BOSTON (AP) — Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates.
“They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.”
Tran also loves math. This summer, he studied calculus five hours a day with other high schoolers in a program at Northeastern University.
But Tran and his friends are not the norm. Many Americans joke about how bad they are at math, and already abysmal scores on standardized math tests are falling even further.
The nation needs people who are good at math, employers say, in the same way motion picture mortals need superheroes. They say America’s poor math performance isn’t funny. It’s a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.
“The advances in technology that are going to drive where the world goes in the next 50 years are going to come from other countries, because they have the intellectual capital and we don’t,” said Jim Stigler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the process of teaching and learning subjects including math.
The Defense Department has called for a major initiative to support education in science, technology, education and math, or STEM. It says there are eight times as many college graduates in these disciplines in China and four times as many engineers in Russia as in the United States.
“This is not an educational question alone,” said Josh Wyner, vice president of The Aspen Institute think tank. In July, the think tank warned that other nations are challenging America’s technological dominance.
“We are no longer keeping pace with other countries, particularly China,” the Aspen report says, calling this a “dangerous” failure and urging decisionmakers to make education a national security priority.
Meanwhile, the number of jobs in math occupations — positions that “use arithmetic and apply advanced techniques to make calculations, analyze data and solve problems” — will increase by more than 30,000 per year through the end of this decade, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. That’s much faster than most other kinds of jobs.
“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the math department at Tennessee Technological University.
Tennessee Tech runs a summer camp teaching cybersecurity, which requires math, to high school students. “That lightbulb goes off and they say, ‘That’s why I need to know that,'” Allen said. Computer-related jobs — ranging from software development to semiconductor production — require math, too. Analysts say those fields have or will develop labor shortages.
But most American students aren’t prepared for those jobs. In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment tests in math, or PISA, U.S. students scored lower than their counterparts in 36 other education systems worldwide. Students in China scored the highest. Only one in five college-bound American high school students is prepared for college-level courses in STEM, according to the National Science and Technology Council.
One result: Students from other countries are preparing to lead these fields. Only one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American, the National Foundation for American Policy reports. The rest come from abroad. Most will leave the U.S. when they finish their programs.
In the U.S., poor math skills could mean lower salaries for today’s kids. A Stanford economist has estimated that, if U.S. pandemic math declines are not reversed, students now in kindergarten through grade 12 will earn from 2% to 9% less over their careers, depending on what state they live in, than their predecessors educated just before the start of the pandemic.
