Trends in soil science education: Looking beyond the number of students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Decreasing student numbers—along with related causes and concerns—is a common topic of discussion in the international soil science community. Such discussion is seldom quantitative. Here we present long-term student numbers (in undergraduate courses as well as MS and PhD graduates) of soil science departments in North America, Europe, and Oceania. A previous study by P. Baveye and co-workers had shown that in the United States and Canada student numbers fell by 40% in more than 80% of the universities between 1992 and 2004. The United States and Canada experienced an increase in female students in soil science between 1992 and 2004. Meanwhile, the number of foreign students has decreased. Student numbers have also decreased in New Zealand. Numbers at Dutch universities decreased in the early 1990s but have since stabilized. Two of three Australian universities had increasing numbers of students for undergraduate courses as well as MS and PhD graduates. Currently in the Netherlands almost half of all MS soil science graduates are female, while in the 1970s and up to the mid-1980s 80% or more of soil science graduates were male. It seems that teaching is becoming more general (more introductory courses to a range of other disciplines), while …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".