Disciplinary Differences in Engineering Students' Aspirations and Self-Perceptions

Abstract

In discussions of the recruitment and retention of engineering majors, students are sometimes treated as a homogeneous group with respect to the necessary preparation for college, their career values, and their aspirations despite the diversity of opportunities and specialties across disciplines.Moreover, initiates just starting their post-secondary education in engineering may not perceive disciplines as practitioners do: they may identify and find affinity for features of an engineering specialty that may be different from actual practice.This paper conducts a comparative analysis of students at the start of their engineering studies using data drawn from a nationally-representative survey, conducted in 2011, of 6772 students enrolled at 50 colleges and universities in the U.S. By identifying students intending to major in eight different disciplines (bio-, chemical, civil, electrical/computer, environmental, industrial/systems, materials, and mechanical engineering), we show how student goals, values and self-perceptions differ.Regression analysis is used to study how the likelihood of entering one of these eight disciplines is associated to career outcome expectations, students' self-beliefs around their science, physics, and math identities, and constructs measuring their personal and global science agency.Results indicate that students intending to major in engineering show substantial interdisciplinary distinctions in the investigated domains.The utility of this work is that it should help to guide more effective recruiting of students into engineering disciplines and allow for a broadening of recruitment efforts to students who would normally be overlooked for engineering careers.

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