Reading Reaction #2: Engineering Engineers

While many teenagers think that they are choosing their career paths when they apply for college as juniors and seniors they do not realize that they have been tracked to specific fields. In The Engineering Student Pipeline Bowen states that “The preparation of American youth for careers in engineering starts in reality in kindergarten and ends, for entry, with an engineering baccalaureate degree over a decade and a half later”. While Bowen explains how this is true within engineering, he does not mention that it is the same across all professional fields. Students are pushed away from some fields and into others based on race, gender, stereotypes, perceived ability, and attitude. Tracking is done by both parents and teachers and in many cases is done unconsciously. One way in which tracking works is through verbal cues. If constantly told that you are good at math and science, but writing is just not your thing you will eventually start to believe this. This will cause you to care more about the work associated with what you are good at, and use excuses like I am just not a good writer as an explanation for your C+ in English. These verbal cues can also be compounded with grades you receive. As soon as children start to accept that they are better at math then they are at writing and begin to put less effort towards working on their writing skills they will begin to receive better grades in the subjects they are “better” at. Bad grades will reinforce the thought that they are not good at a subject and will cause a snowball effect. Eventually, they truly will not be good writers because they have ignored English for years while spending all of their time learning mathematics. This is important to note because of how stereotypes affect this tracking. As the Dean’s task force published in its findings and recommendations, “the fraction of engineering students who are women peaked at less than 20 percent and has declined”. With such a small proportion of women in engineering fields, there is a common stereotype of engineers as males. This stereotype is involved in the tracking of girls and boys from a young age. Stereotypes like these influence how teachers and parents track children. Unconsciously teachers and parents give praise and push children in certain directions based on stereotypes and cultural norms. As stated earlier, tracking is apparent across many groups including race, gender, and social class. Tracking leads many children to drop out of education pipelines before they can decide for themselves whether or not they like the field. In order to keep as many children in every education pipeline as long as possible, work needs to be done at every level of education. Increasing the number of children in all education pipelines will not only provide them with the opportunity to study a broader range of subjects, it will also increase the number of students attending college, as less students will be denied from college because they do not meet the standards. Tracking causes some of the imbalance we see in today’s careers, but are there factors with more influence on this imbalance?