U.S. Science Students Now Choose Industry

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28178, 17 January 1957, Page 2

U.S. Science Students Now Choose Industry

Industry, with its lucrative wages and its “big-time” jobs, is luring science and mathematics students away from the teaching profession in the United States, just as it is in other countries where production is highly competitive. In the United States it was estimated that one-quarter of the high schools had no science on their curricula because science teachers could not be found, said Miss Harriet J. Doheny, a mathematics teacher of Franklyn High School, Seattle, in an interview yesterday.

“Students in their second and. third years at college are approached by industrialists to work

for their firms. The students are subsidised by scholarships from the firms on condition they will work for them when through examinations,” she said. Mathematicians with university degrees were also in great demand for production, she said. Although industry today was largely a matter of pushing buttons. the computing machines must be controlled by highly qualified mathematicians who might have become teachers.

Opportunities Offered “Scientists and mathematicians once hid away in attics or cellars; now they do big things in laboratories and factories,” she said. “Opportunities offered by industry to students of mathematics and science have given a certain stimulus to both courses, but even so the increase in the number of students specialising in these subjects is not sufficient to meet the demand for their services.” Miss Doheny blamed a “long and horrid grind,” which could not be side-stepped, for deterring students from taking up these courses. Teaching as a profession had much to offer science and mathematics students, if they were genuinely interested in imparting their knowledge to children, she said. Its greatest draw was the long summer vacation of 11 or 12 weeks, which gives those interested in travelling the opportunity to go far afield. Miss Doheny, an experienced tourist, is now on sabbatical leave. Already she has visited enough countries to qualify her as a “round-the-world” traveller. On her present tour she has visited Australia (mainly to see the Olympic Games), Tahiti and Suva. Now she is touring New Zealand with Mrs I. Anderson of Omarama, with whom Miss Doheny has corresponded for 18 years. Penfriend “We had never seen each other before I stepped off the plane at Christchurch airport. I had sent Mrs Anderson a photograph of myself and that is how she identified me,” Miss Doheny said. Except for a few days at Omarama at Christmas, Miss Doheny and Mrs Anderson have been touring the South Island in earnest since December 14. Their itinerary included a walk over the Grove track, Marlborough, and the Milford track, and an amphibian flight from Invercargill to Stewart Island. In four weeks Miss Doheny has seen more- of the South Island than many South Islanders.