EAGER: Investigating and Pinpointing the College Success Factors for First-Generation, Underrepresented College Students in Engineering

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Students who are the first-generation in their family to attend college are increasingly the spotlight of educational research and reform seeking to broaden the participation of underrepresented students in higher education in general and engineering in particular. While growing research begins to illuminate the challenges these college students face, this research project attempts to break new grounds by making two key interventions. First, the investigators will apply an intersectional lens to understanding how the multiple dimensions that make a person's identity intersect (e.g., socioeconomic class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, parental status, immigrant status, and rural vs. urban K-12 schooling, etc.) and how this intersection may positively influence the success of first-generation engineering students at various higher education institutional-types. Second, the investigators will take a capabilities approach to study what kinds of opportunities and strategies best support particular kinds of first-generation students, rather than focusing exclusively on their deficiencies and/or treating them as an undifferentiated group. Having this nuanced understanding will provide the foundation for more effective, targeted, and potentially transformative educational reforms to broaden the participation of first-generation students from multiple backgrounds in engineering. By more clearly identifying the factors leading to the success of such students, this research project has the potential to inspire educational transformations in admission decision-making, teaching, advising, and mentoring practices that are all likely to broadening the participation of first-generation students in engineering, especially among women and underrepresented groups in engineering. The investigators will use findings from a pilot ethnographic research on low-income, first-generation students and insights from the growing theoretical and scientific literature on first-generation students to develop a survey that will be given to students and alumni from across the U.S.. This will allow for an intersectional analysis of first-generation students' engineering experiences and the specific variables that contribute to their perseverance and successful entries into the job market and/or graduate school. This project addresses two major limitations of the existing theoretical and scientific research on first-generation students. First, the project will provide between- and within-group comparisons of first-generation students to obtain more nuanced understanding of how multiple factors influence their success in completing engineering degrees and transitioning to the engineering workforce. As the first large-scale intersectional analysis of first-generation student experiences in engineering, the project will add analytic clarity to a field that unevenly considers generational status along with socioeconomic class, race/ethnicity, and gender. It will also advance the literature base by expanding the traditional demographic categories to include those that were salient for students in the preliminary ethnographic research, such as parental or immigrant status. Second, the research will identify if and how opportunities for students to apply their "funds of knowledge" (e.g., developed through their family and work experiences) inside of the engineering curriculum shapes their undergraduate success and graduation transitions. The project's findings will be disseminated to participating institutions, engineering educators at-large, and future generations of first-generation students through faculty and advisors.