By Kyra-lin Hom

When I was in undergrad, we film school students used to play 'guess the major' when killing time in our film school lobby. We'd lounge under the monitors displaying recent student projects sans volume and point out the loud and manic production majors, the quirky, quieter screenwriters, the good-natured, techno-nerd recording arts majors – so on and so forth. These general distinctions are hardly unusual. For example, here at the University of Chicago, there is a 'friendly' rivalry between the law and business school students comprised of mutual mocking. Even the professors get involved.

It's well accepted college lore than certain programs attract certain types of people. But a recent article published by Government Executive online went a step further. It compiled five separate surveys, conducted over seven decades, looking for a correlation between general aptitude test scores and college major. In other words, is your college major an indicator of your intelligence? The results gleaned over 70 years were remarkably consistent.

It likely won't surprise you to hear that, with only one outlying exception, majors in the arts and social sciences were correlated with lower test scores when compared to STEM majors. (STEM is a popular acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.) Humanities and biological sciences ran middle of the pack.

The result of note, however, is which specific major sat at the very bottom in all but one of the five surveys (and there it was elevated all the way to the second from the bottom). Are you ready? I bet the more cynical of you guessed it: education. While our nation's best and brightest students are choosing the challenge and monetary reward of STEM fields, the...um... not best and brightest are resigning themselves to study education.

Of course there are lots and varied exceptions. Majoring in education doesn't mean you're stupid, and majoring in STEM doesn't mean you're brilliant. But these results are the averages across thousands and thousands of American college students. So they might not mean anything about you personally, but they certainly say something about us as a nation and where we place our values.

The top education systems in the world recruit a full 100% of their teachers from the top one-third of their academic cohorts. For the record, the US isn't one of those systems. As of 2012, according to the Center on International Education Benchmarking (National Center on Education and the Economy), the best national education systems belong to (in no particular order) Canada, Finland, Japan, Poland, Singapore, Estonia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Shanghai and Taiwan.

The fact is, young adults in America nowadays have little incentive to major in education. By reputation, the study track is easy and unoriginal. It has none of the challenge that top students crave. And it lacks the academic romance of philosophy, obscure histories or even physics. Pair that with the dreary prospects of working in grade school level academics and you can see why the field has low appeal. Among other things, education needs a PR overhaul.

The situation is getting better within the US. Organizations like Teach for America are frequently picking their candidates from prestigious institutions, and studies like the one cited here are drawing the public eye. But the problem is complex and ingrained. Fixing it involves remolding cultural perspectives nearly a century old. Change won't be easy. The results, however, will be worth it.