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According to a 2012 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "60% of students who enter college with the goal of majoring in a STEM subject end up graduating in a non-STEM field". This exodus is a long-standing problem. For several decades students have been saying that they feel that getting a STEM degree is too "hard". Engineering students indicate that they are working constantly and still struggle to understand basic STEM concepts. In order to address the first-year exodus, higher education must shift its attention to providing educational mechanisms that focus on helping students enhance their understanding of basic STEM concepts. By understanding we mean a deep-seated knowledge that has become deep-rooted in a student's way of thinking and that they can comfortably use when solving problems. The focus of our paper is to provide a new set of fundamental ideas from which one can re-direct the conversation about the educational needs of first-year STEM students. We are proposing a bold new direction that embraces a rich empirical theory from the field of cognitive development called, dynamic skill theory. Our objective is to transform the current status quo in first-year engineering education where students say, "It's too hard," to where they say, "I get it." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]