2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this paper we consider how curricular complexity varies according to academic discipline, both broadly across the wide variety of fields in higher education, and more narrowly within the engineering discipline and specific engineering sub-disciplines. This work involved collecting and analyzing all of the undergraduate curricula associated with all of the undergraduate programs at thirty different universities. The universities involved inthis study included a broad cross-section of R1 and R2 institutions, as well as two HBCUs, located in sixteen different states. We first describe the curricular complexity metric used in this study. Next, we consider all curricula across all of the institutions involved in this study, and we show that most curricula are distributed at the lower end of the complexity scale with relatively fewer at the higher end of this scale; moreover, this distribution has a long right-skewed tail. Furthermore, many of the high-complexity programs in the tail correspond to engineering programs. Given the long tail associated with the distribution of data in our study, the average curricular complexity value is easily skewed by a small number of highly complex curricula. Thus, any statements made regarding the average curricular complexity value at a particular institution, or across any collection of institutions, when all disciplines are considered, should be considered highly unreliable. However, if we instead disaggregate programs according to discipline, the long tail behavior is significantly moderated, and interesting distributions emerge. By characterizing the features of these distributions, it becomes possible to make quantitative and comparative statements about the complexities of particular disciplines, including engineering. By further disaggregating according to engineering sub-disciplines, we obtain distributions that resemble well known distributions, such as the gamma distribution. This provides a means, for the first time, to meaningfully compare and contrast the curricular complexity of the engineering field to those in other fields, as well as the complexities of the sub-disciplines within the engineering field, e.g., civil engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, etc.