Familial Influences Affecting Student Pathways to Engineering at Two-Year and Four-Year Institutions

Improving retention rates of engineering students in higher education has been a nationwide goal aimed at expanding and diversifying the engineering workforce. Initial mathematics placement in institutions is a major predictor for attrition, with 52% of students from two-year institutions starting below calculus as opposed to 14.4% of students from fouryear institutions starting below calculus. Consequently, national data shows that the attrition rate for engineering students at two-year institutions is 69% while the attrition rate for engineering students at four-year institutions is 37%. As the prevalence of students taking an indirect path towards completing an engineering degree increases, the examination of those students’ pathways towards an engineering degree is necessary. In the SC:SUPPORTED project, we conducted focus groups with students from two-year and four-year institutions across the state of South Carolina. Themes related to academic influence, social influence and family influence emerged from analysis of the focus group data. Within family influences, which are the ways family members affect a student’s persistence in education, choice of major, and choice of institution, there were differences between students attending two-year institutions and those attending four-year institutions. Family members include parents, siblings, other relatives, and also “fictive” family. The goal of this paper is to discuss the factors that influence why students choose engineering and choose to attend a twoyear or four-year institution. Introduction: The national need to expand and diversify the engineering workforce has led to multiple research initiatives to examine the cause of high attrition rates and to improve engineering programs [1, 2]. Multiple studies have reported that high attrition rates can be attributed to teaching and advising [3, 4], curriculum and coursework [5], and lack of feeling of belonging in these engineering programs [6, 7]. Despite efforts at the post-secondary level such as incorporating active learning [8], revamping the course curriculum [9], and stressing the importance of mentoring and advising [10], attrition rates remain high [11]. Underlying many of the observed issues at the post-secondary level is insufficient mathematical preparation in high school. Entering engineering students whose initial college math placement is below calculus complete their engineering degrees at half the rate of those who start in calculus or higher [12]. Past research indicates the importance of family in influencing different aspects of students’ academics. For example, it was found that students taking an indirect path to a four-year institution are more likely to have their parents involved academically by monitoring schoolwork and influencing the student’s academic plans [13]. Additionally, students at two-year institutions who subsequently transferred to a four-year institution had, on average, a higher socioeconomic status than those who did not transfer to a four-year institution [13]. Specifically related to parental influences, parental behaviors were found to be related to a student’s career decisionmaking self-efficacy, or how strongly the student believes that they can complete the necessary tasks to make career decisions, indicating that adolescents valued their parent’s career-related opinions [14]. Parents were also found to play an important role in shaping the mathematical ability of young adolescents [15], which is important as mathematics courses serve as gatekeepers to engineering degrees. Unequal access to social capital, due in part to parental educational occupation and attainment, can impact how engineering students experience education [16]. Another study found that first year engineering students who leave their engineering programs in good academic standing had been influenced by their family to study engineering. These students were seen to have been influenced more by family than students who stayed in engineering [17]. The term fictive family refers to a person who is not a family member, but who acts in some ways as a family member to the person. Simmons and Martin emphasized the importance of “engineering fictive kin,” referred to in this study as a fictive family, in influencing firstgeneration college students in engineering. Fictive kin guide the student and explain what engineering is; encourage, discuss, and/or aid the student in finding a job; suggest academic resources to help the student; aid in selecting courses to take; and provide other academic guidance [18]. Engineering fictive kin were able to increase feeling of belonging to engineering, instill confidence in major choice selection, impact persistence in engineering, and develop an engineering related network for students [18]. Previous work on family and fictive family influences, however, has not looked at differences in initial math course placement or persistence in major between students at two-year institutions and students at four-year institutions. This gap in the literature is particularly meaningful since national data shows that the attrition rate for engineering students at two-year institutions is 69% while the attrition rate for engineering students at four-year institutions is 37% [11]. Initial mathematics placement is a major predictor for attrition, with 52% of students from two-year institutions starting below calculus as opposed to 14.4% of students from four-year institutions starting below calculus [19, 20]. This presents a significant issue for diversity in engineering, since Black and Hispanic students nationally are overrepresented at two-year institutions and underrepresented at four-year institutions [11]. We see similar patterns of lack of representation in South Carolina as we do nationally. Specifically, 27.35% of the state population is Black and 5.34% is Hispanic. At two-year institutions in the state with ABET-accredited engineering programs, 29.7% of students are Black and 5.8% are Hispanic. Meanwhile, at four-year institutions in the state with ABET-accredited engineering programs, 18.8% of students are Black, and 4.2% are Hispanic (Figure 1) [21, 22, 23]. Thus, understanding the differences in factors affecting two-year students versus four-year students will provide insight into increasing diversity in engineering within the state. Figure 1: Bar graph of percentages for Blacks in the South Carolina population, at two-year institutions, and at fouryear institutions. Bar graph of percentages for Hispanics in the South Carolina population, at two-year institutions, and at four-year institutions. The SC:SUPPORTED project examined the factors associated with initial mathematics course placement at a statewide level using a sequential mixed methods approach. In this paper, we report qualitative results drawn from focus group data. Three types of influences affecting mathematics placement and major selection emerged: family influences, academic influences, and social influences. In this study, we define family influence as “the ways family members affect a student’s persistence in education, choice of major, or choice of institution. ” Family members included parents, siblings, other relatives, and fictive family [18]. Within the three major themes emerging from the focus group data, family influences stood out because there were more transparent differences between students attending two-year institutions and four-year institutions. The goal of this paper is to discuss the differences in family influences affecting engineering degree paths between students attending two-year and four-year institutions. Methods: The results from this paper are a part of a larger study that included 20 institutions with ABET-accredited engineering programs in South Carolina. The study utilized a sequential mixed methods design that is described in greater detail elsewhere [24]. The results we report here are from qualitative analysis of data from the first rounds of focus groups conducted at twoyear and four-year institutions. Additional focus groups were conducted subsequent to this analysis and are not discussed in this paper. 27.35% 29.70%