Total fall enrollment of 1st time students at post-secondary institutions is currently 2.8 million, so we’d have to devote 21% of the slots to aspiring engineers.

Engineering programs are challenging, so I’m skeptical you find many engineering graduates who started out in community college.

As we speak, about 78% of all engineering graduates are male as opposed to 45% of first time matriculants in post-secondary institutions. If attrition rates for male and female institutions are the same, we’d have 480,000 young men matriculating in engineering school.

1st time matriculants in four-year institutions currently number 1.9 million. If 45% of these are male (in line with the share of all 1st time matriculants), there would be 865,000 young men enrolling de novo at four year institutions.

So, we have 865,000 young men or thereabouts, of whom 480,000 would have to be enrolling at the engineering school. So, your preferred system works if 55% of the young men enrolling de novo at 4 year institutions enroll in engineering.

I’m going to guess most places have more effective screens.

I’m using the dictionary definition of “hard”: requiring great effort or endurance; not easy.

Sure, it requires a certain amount of the proper number of neurons and arrangement, but once you reach that, there’s the matter of motivation, which pulls you through. Elite military training is another example where the difference between those who make and those who don’t is 90% will. Most of those who dropped out had the sheer IQ to do it, they just didn’t have the will to put in 60-70 hours of work outside of class to keep up. Sure, there are those whose mental wiring made it easy (think idiot savants, and leave out the idiot part), but there aren’t enough of those to keep civilization running. Most of what I (and every other engineer I know) did was a slog – an interesting slog, but a slog nonetheless. There were occasions, at least for me, where it came easy – Electromagnetic Theory; I just had a feel for it, I could visualize fields in 4 dimensions, I guess, but my test scores were so far above the rest of the class the professor declared that he wouldn’t use them in the curve, because that would flunk half the class. On the other hand, I struggled in computational theory. I still have to work things out, no leaps of intuitive thought as I’ve seen in others. Maybe that difference is why (unusual in an engineer) my verbal SATs were 40 points above my math. Not surprisingly, I wound up in my professional life doing a lot of analog and A/D – D/A work.

Aside: I try to maintain a pseudonymous identity on line. I’m sure that the No Such Agency could identify me in a few seconds, but I want to make it difficult for the jackass script kiddies out there, which is why I’m pretty vague on details.

What is a “satisfactory admissions screen”, and how do you determine motivation. As R2L noted, we haven’t figured out the human psyche to anything more than a very rough approximation. It wasn’t MIT or CalTech, but the school I attended was ranked in the top 50, and I’d put it in the top 5 “practical” (vs theoretical) engineering schools. We graduated ready to go into the world, not grad school. As an example, I had a TA grad student for lab instructor in Electrical Machinery, where we actually played with motors, generators and transformers. He had his BS from one of the top 5, and he could do quadrature equations in his head, but he burnt out a motor because he literally did not know what a nameplate was, nor how to use the info on it.

That 87% number is misleading, many changed majors -one guy I know moved into business and retired as VP out of a Fortune 500 company. The actual “flunk out” rate was probably less than the non-engineer rate. The guys who did flunk out were almost all alcohol and party related.

I took organic chem as a freshman in a class we had to take a test to get into.

Which works if they bother to look at the results. I just bring that up because as a freshman I had to take a physics test and a calc test to place into a calc based physics course. The physics test was little more than “Do you understand Newton’s first law” which I did. The calc test I did not do so well in. Looking back on it I shouldn’t have been told to take that physics course which made no sense if you didn’t already know freshman calc.(But that’s exactly what the physics professor who looked over the 2 exams told me to do. He wasn’t doing me any favors) I didn’t do so well but I always like to brag I did get full credit on at least one exam question because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was probably one of the few kids that actually did get full credit on at least one exam question.(Those exams were rough)

Years later I took calc based physics at another university but this time I made sure to know calc first. Just to prove to myself I could do it. Pretty much aced that course, made total sense. (But then again physics ruins you by letting you understand how things actually work. I’m amazed at how many people think you can regularly break the first law of thermodynamics at a drop of a hat. )

Symon is a well-known, and often used book. The reason I I never used it was as I mentioned before, I found it to be at a level somewhere between undergrad and the classic grad level text Goldstein. Just not appropriate for a junior physics major encountering their first “upper level” course. However, it’s a great supplemental text, and I would recommend it to students if they wanted to look at some other source

Mechanics is the first course where physics students are required to actually start using some of the calculus they been working on in math courses. It also starts getting them used to dealing with 3-d vectors. Meanwhile the actual material is still accessible on an intuitive level…they have ridden on swings, thrown balls, etc. Once this “warmup” course is done they are then ready to take on the the very challenging material of E&M which uses full blown vector calculus and the material is not nearly as experiential and intuitive as mechanics.

Why? (And what scores did these characters receive on their AP exams?).

The engineering school you attended wasn’t applying satisfactory admissions screens if they were failing 87% of those admitted.

I am looking forward to receiving my Morrison and Boyd. Like you I am interested to see how much of the chemistry I remember. Yesterday Mrs. X asked me about the gardening use of vinegar as an insecticide. I went on about how acetic acid is the second simplest carboxylic acid (after formic acid – the active ingredient in ant stings) and its functional group is methyl. Slowly her eyes started to glaze over and I realized my time was up. Hard to take the chemistry out of the boy!

No, it is hard(er) for those who don’t have the mind for it, and easier for those who do. Humans are incredibly complex mental animals and don’t all have the same abilities, etc. Which of course is why real diversity is beneficial, and pretend diversity is a travesty.

As an engineer, me trying to be an artist or a musician or a therapist, or perhaps even a lawyer, would be hard. I’m not particularly driven to be a blogger, either, so tip of the hat to our hostess for her long suffering but successful efforts.

We used to think of STEM subjects as hard because of the math or the relatively limited number of people with a suitably successful mindset. Whereas psych, sociology, anthropology, English, perhaps other languages (except the study of linguistics??), and some other topics were considered “soft” because they did not involve math, etc. in the same way. Much more conversational, where logic might be harder to apply successfully, etc. But with maturity and knowledge, I now realize that the STEM subjects are “easy” in the sense that the solutions and answers tend to be pretty definitive (and repeatable) once they are discovered. It is much easier to say definitely that such and such is “true” via empirical evidence [which is why the political corruption of climate “science” results in deeply flawed “results”. In addition to the actual phenomena being complex and interrelated in poorly understood ways.]

In contrast, the study of fields involving human nature, psychology, history and motive, etc. are actually difficult to obtain definitive conclusions because of the wide variability in human minds and behaviors. To achieve decent confidence level statistics requires a large population of test subjects, which is both expensive and still subject to uncertainty and questions as to method vs. results. We are now also finding that a great many published reports are not repeatable, even in medicine. So the ability to achieve real knowledge is “harder”.