Where Have All of the Math Majors Gone?

Peter Clayton of Total Picture Radio just added a podcast with Mark Penn, CEO of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller. You might want to listen in if you care about what is happening to today’s college students.
Some may know Mark as a top presidential campaign strategist to Senator Hillary Clinton while others may know him as a numbers wonk. Mark has been a key adviser to Bill Gates and Microsoft for the last six years and just wrote a new book entitled Microtrends – The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes. In the book, Mark states that the number of undergraduate math majors is 77 at Harvard and 38 at Yale. As scary as that is, that isn’t what scares Mark the most about today’s college students. His biggest fear is the rapidly increase number of drop-outs.