2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering student recruitment and retention are crucial elements to encouraging the growth of the field of engineering. To this end, much research has been done on why engineering students attrite from engineering disciplines. A question oft left unanswered, however, is where these students go when they leave engineering. A similarly limited amount of research has been done on where students come from when transferring into engineering or on the behavior of students transferring between different engineering disciplines. In this study, a historical data set of student unit records (MIDFIELD) is used to identify common transfer paths students follow when entering or leaving Industrial Engineering (IE) degree programs. This includes when students are transferring from non-engineering programs into IE, transferring from IE to non-engineering programs, or changing degree programs to or from IE while remaining within engineering. It was found that IE was far more commonly the destination for degree program transfers, rather than the origin, both within engineering and in general. Fields which often led to IE included Electrical Engineering and Chemical Engineering as well as Business and Computer Science. However, when students did transfer out of IE, they were much more likely to be leaving engineering entirely than changing to a different engineering discipline. Further, it was found that when students transferred out of IE into a non-engineering field, Business was the field of choice for nearly 50% of students. Knowing where incoming students come from allows engineering educators to target recruitment efforts towards where those efforts will be most effective while knowing where students transfer to when they attrite from industrial engineering enables tailored retention efforts. Alternatively, this information can be used to encourage conversation about how student needs are met by different departments and supports inter-departmental communication about student achievement.