2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The current era is marked by an increasing need for a new set of skills, commonly named 21st century skills. Education researchers have recognized this need, as have educational bodies, and economic bodies.

However, fostering 21st century skills in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students remains a challenge, with STEM graduates at times underprepared for what present-day STEM professions require. Preparing students for present-day society and economy requires changes to STEM higher education curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Role models can provide encouragement and promote a sense of belonging and self-efficacy for STEM educational attainment, particularly for individuals who feel connected to the role model. Studies of scientists, physicians, and science and engineering higher education students found that social support, including role models, had promoted their aspirations and achievements.

The New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program was launched as a pilot program in 2017, as an answer to efforts by Massachusetts Institute of Technology to reimagine undergraduate engineering education. An extra-curricular, cross-departmental endeavor with a focus on integrative, experiential learning, the [Program] aims to cultivate the essential skills, knowledge, and qualities engineers of the future will need, to address the formidable challenges posed by the 21st century through interdisciplinary approaches.

MIT undergraduates earn a degree in the major of their choice and a NEET certificate in one of four high-impact cross-departmental tracks in the usual four years: Autonomous Machines, Climate & Sustainability Systems, Digital Cities, and Living Machines. As of October 2023, the canonical number of students registered to NEET is 248 across sophomore, junior, and senior years at MIT.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of NEET on its participants' career readiness, on its own and as compared with another experiential learning program at MIT named UROP (undergraduate research opportunities program).

The research questions (RQs) for this study are as follows:
- RQ1: What were the contributions of NEET and of UROP to the development of participants’ 21st century skills?
- RQ2: What was the importance of 21st century skills for participants’ career success?
- RQ3: What role models, if any, did participants encounter in NEET and outside of it at MIT?
- RQ4: How satisfied are participants in their current role?

We limited this study to the two founding threads of NEET: Autonomous Machines and Living Machines. We chose NEET’s founding threads because they have gone through fewer changes in curriculum in recent years when compared with newer tracks and because they had the largest potential pools of NEET alumni—four cohorts from 2020-2023.

To answer the RQs for this study, we designed an online survey that included the following sections:
- Informed consent to participate in the study (with the option to agree or disagree).
- Demographic details, including census details (ethnicity, gender, etc.) and academic credentials.
- Experience at MIT, which covered items related to career readiness: 21st century skill development and finding role models.
- Current career, which covered items related to career readiness, including a list of 21st century skills.

We used email and social media to reach alumni of NEET, based on existing contact details we had stored previously. As of the date of submitting the manuscript, 16 former alumni of NEET have responded to the online survey.

Since the study sample (N = 16) was not large enough to conduct inferential statistical testing, we provide descriptive statistics instead:
- Development of 21st century skills at NEET when compared with UROP
- Importance of 21st century skills for career success
- Role models encountered at MIT, in NEET and outside of it
- Overall contribution of MIT to career readiness
- Career satisfaction

While this is a work-in-progress, some indications are emerging from the findings thus far. Further study is required to come to definitive conclusions concerning our RQs.

The study's findings that NEET significantly contributes to the development of 21st-century skills, particularly in areas such as collaboration, spoken communication, and engineering design, support the literature's emphasis on the need for education to evolve to prepare students for the modern workforce. This is crucial, because traditional STEM education has often been criticized for not adequately preparing students for real-world, interdisciplinary challenges, emphasizing the need for reform as highlighted by researchers and educational bodies.

The findings related to role models within NEET and the broader university environment echo the theoretical insights which discuss the impact of role models on STEM students: providing students with a sense of belonging and self-efficacy, encouraging and facilitating their professional aspirations, and helping to develop their higher-order thinking skills. Since participants overall found more role models within the program than out of the program, we can point to the added benefit that an experiential learning program such as NEET provides students with opportunities to encounter career role models.

The fact that NEET was reported to enhance certain skills (especially interpersonal and domain-agnostic skills) more effectively than UROP does suggests that different experiential learning formats may be suited to developing different skill sets. This aligns with literature suggesting the need for diverse educational approaches to fully equip students for a range of professional challenges.

The overall positive responses regarding career readiness and satisfaction among participants of NEET suggest that such experiential learning initiatives can play a significant role in enhancing students' perceptions of their preparedness for professional roles. This is particularly relevant given the finding that students’ levels of 21st-century skills do not always correlate with academic achievement, underscoring the importance of practical, hands-on experiences in education.

By providing empirical data on how participation in an experiential learning program influences the development of 21st-century skills, the study adds quantitative evidence to the discourse on the effectiveness of such programs in STEM education.

The study's comparison between NEET and UROP offers insights into how different experiential learning models contribute uniquely to skill development. This comparative approach helps to delineate the specific contributions of interdisciplinary, project-based learning versus research-based learning.

The research underlines the alignment of educational programs with the evolving needs of the STEM industry. By documenting specific skills that are enhanced through participation in NEET, the study supports ongoing discussions about how universities can adapt their curricula to better prepare students for the demands of modern STEM careers.

Finally, the study also contributes methodologically by using a combination of survey items to provide different perspectives on the development of students’ 21st century skills. This provides a template for other educational researchers looking to assess program impacts in a similar context.