Work in Progress: An Initial Assessment of the Effect of the First Year Experience on Under-Represented Student Retention in Engineering

Research indicates that under-represented students of color, especially Latino/a and African American students, and women (hereafter collectively referred to as URS) do not enter in the engineering disciplines in numbers commensurate with their enrollments in other courses of study within the University. In addition, some of the URS who initially enroll in freshman-level engineering courses fail to persist in the discipline. The challenge, therefore, is to determine what changes in the climate and/or engineering curriculum might encourage greater numbers of URS to enroll and persist. The goal of this project is to establish an inventory of student retention data for URS in engineering at the University of Michigan to determine the likelihood of persistence based on an evaluation of student intentions upon enrollment, deliberateness of course choices and perceptions of the first year experience. The objective is to follow the trajectories of students based upon their initial choices and intentions and to seek patterns of difference in female and under-represented minority students. This work-in-progress presents a summary of the initial findings of this investigation