Collaborative Research: Understanding the Role of High Schools in Diversifying and Promoting Undergraduate Engineering Degree Attainment

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The proportions of women, African American/Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American students earning degrees in engineering at U.S. institutions have remained relatively stagnant in the last ten years. Yet, the United States' need for a larger and more diverse scientific and technological labor force continues to grow. Increasing the number and diversity of students pursuing engineering degrees is an important strategy to help meet the nation's workforce demands. The objective of this research project is to examine students' pathways from high school through college to determine high school level factors that predict college engineering degree attainment. Examining the role of high schools is especially critical because pre-college academic preparation is a key contributor to college academic success, and because many students tend to decide to pursue an engineering degree before applying to colleges. The results of this research have the potential to significantly advance our understanding of students' college preparation, major choice, and likelihood of graduating with an engineering degree. Key stakeholders can apply findings from this research to inform strategies and refocus educational interventions to increase female and minority students' participation in engineering. This research project applies an institutional perspective to identify high school structural factors that play a role in the longitudinal patterns of academic engineering achievement among students, with a focus on variation across gender and race/ethnicity. The high school structural factors to be examined include: the availability of math and science courses and an engineering-inspired curriculum, proximity to colleges with engineering programs, demographic composition and characteristics of the student body, and access to information about postsecondary education attendance and likelihood of success (e.g., student college-going rates). The research team will apply econometric methods, including regression and instrumental variables approaches, to analyze an extended panel of administrative micro data from the Missouri Department of Higher Education, which will be merged with data from the United States Census and the Common Core of Data provided by the National Center of Education Statistics. The multidisciplinary research team from engineering education, public policy, and economics will integrate their content knowledge, multiple theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches to generate a boundary-spanning examination of diversity, student access, and engineering achievement to advance the research literature and promote policy design for a wide range of academic and applied audiences. Thus, the project will generate evidence that stakeholders and policymakers in school districts, higher education institutions, and government agencies can apply to help remove obstacles, target resources, and create partnerships that can potentially lead to larger scale, systemic transformations in the pathways to engineering education.