Mission Impossible? The President and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. Unfortunately most experts also agree that this is just a pipe dream.

It is not just a K-12 prep issue, they are losing most thru attrition. In addition, it seems that grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences also provides perverse incentives to leave STEM fields of study as well. But the the real undercurrent? It is just too hard and most universities are too rooted in the past to change (it is the old “history has momentum” problem).

As an example, most STEM University programs still make the freshman year a sink or swim experience. It is called “the math-science death march” where we have college freshmen wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students — and then many wash out. Hardly a surprise.

Having graduated with an Engineering Degree from Purdue University in 1972, I can tell you that not much as changed since I experienced that “death march” myself. Our then University University President, Frederick L. Hovde, took pride in freshmen engineering orientation pointing out that the person sitting to the right and left of me would wash out. How can we afford to continue to set these expectations and dash those dreams?

While there is no doubt that these programs need a strong theoretical foundation; we can and must do a better job of introducing more practical and inspiring programming to keep the best and the brightest in STEM programs. If a student is smart enough to get into one of those programs, we need to be able to nurture and be able to keep them engaged and there. Our nation depends on it.

(And while we are at it, we also need to keep our great foreign graduates here as well. How about an automatic Green Card for them? A great topic for another discussion.)

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Special thanks to Christopher Drew and the New York Times in the article “Why Science Majors Change Their Minds” for the inspiration for this post.