much destruction in the Northeast, you know what the warmest, fuzziest, increase-faith-in-humanity action was that I saw? Someone that had power letting people charge up their phones on an extension cord. Here, we skip past that. We let our families know we were safe and then got our hands and knees dirty helping each other recover any remaining belongings from  the wreckage left behind. We didn't just sit back and let the National Guard and police do the work; we jumped in right beside them to lend a hand. News reporters would stop interviews to help move rubble to recover items, and in one case, a pet dog that was stuck under a board of compressed wood.

With a community here like that, I don't think we're crazy for living here. I think you'd be crazy to not want to live with these kinds of people.

* Let me interject a quick disclaimer here: I'm not implying that people on the East Coast are worse about this than other people, it's just what I am able to see from my social network. I don't want to point the finger at a group of people and cast judgment on them, but I'm also wary of making broader generalizations about Americans based on what I have seen myself in that one group of people. 

** Please know that I am not degrading or berating the people of Joplin. I have visited that city numerous times on family vacations and the people there are wonderful and I love them. I'm only saying here that they simply lack the storm experience that we do; it is something that is not their fault, but hurt them severely in 2011. 

Bridging the gap: What I thought I wanted vs. What I really wanted

Throughout my life, I have made it my goal to be a consistent person and, for the most part, I'd say that I've achieved that goal. Many of my thoughts and opinions in life have remained constant, albeit most of them have deepened with maturity, and my personality traits have remained constant. As an adult, I still read with the same voracity that I had when I was in elementary school, I still see the world with the same wonder and awe, I still doodle the living daylights out of any sheet of paper that is suitable for drawing on, I love everybody, and once I love you, to put it frankly, there's not a damn thing you can do about it. (As one of my home church members put it when I was 7, "forgiveness is just in [my] bones")

However, there is one part of my life I've been very wishy-washy on: what I want to do with my life. When I was small, I went through the "obligatory-veterinarian-phase,"and was often told that I should teach, although I decided I would never want to do that. I eventually settled on art when people discovered I was decent at rendering objects (and thus encouraged me to do it) and I stuck with that until high school. Throughout high school, I studied art alongside my traditional classes like AP math and Physics. During my junior year of high school, a group of faculty from my local trade school visited my pre-calculus class to see about interest in a pre-engineering course. I'd enjoyed my math classes, and also my physics class, so I signed up. The next year (my senior year), I was in the class, and preparing for a competition in a major, worldwide robotics tournament. Doing well enough in that competition made me change from wanting to study art, to wanting to study engineering.

I thought that engineering offered me almost everything that I wanted to do. I admit that I did struggle through my classes sometimes, but I made it through. I kept telling myself that eventually I would find a job that would let me work on planes (I've had a long standing love of aircraft because dad was a pilot), and that I could channel my creativity (something I loved) into engineering (something else I loved).

But it's not that easy now. I've discovered that I absolutely adore the BRIDGE office at my alma mater. (Small aside - for those who don't know, BRIDGE is a program for students that want to go to college but have an ACT score (or equivalent SAT score) of 18 or below.) I've worked one-on-one with several students that nobody, except the BRIDGE program, had any faith in. I've watched them glare at me when I take away their calculators, only to watch them ace their math finals at the end of the semester. I've seen some students write papers with so many comma splices and nonexistent words that you'd think an elementary student wrote the paper only to turn into some of the most eloquent and well-written students on campus. I've seen them go from mimicking the lack of faith others displayed for them to deciding to take up the reins and gallop through their studies.

In short, I've discovered that I want to teach. Don't get me wrong - I'd still love to get an engineering position at Tinker AFB, but now, instead of wanting to have a glittering career there until I retire and travel the world, I want to have a glittering career so that I can come back to a university and teach. And then travel the world later. (And to any OC faculty reading this - I could be your first female engineering professor... sounds pretty awesome right? Eh?)

KONY 2012

Recently, the Invisible Children movement has been gaining momentum and attention across the United States. This attention has sparked a rather impressive response, but also, as with almost every large movement, it has garnered its fair share of criticism.

Among the major criticisms are issues with The Invisible Children's financial accounts, their methods of spending, and their suggested methods of ending Kony's reign of terror in central Africa.

While many critics of The Invisible Children have some valid concerns, there are a few things that I feel should be addressed.

First, I do think it would improve their image to allow for external auditing. However, I am not quite as opposed to using funds raised to keep their salaries - at least not on a philosophical level. This type of mission is something that takes up just as much time as a full-time job. Perhaps that means that they shouldn't be a non-profit organization, but I don't have a huge issue with people that work as much as these people do using some of the funds so that they can actually spend the time they need to on the work.

Second, I don't really find it too weird or uncalled for that they spend so much money on filmmaking. The people that started this are, first and foremost, filmmakers. Making a film was the entire reason the founders went to Uganda. Films are what they've marketed themselves with, so it's only natural that they would want to continue using what works (especially when it's also what they are familiar with.)

Last, and my personal biggest issue with many critics, I think it is foolish to pitch a fit about how The Invisible Children are petitioning for a military response. Kony has repeatedly been approached to find a peaceful way to end his war, but every time, he has only used the peace to "recruit" more children. I'm kind of convinced that there isn't a peaceful way to end the issue unless he dies and nobody steps up to take his place. Which is extremely unlikely. That's just how it is with psychopaths. They do not feel remorse for what they do. Combine that with someone that's narcissistic, and honestly think they deserve the power, and frankly, I would be very surprised if Kony ever surrendered. So, while there isn't a fiber in my being that would ever praise the idea of killing children, which is what would happen if military action is taken, I'm honestly not sure there is an alternative.

I know this sounds really pessimistic, but I can't help but see the children he currently has as lost causes. First, because if military action is taken, they will likely be killed; second, if we find him, offer the option of leaving to the children, he will likely kill any that try; and third, even if we could somehow save them, they will need excessive amounts of therapy to have a chance to function in society again, and even that isn't guaranteed to succeed.

At the risk of sounding heartless, this is what I would propose: organize an international manhunt through Uganda, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to work together and hunt this man down. I'd be entirely supportive of other countries offering manpower and resources to find him (assuming that the countries he operates in are accepting of the aid). After all, he is literally the most wanted man in the world. I know that it's likely that the children he has will die in the process, but I honestly don't see any way to save them. I suppose that if he is tracked down, that it's possible that the area could be flooded with troops that are trying to subdue him, but even then, some of the children will die. Besides, if some children are saved, they wouldn't really be kids; their childhood has been erased to the point that the resemblance to children is only physical. Instead, I believe that the focus should be on ending his reign of power so that more children are not lost to his cause.

That said, and at the risk of appearing to contradict myself, I don't really see how this problem is an international problem. As in, politically, this is a problem within several African countries that, at least to my knowledge, haven't really asked for international help. Asking for international help isn't hard, so I have to wonder if the governments of central Africa really care about solving the problem.

Les Miserables and Love

No deep insights from me today. Just an excerpt from Les Miserables. This one is the love letter that Marius leaves for Cosette.

The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God - that is love.

Love is the salute of the angels to the stars.

How sad the heart is when the rendered sad by love!

How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world. How true it is that the beloved becomes God. It is understandable that God would grow jealous if the Father of All Things had not so evidently created all things for the soul, and the soul for love.

It needs no more than a smile, glimpsed beneath a hat of white crepe adorned with lilac, for the soul to be transported into the palace of dreams.

God is behind all things, but all things conceal God. Objects are black and human creatures are opaque. To love a person is to render them transparent.

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars - all the beauties of creating. And why should they not? All the works of God are designed to serve love, and love has the power to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh, spring, you are a letter which I send!

The future belongs far more to the heart than to the mind. Love is the one thing that can fill and fulfill eternity. The infinite calls for the inexhaustible.

Love partakes of the soul, being of the same nature. Like the soul, it is the divine spark, incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is the fiery particle that dwells in us, immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine and nothing extinguish. We feel its glow in the marrow of our bones and see its brightness reaching to the depths of heaven.

Oh, love, adoration, the rapture of two spirits which know each other, two hearts which are exchanged, two looks which interpenetrate! You will come to me, will you not, this happiness! To walk together in solitude! Blessed and radiant days! I have sometimes thought that now and then moments may be detached from the lives of angels to enrich the lives of men.

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love except to make it unending. After a lifetime of love, an eternity of love is indeed an increase; but to heighten the intensity, the ineffable happiness that love confers upon the spirit in this world, is an impossibility, even for God. God is the wholeness of heaven; love is the wholeness of man.

We look up at a star for two reasons, because it shines and because it is impenetrable. But we have at our side a gentler radiance and greater mystery, that of women

Each of us, whoever he may be, has his breathing self. Lacking this, or lacking air, we suffocate. And then we die. To die for lack of love is terrible; the asphyxia of the soul.

When love has melted and merged two persons in a sublime and sacred unity, the secret of life has been revealed to them: they are no longer anything but the two aspects of a single destiny, the wings of a single spirit. To love is to soar!

On the day when a woman in passing sheds light for you as she goes, you are lost, you are in love. There is only one thing to be done, to fix your thoughts upon her so intently that she is compelled to think of you.

That which love begins can be completed only by God.

True love is plunged in despair or rapture by a lost glove or by a found handkerchief; but it needs eternity for all its devotion and its hopes. It is composed of both the infinitely great and the infinitely small.

If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human, be love.

Nothing satisfies love. We achieve happiness and long for Eden; we gain paradise and long for Heaven.

I say to you who love that all these things are contained in love. You must learn to find them. Love encompasses all Heaven, all contemplation and, more than Heaven, physical delight.

"Does she still visit the Luxembourg?" ..."No, Monsieur" ..."It is in this church, is it not, that she attends Mass?"..."She does not come here any more"..."Does she still live in this house?"..."She has moved elsewhere"..."Where has she gone to live?"..."She did not say."

How grievous not to know the address of one's soul!

Love has its childishness; other passions have pettiness. Shame on the passions that make us petty; honor to the one that makes us a child!

A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.

Oh to lie side by side in the sam tomb and now and then caress with a fingertip in the shades, that will do for my eternity!

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it.

Love! A dark and starry transfiguration is mingled with that torment. There is ecstasy in the agony.

Oh, the happiness of birds! It is because they have a nest that they have a song.

Love is a heavenly breath of the air of Paradise.

Deep hearts and wise minds accept life as God made it. It is a long trial, and incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, his true one, begins for man on the first stair within the tomb. Something appears to him, and he begins to perceive the finality. Take the heed of that word, finality. The living see infinity; the finality may only be seen by the dead.

In the meantime, love and suffer, home and meditate. Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

I encountered in the street a penniless young man who was in love. His hat was old and his jacket work, with holes at the elbows; water soaked through his shoes, but starlight flooded through his soul.

How wonderful it is to be loved, but how much greater to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion; it rejects everything that is not pure and arms itself with nothing that is not noble and great. An unworthy thought can no more take root in that a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene spirit, immune from all base passion and emotion, prevailing over the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, lies, hatreds, vanities and miseries, dwells in the azure of the sky and feels the deep and subterranean shifts of destiny no more than the mountain peak feels the earthquake. If there were no one who loved, the sun would cease to shine.

2012 Reading Challenge!

One thing that I started last year as a New Year's Resolution was a reading goal. This was made fairly easy with the Reading Challenge widget on Goodread's website. Since last year was successful, I have decided to attempt to complete a yearly reading goal again this year!

Here is a copy of the books, in no particular order, I want to hit for-sure this year:

1. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

2. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

3. Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

4. The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown

5. Watership Down by Richard Adams

6. The Knight by Gene Wolfe

7. The Wizard by Gene Wolfe

8. Wicked by Gregory Maguire

9. Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire

10. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

11. Dracula by Bram Stoker

12. The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas

13. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

14. Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

15. God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert

16. The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis

17. A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson

18. The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

19. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

20. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

21. Animal Farm by George Orwell

22. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

23. Paradise Lost by John Milton

24. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

25. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

26. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

27. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

28. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

29. Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles

30. Antigone by Sophocles

31. The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

32. The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan

33. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

34. Sandman by Neil Gaiman

35. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

36. The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*

37. Agatha Christie's Detectives by Agatha Christie*

38. Stardust by Neil Gaiman

39. Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty

40. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

41. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

* asterisks denote books that I own that are single volumes with multiple books bound within.

How to Keep Engineering Students in Your Engineering Department

I just finished reading this article about why STEM* students change majors. It's a good, albeit kind of long, read, but one that I found really interesting. I was shocked to see some of the statistics on students that drop out or leave the Engineering field while they're in school (I'm going to focus on engineering because that's what I'm studying and thus, is what I have the most experience in).

Perhaps I'm just geared in a way that works well with the curriculum I've been in. Or maybe my school is just different. But either way, it seems to me that my university (Oklahoma Christian University, or OC for short) has a very effective program when it comes to keeping students. I began with 40 students in my Mechanical Engineering Seminar class and ended my Sr level design class with 20 students. Maybe a 50% retention rate sounds poor, but the national average is only a 60% retention. Also, do keep in mind that OC is a private college, so students have to spend about $400/credit, and finances drive a lot of students to other universities. I also don't have a way of knowing if students that didn't make it through OC's engineering program left because they wanted another major or because they just couldn't afford to continue attending. Finally, this is just the retention rate for Mechanical Engineers based on how many people were in my first and final classes. I also don't have access to a list of students that changed to any other type of engineering offered on my campus. So 50% is actually pretty awesome.

I began to wonder what OC does differently. The NY Times article mentioned that a lot of students burn out because they get bogged down in math and theory and didn't get very many hands-on projects to keep them interested. This is what really piqued my interest. At OC, the engineers have several lab-based classes sprinkled throughout the curriculum. For example, my first semester, I had a class called Engineering Computing. This class introduced all of the freshmen to a programming software called MATLAB. We would do a few exercises in MATLAB that involved displaying graphs, which was great because it was a quick and easy way to make sure we had things right and that we were understanding what was going on. After we got the hang of MATLAB, we used K'nex to design and build little golf ball putters. By the end of the semester, we were going to use MATLAB to predict how high to lift the putter to hit a golf ball into a "hole" on the carpet. It was tons of fun.

The next semester (Spring of my Freshman year) I had another class called Engineering Fundamentals. We built a basic robot and used a BASIC Stamp chip to program to help it navigate a maze to find a light bulb. It was a simple robot with two motors to rotate wheels independently and was equipped with photoresistors on the front to detect which direction the light bulb was in, and bumpers to detect walls. That was all. But we had a lot of fun testing them and making them work well. One student even built a circuit on his robot to play the Star Wars theme song when his robot found the light bulb. The professors were encouraging and came around to offer help and to check in to make sure we weren't just too scared to ask for it.

While I didn't have any engineering labs my 3rd semester, I did have them in my 4th, and 5th semesters. Then when I started my final three semesters I was working on my capstone design classes, which may as well have been a lab. So basically, I never got "bogged down in theory" because I had at least one lab that would let me be hands on.

What I think most universities need to do, assuming they want students to stick around in the engineering realm (and have them paying tuition, etc.) would be to incorporate labs into more classes. Do you have a lecture on manufacturing processes and materials? Why not add a lab that involves working in a machine shop? If you have a lecture on controlling dynamic systems, why not have a lab that lets the students try to do that? I had one project in a lab that involved maintaining the temperature inside of a cardboard box, within a certain tolerance, using a light bulb and a fan to heat and cool, respectively. It wasn't something that was excessively difficult, and it was something that helped the whole Dynamic Systems class make a lot more sense. Lab classes are a critical part of a STEM education. Not because they let students practice handling real-world issues, although that is a good thing, but because the sense of accomplishment and, for me, sheer giddiness at times, from being able to make a self-navigating robot that can go around and backs up when it bumps into something while you just sit on the couch while checking in on your Facebook.

So if you want to keep engineers in their majors. Make them take labs, and be sure the professors are obvious about being invested in the success of the students.

And don't grade on a curve. Curves aren't merit-based, and you can lose a lot of brilliant people by making them fail out even though they had an 80% on an exam.

*STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering & Math