2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper, led by an undergraduate civil engineering student, describes the process of creating a survey to understand why engineering students choose their major, recaps the interview process that laid the foundation for the survey, and discusses the expected results of the study. Nearly half of engineering students drop out before graduation, raising questions as to how engineering colleges can improve their retention rates of engineering students. This paper addresses these questions by creating and deploying a survey to understand student motivations behind choosing and staying in engineering. This paper is the second phase of a mixed-methods study, which began with qualitative interviews of 21 undergraduate engineering students with at least one minoritized identity (i.e. women, LGBTQ, first-generation, low-income, student of color, etc.). The analysis of two questions from this protocol, “why did you choose an engineering major,” and “have you ever considered leaving engineering,” informed the development of this survey. These responses were thematically coded to understand the student’s motivation for choosing engineering; (extrinsic and intrinsic motivators), reasons they considered leaving (lack of passion, course challenge, other career interest), and why they chose to stay (original reasons for choosing engineering, growing to love engineering, and total investment). These themes were used to guide items listed in the survey. The survey will collect demographic information of the participants and will also have Likert scale options for questions that reflect choosing, debating, and persisting in engineering; ranking questions; and open-ended questions. The survey will be open to engineering students over 19 years of age in a large, public, land-grant university in the Midwest. The anticipated results will further elaborate on the themes previously reported in our earlier study and will help uncover new trends and themes that are prominent within the college of engineering. We intend the results of this survey to help advertise engineering to incoming freshman as well as pushing professors and administrators to be adaptable to the ever-changing needs of engineering students to improve retention rates in engineering.