Beyond the Numbers: A Deeper Look into the Retention of Female Engineering Students

Understanding the retent ion of women in engineering programs involves more than comparing how many women reach a particular milestone with how many began working toward that milestone. A complete picture of retention should also incorporate the factors that affect retention, exa mining how leavers and stayers differ on multiple levels: who, demographically, leaves and stays; when leavers make the decision to leave; why stayers make the decision to stay; and what programmatic factors most influence retention. At the University of Notre Dame's College of Engineering, the study of the retention of female engineering students uses information from a number of sources to understand the many and varied factors that influence retention: demographics, academic performance, experiential information reported on in-class surveys, a week-by-week review of retention and attrition in the first-year Introduction to Engineering Systems two-course sequence (EG 111/112), and anecdotal information obtained by talking with students. Coupling information gleaned from all of these factors has helped to understand the factors that impact whether a student who begins engineering as a first-year student will remain in engineering at the beginning of sophomore year. For example, pre-college demographic information indicates that retention rates have historically differed between female students who select an engineering major on their application for admission (~60%) and those who select some other major but nonetheless begin the first-year enrolled as an engineering major (~30%). Multiple in-class surveys highlight experiential differences between female and male students. Week-by-week tracking of course drops help to pinpoint course events that discourage some students. Anecdotal information gleaned from interviews with stayers and leavers indicates that female students need to have more opportunities to interact with one another outside of class. Longitudinal comparisons from class to class enhance the understanding of how one class differs from the ne xt in key characteristics. This information has led to significant changes to the first- year engineering program that have improved retention of female students from less than 50 percent to nearly 70 percent in one year. This paper discusses these information-gathering efforts and shows how they led to real systemic changes that have positively impacted the retention of female engineering students.