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Bringing About Marked Increases in Freshman Engineering Retention

John T. Demel, Robert J. Gustafson, Audeen W. Fentiman, Richard J. Freuler, and John A. Merrill College of Engineering The Ohio State University

Abstract

During the past ten years, The Ohio State University's College of Engineering has moved from a series of separate freshman courses for engineering orientation, engineering graphics, and engineering problem solving with computer programming to a dual offering of integrated course sequences in the Introduction to Engineering Program (IEP) and the Freshman Engineering Honors (FEH) Program. These new programs retain part of the traditional material but add in hands-on laboratory experiences that lead to reverse engineering and design/build projects. The relational practices – teamwork and project management, along with report writing and oral presentations and ethics have assumed important roles in this program. The programs are designed to have faculty from all of the degree granting departments teach freshmen. These programs were developed to improve the retention and early decision to stay or leave for new freshmen and to lay a foundation to better address some of the ABET 2000 accreditation criteria. Retention has improved markedly. This paper provides a brief description of the freshman programs, a summary of changes accomplished, and the retention statistics for the College of Engineering.

Introduction

In 1988, at The Ohio State University the retention of engineering students to the junior year ranged between 40 and 50 percent. See Figure 1. This followed the national norms. In the early 1990’s the Ohio State College of Engineering became part of the NSF funded Gateway Engineering Education Coalition. The other members of the Coalition were Drexel University, Columbia University, Cooper Union, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, University of South Carolina, and Florida International University. One focus of the Coalition’s efforts was to improve retention to the junior year by using Drexel’s integrated E4 curriculum1 as a model to be adapted for use in the other Coalition schools. This paper describes the key components of that adaptation and how they have affected retention at Ohio State University. There are four papers in the ASEE 2001 Annual Conference Proceedings 2, 3,4,5 that describe the components of Ohio State’s First Year Engineering Programs in some detail.

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright Ó 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Demel, J. (2002, June), Bringing About Marked Increases In Freshman Engineering Retention Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10680