Student success: what factors influence persistence?

Arizona State University´s (ASU) Office of Minority Engineering Programs (OMEP) has hosted the Minority Engineering Program (MEP) Summer Bridge Program for the past three years. The purpose of the program is to promote greater awareness of and to recruit potential candidates to the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) at ASU as well as to increase the retention rate of these students. In general, the students who participate in the bridge program and the seminar course do much better that those students who participated in neither. By far, the most successful students are those that also participate in tutoring and an integrated curriculum cluster class program. There are many factors that affect whether a student is successful or not. This paper attempts to discover the factors affecting retention through a series of focus group evaluations of the usefulness of the bridge program or the seminar course.