"Math is to learning what endurance and strength training is to sports: the basis that enables you to excel in the specialty of your choice. You cannot become a major sports star without being strong and having good cardiovascular ability. You cannot become a star within your job or excel in your profession unless you can think smart and critically -- and math will help you do that."

That's the best articulation of this idea I've ever seen.

The article could have (and should have) stopped after this.

I feel like learning math (and to a lesser extent, other hard sciences) is the only certain way you can exercise your brain.

What about art, creative writing, music, etc?

"Choose math because you will make more money."

I could rant at length, but instead I'll just quote Greenspun:

"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

High school math starts you down that road. Other parts of his argument are better.

With Math (and Statistics), you can choose many different jobs.

Economics Financial Analyst Engineers Statisticians (for govt) Computer Science

Those young Wall Street-ers that score 6-7 figures income have strong Math background.

I remember one of the commenters either here or in reddit said that according to his experience as an MIT student majoring in CS/E, graduate either pursue career in hi-tech or work at Wall Street as financial analyst.

Goldman-Sachs came to my school looking for engineers, CS and math/statisticians. Morgan-Stanley hires engineer students from my school instead of Business/Commerce. And these jobs aren't IT related.

From a money standpoint you probably can't beat Wall Street. From a mental stimulation standpoint it probably blows.

Most people who go into a technical major probably do so because they want to create and learn. I don't think the majority who choose those types of (Wall $reet) gigs initially came out of high school saying "I'm going into theoretical physics and math to get a job on wall street". They just gave up on the dream.

At any rate, if your goal is to make a lot of money, going to a top law school probably has better average expected return than a similar caliber school technical degree, with far less variance, as someone here has pointed out.

But I can't knock people for trying to get paid.

I heard it's the same way at Stanford. CS, math,physics and engineering majors go to Wall Street, consulting, or Silicon Valley. Guys from Caltech frequently go to either tech companies, Wall Street or Grad School (and research/academia). Ironically, engineering firms (like Bechtel) don't attract as many engineers to build things like bridges because they can't pay as much for them. They get their engineers from less hyped schools.

It is not only about median but also about possibilities.

While the average math job sucks, with good quantitative skills you can work as a quant, as a programmer and you can change your career more easily than a lawyer (who by average earns more).

"Students see math as hard, boring and irrelevant, and do not respond (at least not sufficiently) to motivational factors such as easier admission to higher education or interesting and important work."

In my opinion, this is almost wholly a function of broken curricula and overworked, insufficiently experienced teachers. Learning mathematics by rote is a) tremendously boring, and b) doesn't work.

Then why do they show all those public service commecials on TV:

"Math... DON'T DO IT... be above the influence..."?

reminds me of when pg said that you can estimate the worth of a education program by seeing how many people drop out to do something easier. I can't think of anyone who's ever complained of having hard classes switching to math/CS afterwards.

Unfortunately, this has happened to some extent with CS programs offered through the math department. CS is so severely impacted at a lot of UCs, and a lot of students (probably pretty good ones) are denied access to the major, so some students look into doing an alternate CS-style major through the math department. The reason I say "unfortunately" is that I think the students who get bounced from CS but make it through math could have made it through CS if there had been more resources for them. It's stupid to have people who really want to be majoring in CS working through Real Analysis proofs that they don't enjoy or even particularly care much about.

Some of this is just because math is a bit cheaper on the budget. A whiteboard and a room is all you need for most math classes, so they tend to take most people who want to give it a crack. It's pretty hard to get into an upper division CS class as a non-major, because they barely have space for the majors (again, I don't think this is the case at well funded private universities with small undergrad populations like Stanford or MIT - it's more of a problem at Berkeley and other large state-supported institutions). Maybe it's also cultural within the field. If you go up to a math professor and ask if you can join his class without the pre-reqs, he's more likely than a CS professor to say "well, as long as you think you can handle it, sure." I suspect math professors are just a bit more laid back than the CS ones.

But overall, I do agree with you - nobody drops out of a "hard" major to take the "easier" classes in the math dept.

There are people who drop into CS after finding maths difficult.

When I was getting my undergrad degree, one of the best student in my class dropped out of EE to study math.

Who is going to read this and be influenced? I don't think many non-math-interested high-schoolers read ACM publications.