Retention rates at the College of Engineering are appalling, said John Chandler, director of the Texas Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Center at Texas Tech.
"By their sophomore year, somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the students that came into engineering right out of high school are gone," Chandler said.
Most students, he said, switch out of engineering before completing actual engineering courses like thermodynamics and fluids.
Courses like calculus, differential equations, chemistry and physics seem to deter students from going further, Chandler said.
"So really it's not the engineering they're not prepared for," he said. "They're not prepared for science and math."
To counter this trend, the Center of Engineering Outreach, with the help of the Texas Education Agency and the Texas High School project, is developing an outreach program called the Texas Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics center, also known as the T-STEM Center.
The T-STEM Center is a workshop program for middle school and high school educators to help prepare students in science, technology, engineering and math subjects, Chandler said.
"We attract a lot of innovative teachers that are really doing a lot of neat stuff in the classroom, and they really like what we're doing," he said.
The T-STEM Center is still in its design phase, but it has teacher workshops planned for this summer, he said.
"We're making progress and I know people across Texas are probably real interested," he said. "Initially, we contacted a lot of colleges and individuals around Texas who are doing really neat stuff and I know a lot of those guys are wondering what is going on."
Chandler said the T-STEM Center conducted its first teacher workshop in November at a new T-STEM Academy in New Deal.
"New Deal specifically requested us to do a short workshop for the teachers that they recruited for their academy program," he said.
Several Tech faculty members, Chandler said, have been helpful in the T-STEM Center initiative, including Padmanabhan Seshaiyer, an associate professor of mathematics.
He said Seshaiyer, who has a background in civil engineering, spent a Saturday helping him teach a workshop at the New Deal academy.
Chandler said to help prepare high school students for college math and science, T-STEM also reaches out to high school students directly.
"We have a principles of technology class that we've developed, and we're piloting that at six schools across the state," he said.
The class is offered at Roosevelt High School and Frenship High School in Lubbock, Chandler said.
"We're already working heavily with L.I.S.D.," he said. "We also have our pre-college engineering academy at Estacado High School and that thing is really proving the concept for us."
Chandler said almost every student who has entered the program has been accepted into a college engineering program.
"One of them got accepted into both Princeton and MIT," he said. "We're waiting to hear on some of them because it's a little early."
Robert Waller, communications specialist for the T-STEM Center, said the goal of the T-STEM Center is to reform science, technology, engineering and math education in Texas.
Waller said the Texas High School project, which developed the T-STEM Center initiative, gave the center a year to plan and ask the hard questions about what is wrong with science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in Texas.
"Why isn't STEM education in Texas working?" he said. "What are the best practices? What schools of excellence are out there that are already succeeding in addressing this problem, and how can we encapsulate that information and deliver it to other schools that are in the state of Texas?"
Waller said those tough questions take time to answer and work out.
"And that's why it's sometimes hard when people ask 'what are you doing, when are you going to start?' And the answer is 'this summer,'" he said. "But we're spending our time this year carefully designing out a solution that we think is going to help reform STEM education in Texas."
Chandler said with the T-STEM program, the center for engineering outreach wants to take a deeper and more innovative approach that builds on the center's previous outreach programs.
"The one thing we don't want to do is just take what we're doing, stamp T-STEM on it and call it a day," he said. "We're looking at this as a real opportunity for us to do things that haven't been done in education before."
Chandler said outside of the T-STEM Center initiative, the center for engineering outreach has also conducted a rocketry program for high school students to spur interest in engineering.
"Two years ago, Estacado High School became the first high school with students to make a large scale rocket to break the sound barrier and the one they're building this year is going to be 22 feet tall," he said.
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