Student Strategies for Protecting Merit-Based Scholarships: Grades, Courseload, and Major Choice

The effects of merit-based scholarships on engineering students are studied by relating the GPA, credit load, and retention rates of engineering student merit-based scholarship recipients and students who met the same SAT and high school GPA criteria but did not receive the scholarship because it was not offered at the time of their enrollment. Student record data for 10,167 engineering students at three institutions in the state of Florida from 1987 to 2002 are extracted from a nine-institution database with student records data from 1987 to 2002 compiled by the Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) and used to examine the differences between the two groups of students in terms of GPA, semester credit hours, and percent leaving engineering over time. The comparisons reveal evidence that merit-based scholarships led students to adopt three strategies for retaining their scholarships: scholarship students tended to have higher average GPAs, tended to take fewer credit hours, and were more likely to leave engineering than similar students matriculating prior to the implementation of the scholarship program