1/16/2024 0 Comments Stem degree list![]() ![]() To analyze innovation outcomes, Bianchi then linked this education data to Italian and European patent data, tracking whether each student went on to patent an invention. Though one of the 19 schools had lost its records, and another wouldn’t grant access to its archive, Bianchi managed to gather and digitize data from the rest of the schools-for a total of 46,473 students. Bianchi visited all the city’s public high schools, collecting information for students who graduated between 19. The researchers focused on Milan, whose residents produce more Italian patents than any other city. Some of those students completed high school before 1961, when they could not go on to earn a university STEM degree, while others graduated just after the educational expansion, meaning the researchers were able to compare cohorts of students who were only a few years apart. “The experiment here is to compare industrial students who are similar on a lot of characteristics,” Bianchi explains-except for a crucial fact. That abrupt change yielded the data that Bianchi and coauthor Michela Giorcelli at UCLA needed. As a result, thousands of additional students flowed into these majors. So starting in 1961, students from industrial high schools were allowed to enroll in university STEM majors. “Industry needed engineers,” Bianchi explains-workers with high-level skills that the industrial high schools simply were not producing. But by the early 1960s, many Italians could see that education reform was necessary. This rigid policy continued even after the fall of Fascism: in the aftermath of World War II, the education system was not exactly the first thing the country wanted to rebuild. This included industrial students, who attended technical high schools specifically to prepare for jobs in construction, electronics, chemicals, and the like. Graduates of technical high schools, in contrast, could not further their education no matter how much potential they showed. “Getting a STEM degree made these people eligible for other types of jobs,” Bianchi says, “and they took them.”įor nearly four decades, starting in the 1920s, Italy’s Fascist policy dictated that only graduates of university-prep high schools could get a university-level degree in a STEM field. He found that, surprisingly, the most talented STEM high school students actually patented much less after getting access to STEM majors than they had done before.Ī STEM education, it turned out, opened up opportunities for these students beyond occupations that tend to produce patents. ![]() By tracking these students’ subsequent patent records and comparing them with those of similar students who graduated before 1961, Bianchi was able to tell what university education actually did for innovation. In 1961, large numbers of students who had studied STEM subjects in high school suddenly gained access to a university-level STEM education. In a new study, Nicola Bianchi of the Kellogg School collected data from a turning point in the history of his native Italy. Even if future inventors are more likely to have majored in STEM fields, it is not necessarily true that education catalyzed those inventions. ![]() The answer is less obvious than it might seem. But what is the actual effect of a STEM education on innovation? A 2012 report by a US presidential council, for example, was premised on the need to produce more STEM graduates in order to stay ahead of China and India. Many people simply assume the economy benefits from STEM majors, believing that these graduates lead to more innovation and long-term economic growth. ![]()
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