2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The field of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) faces a shortage of engineers, while also facing a retention issue in undergraduate engineering programs. The attrition dilemma requires educators to understand why students leave the field, and what steps can be taken to better retain them. Students’ learning experiences play a large part in their decisions to continue in the engineering field, so it is important to learn how a diverse group of students experience education in institutions. The purpose of this literature review is to observe how student learning experiences are observed in engineering education literature, and how these experiences could relate to the retention of students. The review pulled from an unstructured collection of articles related to engineering education and observes what experiences the students have that contribute to their learning of engineering and becoming of an engineer. 15 distinct learning experiences for engineers were observed, and they were categorized into professional communities, personal communities, and academic communities. Professional communities include industry internships and co-ops, research internships, co-curricular activities, interactions with practitioners, and mentorship. Personal communities include familial support, peers within engineering, peers outside engineering, role models, and non-academic responsibilities. The academic communities include institutional culture, program design, curriculum, faculty interactions, and advising. These experiences show connections to many different factors that can affect retention, like identity and motivation and more work is needed to determine the extent to which they impact retention. Overall, the effects of academic communities are pretty widely researched, and much more research is needed in professional communities. These domains could serve as a lens through which to study student learning experiences and explain student attrition.