2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The demand for engineers and other STEM related occupations is increasing, yet universities are currently having difficulties with the recruitment and retention of students to their engineering programs. Currently there is limited research concerning how and why students choose certain engineering degrees, which becomes an issue as universities compete to draw in more students through innovative engineering programs. Recently at a few universities, there has been an emergence of new engineering majors which incorporate additional science and liberal arts education with traditional engineering curricula. These new types of multidisciplinary engineering degrees have the potential to increase the number of students that enter into the engineering field and stay in their selected major. Despite the possible benefit of increased retention, few universities currently offer these multidisciplinary programs, with limited published literature concerning the success of these engineering majors. Studying multidisciplinary engineering students’ rationales as to why they pick their certain combinations will give insight into what engineering programs can adjust to better serve the intentions and expectations of the students.

This research paper uses a mixed-methods approach to examine why students combine traditional engineering fields with other certain areas of study (e.g. science, economics, linguistics, etc.). Factors that will be examined include the student’s interest in their engineering field and outside area of study, the student’s past experiences that influenced their decision to choose their engineering field and outside area of study, the student’s characteristics and relationships (e.g. family, mentors, peers) that influenced their decision to combine an engineering field and outside area of study, and how the student’s projected future outcomes influenced their decision. Additionally, this paper will address how well multidisciplinary engineering programs are meeting the needs of their students by querying how their engineering field and outside area of study will help them in their future career goals. The students will be asked to consider whether or not they feel prepared as engineers by incorporating the additional field of study.

This study will employ two data collection techniques: aggregating online attitudinal survey data as well as analyzing data from focus groups. The results of the surveys will be quantitatively analyzed using descriptive statistics and statistical comparison to evaluate trends in the students’ responses. The focus groups will then allow for additional qualitative context to clarify the survey data on the students’ decisions for choosing multidisciplinary engineering and their engineering field and outside area of study. Combining the results from the survey questionnaire and focus groups will allow for a detailed analysis into the questions posed by the study. This analysis will help reveal important patterns about studying engineering concurrently with other fields that can then be used to support other engineering colleges to grow their multidisciplinary offerings and increase recruitment of talented students.