Introducing “stickiness” as a versatile metric of engineering persistence

A new metric, “stickiness,” is proposed, tracking longitudinally all students who have contact with a discipline to determine the likelihood those students will “stick” to that discipline and graduate in it. This metric has the versatility to be relevant for students making contact with engineering through a variety of pathways. Stickiness exhibits significant disciplinary differentiation. Whereas earlier work has shown that Industrial Engineering is the most successful at attracting and retaining students, the disciplinary distribution of stickiness shows that Industrial Engineering is exceptional. Disaggregating by race/ethnicity and gender, much larger variations in stickiness are observed (as much as 48 percent), and positive and negative outcomes are identified where students in particular subpopulations are more or less likely to stick than expected. Aggregated by race/ethnicity and gender, the stickiness of transfer students ranks the disciplines in the same order as the stickiness of first-time-in-college students, but transfer stickiness exhibits less disciplinary variation and transfer students in all disciplines exhibit higher stickiness than first-time-in-college students.