2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A critical issue within the field of civil engineering is building a diverse workforce to serve as the next generation of civil engineers. Among the subfields of civil engineering, pavement engineering lags substantially behind in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Furthermore, most civil engineering curricula do not cover pavement engineering extensively; often it is simply a week worth of classes during an introductory transportation course. A recent survey by the National Asphalt Pavement Association (NAPA) indicated that only 20% of the general public and 23% of educators believe that road construction “has a diverse, inclusive culture” (NAPA, 2020). Previous studies have demonstrated student competitions as an effective supplemental tool to also build interest and improve learning outcomes in a specific field of engineering. The target population for this project are undergraduate students, with a particular focus on undergraduate students from underrepresented groups. The desired outcome of this project is to generate interest among these undergraduate students to explore careers and graduate study in the field of pavement engineering. Another outcome is to expose students in general to the research process and how to get involved in undergraduate research and later apply to graduate school. In addition, we hope to provide a framework for a low barrier to entry competition which can be replicated in other regions of the country but does not require participating universities to have extensive laboratory or computational facilities. In fact, this framework may be replicable at the high school level in future competitions. This paper presents a literature review on the effectiveness and current gaps in terms of studies related to student competitions, and then presents the framework of the Asphalt Road-eo competition thus far, including obtaining sponsors and securing participation of student groups on our campuses and other campuses.