Recent Research: Is the Notion of a High Engineering Student Dropout Rate a Myth?

Common wisdom says engineering is hard and a high proportion of engineering students, particularly female engineering students, changes majors during the course of their time in college. A recent study suggests just the opposite actually is true.

An analysis of 310,000 university students found undergraduates who begin their studies as engineers are more likely to remain within their major over time compared to students who begin their studies within other majors. Additionally, engineering students were comparable to students in other majors in terms of women remaining within their major, minorities remaining within major, and grade distribution.

The research appears in an article by Matthew Ohland, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, and his colleagues titled Persistence, Engagement, and Migration in Engineering Programs in the Journal of Engineering Education. The article received the 2009 William Elgin Wickenden Award for best paper by the American Society for Engineering Education.

There are challenges, however, to increasing the number of engineering degrees awarded, the researchers found: engineering is the field with the smallest percentage of student migration from other majors, when compared to migration rates into other majors. Also, a lower percentage of females begin their undergraduate studies in engineering than in other fields.

To improve the number of students graduating with engineering degrees, the research suggests universities need to develop policies that encourage and facilitate student migration into engineering programs.

Inside the Data
The study found 57 percent of students who began their college experience in engineering were still enrolled in engineering in their eighth, and possibly final, semester. This is higher than the retention rate at the eighth semester within business (55%), the social sciences (51%), arts and humanities (50%), other science, technology and math fields (41%), and computer science (38%).

The picture changes, however, if one looks back on the degree path students followed to get to their eighth semester. Ninety-three percent of the engineering students in their eighth semester began their studies as engineers (meaning only 7 percent migrated from other majors), for other science/technical fields and computer science, between 59-50 percent of those in the eighth semester started in the same major (meaning they attracted 40 percent of their seniors to the field.) In the social sciences and the arts and humanities, a full 60 percent of their students in the eighth semester of their studies began their studies in another or undeclared major.

The authors found students leaving engineering are most likely to relocate to business, followed by other technical and scientific fields, followed by majors in the social sciences. More than 21 percent of the students who began in engineering either permanently or temporarily dropped out of school or moved to another institution.

The authors' dataset, covering a 13-year period, captured one-twelfth of the U.S. graduate population. While this review looked at retention and migration patterns for engineers and other majors, the journal article also covers alternative datasets to analyze programs and methods to engage engineering students.

Persistence, Engagement, and Migration in Engineering Programs is available at:

http://www.asee.org/publications/jee/upload/2008_Wickenden_Award_Paper.pdf