Retooling the Chemistry Major?

Here’s an article that was making the rounds in the blogosphere this week. The Wall Street Journal in the Education section (Apr 12) has a story titled “Chemistry Departments Try to Attract More Students by Retooling Major”. The subtitle of this article is “Universities begin to overhaul traditional curricula in science field that some worry is churning out too few graduates for nation’s needs”. Click here for a link to the article

This caught my attention because my department is having the opposite problem. Seven years ago thereabouts we retooled our curriculum by actually increasing the requirements, the most significant addition being a required Research Methods course. At the time we had 20-25 majors per cohort, and our laboratory-heavy curriculum could support up to 32 majors per year (it would be a squeeze) without requiring a significant overhaul. This year’s graduating class has just under 40 majors. The group coming up behind them has about the same number. This morning I signed in major #43 of the current sophomore class. And I know there are more to come. I’ve actually dissuaded a number of students away from the major if I thought there was something else that would be a better fit given interests, aptitudes, and what classes they had taken so far.

This year I had the privilege of helping guide our department through another revision – to streamline our majors and allow us to handle the large number of students coming through our classes. Chemistry is the second largest minor at our institution so we have many students who come through our General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry sequences, with Biochemistry being the most popular upper division class after the initial two-year sequence. Our retooling of the major actually provides a little less flexibility in some areas but a little more in others. We had to remind ourselves not to make the requirements even more difficult. We’re certainly not trying to attract more majors as we’re having trouble managing our large enrollments as it is.

The article says that “chemistry professors find themselves waging a fierce battle to appeal to undergraduates who might want a scientific grounding to pursue careers in forensics, molecular gastronomy or politics, but who are turned off by the degree’s onerous demands”. I suppose that could be happening in some places, but how general is this? I also haven’t looked at the data but I suspect that the number of majors has been increasing overall across the U.S., but perhaps the percentage as a whole may not be increasing (and might even be decreasing). The two schools studied were Emory University and Davidson College, and one professor was quoted as saying “chemists [are] not known as the most flexible people … but we’ve really got to change, because academia’s changing.” Really? I don't even know what is meant by being a flexible person!

Is it the demands that are onerous? There’s no doubt that the major is academically challenging. I’m very upfront about this with students. Or is it that the curricula are too traditional (whatever that means, as implied by the article)? I ask myself why is it that my department keeps attracting majors. My anecdotal conversations with many students suggests to me that they find their classes interesting and enjoyable and many of them established a good rapport with their professors. (Our class sizes are small. We run multiple sections.) They also seem to be influenced by students in the cohorts ahead who tell the newer students what a great department they’re in. This of course makes me feel good, and I know my colleagues work very hard to keep up the excellence of the department. It also makes me think that perhaps it’s not the large-scale overhauls that make the difference but the teaching and mentoring relationships that have a stronger impact in bringing students into the fold. When that culture is present, word-of-mouth by the students is sufficient to carry the momentum. Our curriculum is relatively traditional and rather challenging. Our students will definitely attest to the latter. (They don’t know much about the former.) Yet they still keep coming back for more!