Small Liberal Arts Colleges Foster Success in STEM and Entomology

Abstract

Where are entomologists trained in the United States? The answer to that question is clearly entomology graduate programs at research universities that produce scientists entering academia, industry, and government agencies. Look a little further back along that pipeline, however, and those research universities do not hold the same significance in the entomological or, more broadly, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pipeline. Small private liberal arts colleges play a leading role in sending students who will be successful in earning Ph.D.s to STEM graduate school (Fiegener and Proudfoot 2013). Authors in the symposium “Entomology: Partnering with Small Liberal Arts Colleges” present compelling examples of the ways faculty engage students. Those examples range from exciting study-abroad experiences led by home-institution faculty to inquiry and problem-based laboratory and field experiences, undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, or novel collaborations among faculty and staff on campus to provide students with experiential learning. All of this has potential to spark student pursuit of careers in entomology and, more broadly, STEM. Equally significant examples focus on the day-to-day, but very important, care involved in the delivery of education at small private institutions. Faculty ask students to write papers in drafts and faculty deliver as many comments and suggestions on those papers as the number of words students have written. Faculty, not graduate teaching assistants, teach students how to write, how to speak, and how to craft a logical argument, individually and in small-sized classes where students cannot hide from such attention. These efforts promote critical thinking (perhaps more aptly …