Reactions: Undergrad chemistry and AI-generated images

Letters to the editor

Re: Crisis in undergraduate chemistry

Regarding the article “Are Undergraduate Chemistry Programs in Crisis?” (C&EN, Oct. 21, 2024, page 26), I attribute at least one root cause of the relative drop in chemistry enrollment (versus other majors, such as biology) to the quality of high school chemistry programs. Bravo to those talented and passionate high school teachers, such as those I bet most C&EN readers had, who inspired us to study chemistry in university and pursue chemical careers. To help boost the number of students choosing to major in chemistry, high school chemistry programs need to create a vision of a rewarding chemical career. One approach is having retired chemists offer presentations about their careers during high school chemistry classes. This approach must be complemented by chemistry teachers capable of creating lesson plans that clearly explain complex topics in a way that is easy to understand coupled with applying science concepts to real-world situations.

Ara Jeknavorian
Chelmsford, Massachusetts

I will receive my 50-year American Chemical Society pin in 2025 and spent an entire career in industry, so I was interested in the article about undergraduate chemistry programs. A way to examine it is If they build it, will they come? And they aren’t. It is an expensive major for institutions, and the demand is not really there. A degree in chemistry is not trivial, and an advanced degree is even more rigorous. Are the rewards commensurate with the effort? Sadly, not for the effort. Yes, a decent living, but the rewards are not there. Personal satisfaction doesn’t buy much. Until the reward starts to match the effort, it may be a lost cause. I applaud those who are reworking their programs to show applications of chemistry rather than a dry definition of chemistry. It isn’t just anyone who will set out to devote their life to chemistry, and those people are becoming fewer and fewer. When students set foot on a campus, the names on the buildings are rarely ever that of a scientist. They can see where the money is to be made. And the legacy of the chemical industry is not helping either. The value is not seen, only the problems.

Robert Franz
Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania

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 Bell
Framingham, Massachusetts

For over 40 years I’ve witnessed the budget analysts’ attempts to evaluate academic programs with the assumption that chemistry departments are high-cost operations. The main inputs to the analyses are the departmental budget and the number of chemistry graduates, the latter being a relatively small number at most institutions.

Having watched these evaluations as a faculty member, a department chair, a university budget committee chair, and now as a board of trustee member, I believe that these evaluations miss an important perspective that applies to most undergraduate programs. Eliminating the chemistry bachelor’s degree does not result in the cut of very many faculty positions because the dominant workload of most programs is the courses that support chemistry-dependent majors, such as biology, nursing, allied health, nutrition, exercise physiology, engineering, and agriculture.

Typically, only one additional faculty position (net) is required to support the chemistry major courses beyond organic chemistry. But without these courses, the configuration of the faculty will change drastically; the type of faculty who are drawn to join a department without opportunities for upper-division involvement, undergraduate research, American Chemical Society involvement, as well as grant and contract work will be much different than the one designed to teach service courses only.

This is not to disparage the good work of our colleagues who are employed in those service-oriented settings; they are essential to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce and are appreciated for their contributions. But I am aware that their workloads and professional expectations greatly limit their ability to participate beyond the classrooms and supporting laboratories.

My purpose in writing is not to point out the limitations of the typical fiscal analysis of university departments but to arm and encourage those who find themselves being challenged for their raison d’être. Analyses that are based on the mentoring model of education, the roots of the academy, rather than the factory-output model of modern accounting systems are more likely to discover the true value of chemistry programs.

James Postma
Chico, California

Your article, led by Leigh Krietsch Boerner, reminds me of a similar debate that was just getting underway when I joined the workforce in the late 1960s. Missing from the present overview of undergraduate chemistry programs at colleges and universities is the issue of employability at the end of 4 years of education.

Back then, we quickly learned that chemistry graduates were in far greater demand than biology graduates because chemists had a greater range of applicable skills for the marketplace. In fact, biologists frequently had to settle for technician positions because they lacked the needed range of education and skills commonly presented by even BAs in chemistry.

While we were not always the best paid, we were valuable to a far greater range of skill areas than people of other backgrounds, including those in business, so had substantially lower unemployment and layoff rates.

May I suggest that you consider a follow-up note on this important dimension. It speaks loudly to the issue of value of any given education channel.

Lou Floyd
Independence, Ohio

AI-generated images of chemists

Per your article concerning the gender and race of artificial intelligence–generated depictions of chemists and chemical assistants (Nov. 4/11, 2024, page 15), why does there have to be some specific number of representations? If the number of images produced reflects the actual number of the various races engaged in jobs described as “chemists,” then the numbers you quoted are not that far off. White men make up the largest proportion of chemists, according to US government statistics.

The following link will take you to a web page with data from 2022 that show a wide variety of data describing chemists employed in the US: datausa.io /profile/soc/chemists-materials-scientists.

Lon Brouse
Delta, Colorado