Highlighting different routes into science

At my sixth form there was an expectation that you would go to university straight after your A-levels. If you had other plans, the head of year would call you in to a special meeting to make sure that you really knew what you were doing – and then try to persuade you otherwise.

And yet once you get to university, some courses seem designed to drive out those people who are not fully committed to the idea of studying. This is reflected in the controversy around the firing of New York University professor Maitland Jones. For some students it had the reputation of a ‘weed-out’ course, designed to ensure only the most hard-working and talented students continued with it. Whatever the nature of Jones’s course, an analysis of nearly 110,000 student records from six large US universities suggests that tough introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Stem) courses disproportionately weed out students who are members of underrepresented minorities.