I would like to commend Leigh Krietsch Boerner’s article “Are Undergraduate Chemistry Programs in Crisis?,” as the article has pointed out many things that I’ve seen with my own eyes. I’m an associate professor of chemistry at a predominantly undergraduate state institution in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and I have noticed similar trends in enrollment, cost, and graduation rates at my own institution.The article points out that biology enrollment is in line with other undergraduate enrollments, while the chemistry enrollment shows a large decline. Further, the article points out that the number of undergraduate chemistry degrees awarded has plunged the fastest over the last 3 years relative to other disciplines. This too, I’ve seen.However, I feel that a major contributing factor behind these numbers has been overlooked. Over the last 20 years, I’ve seen student math preparedness plummet. This trend was in full swing before COVID-19, and the pandemic exacerbated the problem. I’ve seen many students in my first-year general chemistry course switch from chemistry to biology because the math requirements in chemistry were just too hard given the level of math preparedness of the students. I’m not referring to the log base 10 operation of the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation but rather the simple task of converting grams to moles, which is an exceedingly difficult operation for a quarter to a third of the students in front of me. Chemistry is enjoyable if you have a rudimentary understanding of math, a nightmare if that understanding has never been developed.I had hoped that the trends that I’ve seen were specific to my institution alone, but colleagues at similar institutions have reported to me similar experiences. Fortunately, math preparedness doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem at our nation’s elite schools, but can these few schools produce the army of chemists needed to carry an advanced industrial society?The development of a mathematical intuition is needed to succeed in chemistry. Why that intuition is not being developed on a broad scale needs to be addressed, as more than the fate of a few chemistry departments is at stake.Dwayne BellFramingham, Massachusetts
I guess I don't really know what to say about this, other than math is an important skill, and it's hard to imagine getting through (I dunno) the first semester of general chemistry without a pretty decent sense of how to do basic algebra.
