2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this exploratory research study, first-year engineering students were surveyed on their perception of public welfare beliefs, leveraging the work of Erin Cech, who published results in this area over 18 years ago. Throughout their college career, engineering students acquire a wide range of technical skills that serve as the foundation for their future professional endeavors. While technical proficiency is a core focus of engineering education, it is equally important for students to develop essential non-technical skills such as critical thinking, professional development, and ethical reasoning. These skills are vital for a well-rounded engineering career. However, an important question remains: do students themselves recognize the value of these non-technical skills? This paper seeks to answer the question: “How do first-year engineering students’ perceptions of public welfare beliefs differ with exposure to ethics education and student backgrounds, mediated across cultures?” To answer this question, 1675 survey responses were collected from first-year engineering students from the US, Netherlands, and China across 7 universities from 2021-2024. Students’ responses were analyzed using Multi-factor ANOVA testing, interaction plots, and hypothesis testing. Initial results suggest first-year students perceive public welfare beliefs as being more important when they have had some formal ethics education. Additionally, significant differences in the perception of public welfare beliefs were present across gender, country of origin, and religious participation.

The findings from this work can assist engineering educators in designing ethics pedagogy to be more responsive to student backgrounds and perspectives, as well as how to emphasize the importance of professional responsibility to public welfare to early engineering students. This paper is part of a larger NSF-sponsored projects that intends to compare how students develop moral reasoning and intuition longitudinally across the United States, Netherlands, and China.