INVESTIGATING NARRATIVES OF ATTRITION IN ENGINEERING
Open Access
- Author:
- Whitehair, Carey A
- Graduate Program:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 16, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Catherine G P Berdanier, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- graduate attrtition
attrition
engineering
graduate engineering
engineering education
education
graduate engineering attrition
qualitative analysis - Abstract:
- The pervasion of graduate student attrition, as Barbara Lovitts (2001) notes, is one of the best kept secrets of higher education. Attrition is “costly” both in monetary and emotional capital to multiple stakeholders, including funding agencies, universities, research advisors, and most importantly, to students themselves. While attrition within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs is markedly lower than disciplines in the humanities, most figures still estimate STEM graduate attrition to be above 30% across the United States. Despite the undesirable common occurrence of attrition, it remains fundamentally understudied in STEM, and specifically in engineering disciplines. Literature frequently cites financial burden, among other social factors, as strong motivators for attrition in non-STEM fields; however, these findings cannot be universally applied to STEM students who often are well-funded. Beyond just funding, the structure of graduate programs across disciplines and even among STEM disciplines vary significantly which again suggests caution should be applied when attempting to apply broad generalizations about graduate student attrition across all fields. To fill this gap, and to more clearly understand of the causes of attrition for engineering disciplines, this work uses a multiple methods approach to explore the themes discussed by engineering graduate students considering leaving their programs. Data were collected through the use of an online web-scraping “bot” that searched the online forum of Reddit.com with specified constraints and search terms, collecting forum threads posed by anonymous subscribers to ask the wider community about decisions to stay or leave their graduate programs. The textual forum threads collected were analyzed through opencoding methods and descriptive statistics. Through the sociological theories of socialization theory and identity theory, and the psychological theories of expectancy-value theory and attribution theory, the findings from this research indicate that some themes presented in the general graduate iv student attrition literature hold for graduate engineering attrition (such as advisor role, for example), while also illuminating nuanced facets of the psychosocial process of attrition that pertain to an individual’s articulation of goals and their worries about how their decisions will be perceived by others. These themes expand upon what has been discussed previously in literature in engineering education specifically or in higher education literature more generally. Further, this literature informs practice, by suggesting topics, such as goal setting, that should be addressed earlier in the graduate student experience—or even earlier, in undergraduate education—to mitigate some of the effects of graduate attrition.