Study: No high engineering dropout rate

Sciences found that a federal effort is urgently needed to bolster U.S. competitiveness and pre-eminence in engineering and science. Meanwhile, emerging nations such as India and China far outstrip the U.S. production of engineers. One reason for the lack of migration into engineering is that institutions usually do not provide universal prerequisites, such as calculus, which can be applied to engineering, Ohland said.

“At one institution in the database, everybody takes the same calculus course,” Ohland said. “There isn’t calculus for business, or calculus for the life sciences, and this makes it much easier for students to transfer to engineering later in their academic careers. Most institutions, unfortunately, don’t do it this way, meaning you’d have to take calculus over again if you wanted to transfer into engineering, and this discourages students from switching.”

Some of the findings were reported in 2008, and newer findings have been accepted for publication in a future issue of the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering.

“The findings in both of these papers are counterintuitive,” Ohland said. “People naturally assume there is a female persistence problem because only about 20 percent of undergraduate engineering students are women.” By comparison, women earn more than half of bachelor’s degrees in psychology, agricultural sciences, biological sciences, chemistry and social sciences. “The problem of few women in engineering, however, is one of recruitment, not retention,” Ohland said. “The problem is complex and is certainly affected by engineering’s culture. It is likely that engineering cannot attract significantly more women unless the profession changes. Rather, a critical step in attracting more women to engineering is to accept women as they are and to be excited about how the engineering profession might be different if it were more gender balanced.”

The database only includes institutions in the southeast because the partnership to collect the data was first formed there. Future work will include institutions in other geographical areas, but Ohland said there is no reason to assume results from other regions won’t be similar.

“Certainly, we expect to see differences at private institutions, particularly those with low enrollments, but large public institutions probably all have similar behaviors,” Ohland said. “These data should not give people the impression that persistence in engineering education isn’t a concern. Yes, engineering retains students as well as other majors, but that might be because we pay so much attention to engineering retention.”

The 2008 findings earned Ohland’s team the William Elgin Wickenden Award for best paper from the Journal of Engineering Education. The award was issued by the American Society for Engineering Education in June 2009.

The database was created in 1996, and Ohland began managing it in 1998 while a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida.