When research in 2011 showed that workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics earned a premium of 25 percent over other workers and have just a 5.5-percent unemployment rate, it reinforced strong economic incentives to get more people into those STEM fields.
But research like that might soon become more difficult to conduct. That's because the U.S. Census Bureau wants to stop asking people in a key national survey about their field of study.
Since 2009 the bureau has collected data on people's undergraduate fields of study as part of its American Community Survey, at the urging of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation. The survey, which is based on responses from more than three million households, is used to collect demographic information and keep track of trends between the decennial censuses.
On this blog, we've previously written about how underemployment hit recent graduatesand that ever-present question: "Is your college degree still worth it?" Without the field-of-study data from the American Community Survey, that research would have been nearly impossible to compile.
Before 2009 the National Science Foundation's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics conducted its own surveys. But the center’s director, John R. Gawalt, called that process "inefficient" and said it was difficult to find people in STEM fields and to track them over time.
Adding the field-of-degree question to the Community Survey reduced costs and improved what the NSF could do because the Census statistics allowed researchers to dive deeper into the data, especially for those employed in science and engineering fields.
Elimination of the question would leave researchers with "no data sources large enough to study small but crucial academic specializations," said Mr. Gawalt, noting that the data provide context for efforts to focus on underrepresented populations in the STEM fields, including women, members of minority groups, and people with disabilities.
Higher-education organizations have also weighed in on the proposed change. A newsletter from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce called the Community Survey's question "the only information that students, parents, and educators can rely on to understand the economic benefits of individual college majors."
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/data/2014/12/15/american-community-survey-to-remove-key-question/