2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Complete Evidence-Based Practice Paper details steps taken to improve retention of students in a new undergraduate engineering program. The effort to improve retention began in the 2018-19 academic year after strikingly poor results for first- year students that entered the program in the previous year. It was also part of a campus-wide effort to improve the retention of all undergraduate students.
Only 53% of the first-year students who indicated an interest in studying engineering in the fall of 2017 returned to the college for the 2018-19 academic year. This compared poorly to the college-wide retention of that cohort which was 79%. Of those who returned, 38% continued to study engineering. This amounted to a retention rate of 20% in engineering after one year. Obviously, to have a sustainable program, this needed to change.
Several changes were made to improve retention, both in terms of retaining students in engineering and, failing that, at least retaining them as students at the college. The first change, implemented with first-year students in the fall of 2018 was implementation of a math placement exam which allowed the college to place a student into either College Algebra, Pre-Calculus or Calculus I in their first semester rather than putting all engineering students directly into Calculus I as was done in fall 2017.
A second change was the modification of the engineering curriculum based on best practices seen at other engineering programs for improving retention. This included decreasing the pre-requisites for the first required course in the program – an Introduction to Engineering and Design and redesignating it from a 200-level to a 100-level course. Coupled with the placement of a zero prerequisite Exploring Engineering course in the fall semester, the Introduction to Engineering and Design course in the winter semester ensured sustained exposure of incoming students to the Engineering faculty and their engineering classmates throughout their first year of college.
A third change was implemented in the fall of 2020. That was the intentional grouping of first-year engineering students in FY101, a college success course that was led by an Engineering faculty member and a peer mentor who was a returning engineering student. In the past, engineering students were mixed in with other first-year students in an FY101 course taught by non-Engineering faculty. Since the FY101 course instructor serves as the academic advisor of first year students, this change ensured that engineering students were advised by engineering faculty from their first day on campus. The use of a seasoned engineering student as a peer mentor ensured that first-year students would have a connection to a student who had “been through the ropes” before them.
All of these engineering-focused efforts were coupled with college-wide efforts at improving retention which included an increase in staffing for the college’s academic success/tutoring center, a re-design of the first-year college success course that put increased emphasis on building a sense of community and belonging and narrowed the objectives to aiding students in becoming strategic learners, exploring and reflecting on their skills, interests and abilities and developing tools and strategies for navigating social and professional situations.
The data show that the combined efforts of the engineering program and the college academic success team have resulted in the retention of first-year engineering students growing to 82% for the class of 2026 cohort (based on students remaining enrolled at the college) and to 73% based on students remaining in Engineering courses. The 82% level compares well with the college-wide retention rate for the class of 2026 which was 83%. The 73% level represents more than a 50-percentage point improvement over the retention rate for the class of 2021.
Detailed descriptions of each of the efforts mentioned above will be provided in the paper along with a discussion of other factors that may have impacted retention rates.