2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This critical theory and arts-based research methods paper’s purpose is to generate awareness of how institutional prestige seeking may shape underrepresented STEM students’ experiences and wellbeing during their education. Scholars in engineering education have identified high rates of mental health issues among engineering students (e.g., Beddoes and Danomitz, 2022) and have called for a movement away from a culture of stress to a culture of wellness (e.g., Jensen, 2021). To move toward such a culture we need to better understand the institutional mechanisms that keep a culture of stress intact and difficult to transform. Our paper re-examines the critical qualitative data and creative content from a culturally responsive participatory study with female undergraduate STEM students with multiple intersecting underrepresented identities. The study used a unique conceptual framework called creative materialism that included individual semi-structured conversational interviews, weekly participant journal entries, and arts-based research methods with participant-generated creative content of poetry, drawing, painting, and photography as well as a focus group.

In the process of exploring their own experience of socialization into the culture of engineering during their education at an engineering-focused institution in the western U.S. (the initial broad purpose for the study), the students identified institutional prestige seeking as a structural mechanism linked to rigid notions of rigor that harms student well-being. Findings in the original study indicated that notions of extreme rigor in engineering culture seem to unnecessarily exacerbate the culture of stress, which can in turn contribute to declines in student mental health. This paper further maps these participants' perspectives on how institutional prestige seeking and student mental health are interconnected. Multiple broader implications emerged from our analysis, including that in the quest to reduce student stress, engineering education scholars and practitioners may have overlooked links among institutional prestige seeking, cultural notions of rigor, stress, and student mental health. That is, we may have danced around the curriculum–focusing research and intervention efforts in student enrichment experiences, student clubs, and more. Although those extracurricular efforts remain worthwhile areas of inquiry, we suggest that more attention must be paid to how curriculum and pedagogy are entangled with institutional prestige seeking and the resulting fixation on rigor and possible significant mental health consequences. Also, since issues of stress can disproportionately affect students with multiple minoritized, intersecting identities (Cech, 2022; CCMH, 2024), a related implication is that diversity and inclusion efforts should also pay attention to how institutional prestige seeking and the resultant “rigor” in the curriculum can disproportionately affect underrepresented students in engineering education.