Analysis of Variation in Student Success in Engineering Degrees among Several Institutions

As the nation’s institutions struggle to broaden participation and diversity across STEM fields to underrepresented minority (URM) students, there are certain universities who have a track record of being more successful in granting STEM degrees to URG students than others. The purpose of this project through the collaboration of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the American Society on Engineering Education – ASEE will be to explore the successful institutional practices of 3 institutions.

The investigators will specifically focus on the equity-based policies and practices that the institutions have in place as it pertains to engineering degrees awarded to URM students. The work is an outgrowth of the 2018 Status Report on Engineering Education NSF award EEC-1734899 and particularly its first report entitled A Snapshot of Diversity in Degrees Conferred in Engineering.

That project identified significant variations across large research institutions, MSIs and all other institutions in their success in the number of engineering degrees they awarded to URM students. As a result of the previous analysis, the investigators will also focus on the strategic variations across the campuses and will be looking to identify the similarities and diversifications of unique procedures, policies and practices.

Finally, the investigators would analyze the timing of the adoption of these procedures, policies, and practices against the trend in degree completion for those institutions drawing on the ASEE database of degrees, disaggregated by URM students.

This project will examine the key question of, “Can we identify specific equity focused policies and practices to explain variation among institutions in undergraduate engineering degrees awarded to URM students?” The approach will be based on a potentially productive partnership between the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the American Society on Engineering Education – ASEE. In short, the target institutions would be selected from the APLU analysis of its prior study on engineering degree completion.

Then for those institutions, we would examine what we know about improvements in education – drawing on the ASEE compilation of notable institutional policies and practices. Finally, we would analyze the timing of the adoption of these changes in practice against the trend in degree completion for those institutions drawing on the ASEE longitudinal data base of degrees, disaggregated by URM students.

Results of this work might be helpful to a broad swath of STEM education projects. Perhaps most notably, the CAHSI (Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions), First2 Network and Seas INCLUDES Alliances are all attempting to enhance the success of URM students in undergraduate STEM majors. Further identification of the institutional changes that are more powerful levers for student success might be helpful to these and other education improvement efforts.

The broader impacts could provide potential relationships among specific policies and practices to improve education success with increases in degrees gained by URM students over time – while this study focuses on engineering degrees, the approach and understanding of success of practices could carry over to other disciplines. Lastly, the broader impact could create a potential long-term partnership for educational improvement for URG students between APLU, with its overall institutional members, and ASEE with its discipline-based college members.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.