The Dynamics of Attracting Switchers: A Cross-Disciplinary Comparison

Many retention studies focus on which students enter engineering or how long engineering students persist. We propose studying an alternate pathway, students who switch into engineering from other majors. Examining such pathways reveals a previously understudied aspect of the engineering pipeline and may be leveraged through institutional policies and programs designed for attracting engineering students from other fields. Survival analysis is a longitudinal statistical method used to analyze the time at which people experience an event, rates of event experience over some measure of time, as well as cases that do not experience an event. Our study implemented discrete survival analysis of a subset of a database comprising more than 1,000,000 unique students. For our current research, we use a sample population of first-time in college (FTIC) students initially matriculating into nonengineering disciplines in two years with population of ~55,000 at nine institutions. The event of interest is switching into engineering and time is measured in terms enrolled. We compare the results for engineering to two other broad colleges, science, technology and math and social science, to better understand the dynamics and context of attraction into engineering through contrast and comparison. Our preliminary results show that the attraction rates for engineering are lower than both STM and social science. Furthermore, the pool of students who abstain from switching is greatest for engineering, and significantly less for STM and social science. These findings are consistent with other studies using the same database, which gives confidence that the model was constructed properly.