2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With declining enrollments and increasing competition for students, many universities are turning to social media to outreach to potential students. Social media has been found to perform an essential role in shifting sentiments, moods and overall image a university portrays [1]. This study examines the forward-facing presence of university engineering programs at two public universities. This study uses content and textual analysis and the lenses of occupational demography and feminist post-structuralism to make sense of the messages the programs are portraying to potential students and other stakeholders about the student experience and learning outcomes valued by the university. The study examines social media posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, as well as the university website and publicly accessible policies and curriculum requirements. By examining the messages portrayed on the internet, a sense of the student experience and commitment to the students, in particularly women, can be understood. This is then compared to enrollment data, and student success data to develop a picture of the effectiveness of the social media and if the university’ mission is properly being conveyed. Two large, public universities (R2 and R3) that are primarily teaching focused, Hispanic Serving and with a large population of both first-generation college students as well as Pell grant recipients make up the study.