2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this research paper is to capture reasons engineering graduate students enroll in and persist through their graduate degrees. Graduate enrollment literature has largely focused on undergraduate students’ perceptions of graduate education and has also characterized the factors, including research experience, high self-efficacy, and math proficiency, that contribute to undergraduate students’ intentions to pursue a graduate degree. Few studies, however, have explored how the reasons and motivations graduate students say they had for enrolling in a graduate program compare with the reasons that they have for persisting. From the perspective of Expectancy-Value Theory, we posit that in order to persist in graduate engineering programs, it is important to know what students expected and valued in the past when enrolling in graduate programs and the current value they place on an advanced degree. Given that graduate engineering enrollment is a critical issue for national competitiveness in industry and academia and given volatile trends in graduate enrollment through and after the pandemic and current political climates, particularly for international students in the last five years, it is important to understand why today’s graduate engineering students enroll in school and how enrollment and persistence motivations are related.
To this end, we describe the reasons students indicate for enrolling and persisting in engineering graduate programs in this paper. We report quantitative results of a nationwide study of n=1084 engineering graduate students enrolled in Master’s and PhD programs in the United States. As part of the survey, participants were asked two separate questions, using pre-determined lists of options, to determine i) why they chose to enroll in their program and ii) why they are persisting through their program. They were also asked to rank their choices for each question in order of most contributing to least contributing factor. The descriptive statistics presented here provide a deeper understanding as to why students originally decided to attend graduate school and why they are currently persisting. In this paper, we also explore the patterns in this data with regard to gender, race/ethnicity, and year in graduate program. While results indicate that students’ main reason for both original enrollment and continued persistence was to continue learning specialized knowledge, this was a more dominant rationale for originally pursuing a graduate degree. Our data also show that participants’ reasons for persisting in a graduate degree are more varied than the original reasons that they enrolled, indicating that graduate engineering students’ experiences are causing them to change their perspectives on why they should continue in school. This paper is one of the first to explore why graduate students are deciding to enroll in engineering programs and to understand how enrollment and persistence relate.