2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Significant changes were implemented into the senior design capstone course for civil and environmental engineering students over the course of an eleven-year period from academic year (AY) 2012–2013 to AY 2023–24. This course now takes place over two semesters in the final AY of the undergraduate programs for civil and environmental engineering students. Major year-over-year changes made – against which experiences and outcomes were measured – included the instructors reducing group sizes and increasing the number of external mentors involved in the class, altering project deliverable targets, and implementing more frequent external mentor meetings; the instructors doubling the frequency of peer evaluations and time sheet graded feedback to students and also setting aside dedicated in-class time for external mentors to market themselves and their companies; and the instructors adding general contractors (GCs) as external mentors to the course, supplementing the civil and environmental designed-focused mentors in the course.
Measured outcomes from the changes in the senior capstone course included student experience as measured via formal, anonymous, and university-administered course and instructor feedback (CIF) surveys and instructor-administered course-specific surveys; mentor experience as measured via instructor-administered course-specific surveys; and student and employer (i.e., “student-employment”) experience as measured by instructor-administered course-specific surveys, specifically the proportion of students who ultimately accepted employment offers from mentors’ companies, and reported starting salaries with year-over-year increases that improved relative to salaries from previous civil and environmental engineering graduates and also generally outpaced college, industry, and national trends.
The changes made to the case study capstone course represent an apprenticeship-style learning experience historically associated with construction trades. Thus, the relevance of this study to the civil engineering community applies to both academics and professionals as the measured outcomes due to changes made in the case study capstone course represent “real-world” early-career impacts on students and their employers. Senior capstone is an excellent forum to measure the effects of course changes since most students in this program enter the workforce almost immediately after the completion of the capstone, thus providing some control to the experiment. Provisional conclusions from the measured outcomes include improved student experience in CIF surveys, improved and now consistent mentor experience despite the heavier time demands, increasing rates of students accepting positions with employers who participated in the senior capstone course, and starting student salaries with year-over-year increases that generally outpace college, industry, and national trends.