Characterizing Non-Traditional Student Access and Success in Engineering

University Of Louisville Research Foundation Inc, Louisville KY

Investigators

Abstract

Technical Description: The PIs and their students will describe the demographic characteristics and academic pathways taken by nontraditional engineering students?students who enter engineering programs at age 24 or later, commuter students, and part-time students as measured in this study. Nontraditional students have been studied in community colleges and urban universities, but have been rarely studied at public 4-year universities in engineering due to a lack of longitudinal data on individual students. This study uses the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD is a longitudinal, multi-institutional, and multivariate dataset of over 209,737 engineering students. MIDFIELD is large enough to provide a better understanding of nontraditional students in public 4 year universities, identify conditions where they are more numerous and more successful, and explore the conditions that support their success. The focus will be on engineering, rather than the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines combined, because engineering has been shown to have unique characteristics. This study will explore the relationship between nontraditional status and student outcomes of interest, such as graduation in engineering, controlling for other relevant factors. Whereas prior research has ignored or masked the contribution of nontraditional students to graduation statistics, this research focuses on nontraditional status and its associated outcomes. Following the development of descriptive statistics, this will be studied in a multivariate setting, comparing the outcomes of nontraditional students to those of traditional students. Broader significance and importance: Whereas university attendance was once a privilege of a small fraction of upper class white males, the demographics of college classrooms have changed with society's expectations of a larger and more diverse college-bound population. Graduation statistics are typically reported in ways that have not kept up with these changes. The most commonly reported graduation rate statistics, which are taken from the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System maintained by the Department of Education, ignore part-time time students, students who enroll for the first time in spring rather than fall or summer, and students with more than a proscribed minimum number of credits from other higher education institutions. Thus, even as university students have become more diverse, the success of those students is frequently measured using outdated approaches. By including students ignored by typical techniques, this project will provide a more accurate representation of what happens to today's engineering students. More importantly, by studying what happens to those nontraditional students in particular, this project will draw attention to the educational outcomes of a population that currently comprises 10% of student enrollment, but represents some of the fastest growing pathways in US higher education. The work of this project is possible because it uses a special multi-institution database headquartered at Purdue University created to understand the engineering education system and to make it possible to increase the quantity and quality of engineering degree recipients. This research is supported by the Research in Engineering Education Program of the Engineering Education and Centers Division.