2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

On 15 November 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) became public law, providing $1.2 trillion of new funding for all 17 categories of infrastructure detailed in ASCE’s Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. While the passage of this law was a needed investment into our infrastructure's safety and improved resilience, it highlighted a glaring gap in the U.S. engineering and construction workforce. Some estimate that the design and execution of infrastructure under the IIJA will require 82,000 additional engineers! The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published employment for civil engineers will grow by 6 percent over the next ten years. Universities must attract and develop more civil engineers to meet the needs of society! However, with only 24% of high school seniors in the U.S. proficient in mathematics and 22% proficient in science, civil engineering programs at universities must be intentional about investing both time and resources to attract top talent from a small pool. Further, programs within each university are often fighting for talent as university resources (funding, staffing, and space sharing), especially for those in financial stress, are often tied to the number of students within each program. Thus, for a number of reasons, it behooves academic departments to invest in the process of recruiting students to their programs. Developing an understanding of why students choose a particular academic major and when students make their academic major decisions is helpful for departments to ensure they are investing in effective recruiting activities and the timing of those activities.

Multiple studies have been conducted to investigate the various factors that influence the “why” behind a student’s choice of academic major. Many of those studies have focused on the choice of engineering as an academic major. A prior investigation by the authors of the current study looked at the specific factors that lead students to select the civil engineering major. While the “why” of selection has been extensively studied, the timing, or the “when,” has not been previously investigated within the civil engineering discipline and has seen only limited study within more broadly focused choices of academic majors.

The scholarly paper proposed in this abstract will detail a study structured around the research question of “when do students at one academic institution select the civil engineering major?” This study will build off the previously mentioned study that investigated why students select the civil engineering major. The proposed paper will provide a detailed description of the subject academic institution, the instrument used to collect data, and the student population. Background information and a literature review focused on the research question will be presented. The study’s findings and conclusions will be discussed.

This paper will be of interest to all civil engineering programs who want to ensure that they appropriately time their recruiting efforts to maximize student enrollment.