Studies that look at the fields students choose to go into reveal that students that score higher on aptitude tests typically go into the STEM field while those with lower scores go into education and related fields.
These findings have been consistent for the past seven decades. A study conducted in 1952 measuring the scores of college graduates on the Army General Classification Test found that the median score for the education field was 122, while the median score for the physical sciences was 130.
Fast forward to 2014, a look at the verbal aptitude and math scores from the 2014 SAT Report on College & Career Readiness shows that students who intended to go into the education field had an average score of 482 while those that intended to study math and statistics had an average score of 574.
Arguments for why STEM majors regularly score higher on aptitude tests include the fact that "STEM disciplines are highly complex and require such aptitude." There is no clear reason why education majors are consistently low, but the average SAT scores of teachers have been rising.
Though these results cannot be fully explained, they do show certain fields — particularly STEM and increasingly, business — are valued over others in American society.
Read the full article at Quartz.
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