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Engineering Students Define Diversity: An Uncommon Thread

Abstract

Diversity has come to mean a lot of different things depending on the context in which it is used and the person using it. As a corporate term, diversity evolved out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, it served as a means of penetrating the dominant ethos of many institutions that aimed to preserve the white male culture. More recently, diversity has been used to include an array of conditions that represent people who feel disenfranchised and excluded. Following a path of seeming ambiguity, today’s engineering students have come to embody diversity as an extension of their home, academic and social environments. The result is a group of students that show indifference to diversity (however defined) and the impact it will have on their professional careers.

Using a 4-year longitudinal mixed method approach, the Academic Pathways Study (APS) investigated engineering skills, education, and identity from the first year through their senior years. Four distinct universities recruited 40 of their students each to participate in the study. This paper shares findings from structured interview data elicited from 94 students during their sophomore year. Grounded theory, an inductive, analytical approach was used to develop the concepts that ultimately informed the research. Data both iterative and inconsistent reveal details about how students define diversity and its impact on their undergraduate academic tenure. Further, we explore the impact that gender and race have on sophomore engineering students’ academic experience and engineering identity. Finally, a broad range of divergent and parallel views shed light and provide insights about diversity and its impact on their potential careers as told by a cross section of sophomores from around the United States; yet, these data are not meant to generalize beyond the population from which it was taken. This paper contributes important knowledge to the growing body of literature in engineering education and diversity.

Introduction

Burgeoning research on diversity in engineering consistently reveals that engineering struggles to keep pace with trends in the increasingly growing global marketplace1. Numerous ideas have been put forth as to why student attrition among some groups in science and engineering is so high. Women and minorities who start their engineering education experience higher attrition rates in matriculation and are far more likely to defect to other fields than their white male counterparts2. Critical is the rate and level of preparedness to which women and minorities are exposed that prepares them to succeed in a rigorous engineering program. While other fields like veterinary medicine and the medical field continue to enjoy healthy gains across genders and, albeit a lesser degree, multicultural gains through aggressive recruitment and retention efforts, engineering struggles to achieve and sustain the same momentum3.

For more than twenty years, science and engineering degrees have represented approximately one-third of all baccalaureates awarded, according to the National Science Foundation. In 2002, “women earned more than half of the degrees awarded in psychology (78%), biological/agricultural sciences (59%), and social sciences (55%), and almost half (47%) in

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Fleming, L., & Ledbetter, S., & Williams, D., & McCain, J. (2008, June), Engineering Students Define Diversity: An Uncommon Thread Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3638