Effect of High School Math skills on the Types of Professions

Abstract

In the 21^st century, the importance of STEM professions has increased. Simultaneously, the interest to acquire these STEM professions has also increased among high school students. For high school students desiring to acquire a STEM profession, this paper attempts to find the relationship between high school math skills and the likelihood of acquiring a STEM profession in the future. Furthermore, this paper attempts to explain the effect that high school math skill has on average wages which are indicated in other related papers. This paper collected secondary sources from a renowned math summer program for high school students which contained tracked data of past alumni. After analyzing 121 alumni data, it was clear that high school students who were skilled at math indeed had a higher chance of acquiring STEM professions such as engineering and computer science. However, STEM jobs related to science did not have high percentages. This indicated that high school math proficiency had a profound effect on the probability of acquiring heavily math integrated professions whereas this was not the case for STEM professions requiring a mix of other STEM knowledge besides math. In addition, the high percentage of computer science and engineering jobs explained how proficient high school math skills led to high average salaries as these are one of the highest paying jobs. Overall, it is clear after reviewing the data that although proficiency in high school math skill does not necessarily lead to higher probability of acquiring all types of STEM jobs, it still has a noticeable impact on the probability of acquiring a math-heavy STEM profession and is likely to be one of the major elements in determining the future salaries.