Abstract:

Nowadays, the election of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) degrees is not the main option for most of the students and, in fact, this aspect is even more relevant for spanish students with respect to the average of other European countries. Moreover, the tendency is to decrease the number of students that choose these degrees and, last year, some reports showed a reduction of about 30 % in the number of students studying STEM degrees. This aspect is quite relevant because European Commission has already alerted that future requirements of technological and scientific profiles could not be fulfilled if this tendency goes on in time.

One of the main aspects that seems to affect this selection is the difficulty of the studies that seems to be not properly compensated later by the job opportunities, that is, students think that other studies, such as social sciences and economics based ones, gives them an easier opportunity to reach the working world.

The experience as coordinators of two engineering degrees, Materials Engineering and Industrial Management Engineering, is used in this work to analyse two main aspects regarding the lack of interest of students when choosing this type of studies and, on the other hand, the role of the university to give further and confident information to high school students by different activities with them to get science and technology nearer to them.

These activities should cover three main aspects:
- Information about real professional activities in which engineers and scientist work after finishing the degree, as well as perspective of progression in these jobs and satisfaction of graduates with their jobs the first year after graduating.
- Real experimental and design activities. Science and engineering knowledge is sometimes found harder because of lack of perspective or real application. Real experience where their science and technical knowledge could be applied has been identified as a drawback when compare to social and economics sciences.
- Information about the importance of keeping science and technical subjects during their high school formation. Many students realize later that their lack of mathematics, physics or chemical concepts is a high barrier very difficult to overcome when they want to do a degree in this field and they finally choose another one.

The study provides results about real difficulties of courses taught in different areas (science and technology or economics and management) for students of engineering by analyzing different results per areas for the same students (industrial management engineering and materials engineering). Also provides real information about graduate job perspectives according to data collected in surveys of these students which should be translated to high school students and, finally, it will provide some different activities that could be done with high school students in order to provide more accurate information to them and real perspectives of work an activities if they choose STEM studies.

Keywords:

STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, professional activities, job perspectives.