Is attrition from engineering partly due to admission-to-major barriers that students face after enrolling?
I.e. some well known schools like Minnesota, Purdue, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, Washington admit most or all engineering frosh as undeclared or to a pre-engineering status, and then require them to meet a GPA requirement significantly higher than needed to stay in good academic standing (e.g. a 3.0, 3.2, 3.5, etc. needed to get into a major, even though one otherwise needs only a 2.0 and C grades to stay in good academic standing) or apply into a competitive admission process (Wisconsin has a variant where frosh are admitted to their majors, but must meet a high GPA requirement to stay in the major).
Obviously, not every student at such schools meets the GPA requirement or is admitted to his/her intended major, which may result in some of the students leaving engineering (the alternative is to transfer to another school where they can be admitted to their major).
It may be, but that depends on how schools do their accounting. Texas A&M, for example, actually instituted their policy to improve the retention rate. I haven’t heard whether that has succeeded (probably too early to know) but from what I could tell, theirs seemed to be structured such that it may actually work out that way.
Did/will Texas A&M’s policy improved retention because it forces weaker students to be attrite, before the student is able to get into the COE? That would cause the COE’s retention rate to be higher. I find TAMU’s process a little blah (from a students point of view), since requirements to your major can vary on a yearly basis, based on how competitive is the class, and enrollment in your major. I much prefer knowing at the start of my freshman year, what metrics I have to hit to get into my major. On the other hand, from the COE’s point of view, it makes enrollment planning by major, easier to manage.
*FYI: Texas A&M has freshman enter the COE via a “entry-to-a-major (ETAM) process”, after they complete their first two semesters. Students must apply to three majors with the option to select up to five majors. Majors must be ranked in order of preference. The entry-to-a-major process includes automatic admission to the first choice major for students with a 3.5 cumulative GPA after the first two semesters. Otherwise, entry is competitive, and you may end up with your 2nd, 3rd, or even rejected by the COE. *
Is this not true of literally every school, every year? They are simply changing at what point that moving bar comes into play. I suppose it does perhaps double the number of times you have to get by a moving bar.
However, you can’t take these sorts of policies in a vacuum. The State of Texas has a law that a flagship university must enroll any student graduating in the top 10% of his or her graduating class. The experience at TAMU (and I’m sure at UT) is that, while this increases access to college for more rural and inner-city students, it also floods incoming classes with underprepared students and increases the drop-out rate while also taking admissions slots from otherwise higher-aptitude students.
This policy at TAMU coincides with a simultaneous increase in their enrollment numbers in an effort to tackle both problems at once. The increased enrollment lets them get some of those higher-aptitude students (and out of state applicants) that are missed by the 10% law. The freshman engineering program is then designed to basically educate students on the different flavors of engineering (so that they make a more educated choice) and make sure all engineers have the same minimum level of preparation prior to hitting the meat of the engineering curriculum. This also lets weaker incoming students level the field a little before they get into the really tough courses and also gives students a little more potential cushion while they grow up a little and adjust to college life. They try to make the process a little more flexible, too, by allowing students to apply for engineering admission any time after first semester, so you could start in engineering in semester 2, 3, 4, or 5. That should help with students who require a little more of an adjustment period or remedial math, and if they tank the first semester or two, they have time to raise that GPA and get the auto-admit later. It’s not a try once and you’re some kind of thing.
That said, it’s not guaranteed to work as planned. It is way too early to tell. All I can tell you is that their motives are in the right place, but you know what they say about the road to hell. I expressed skepticism about the policy and the related growth policy while I was a graduate student there and had a number of discussions about it with people at the dean and higher level and it got me looking at it in a different light. My chief point here is that I don’t think it makes sense to paint all such programs with the same brush, as often occurs on this site. These programs, depending on how they are run, could be a net positive or a net negative for retention, and shouldn’t be taken in a vacuum.
One last anecdote. While at TAMU I was in the aerospace department. The single largest two situations leading to drop outs were as follows. Students who said “cool, airplanes/space ships!” and didn’t actually know how much math was involved, then left because it was not what they thought, and students who’s level of preparation (particularly in math) was not up to par (often due to the auto-admit policy) and they struggled until they had to leave. The above two policies should help resolve both issues.
I think we, as a community, just need to be a little bit more circumspect when evaluating such programs.
I am sure a good number of students leave engineering altogether because of these secondary screenings. I imagine it is a major PITA to have to up-and-leave your school, work out moving logistics with parents, meet new friends, etc. This whole process undoubtedly weeds out a considerable number of students looking to become engineers.
I’d agree that you undoubtedly lose people in the process. I think the operative question is “who do you lose?” The goal would be to adjust the program so that the students you lose are the ones you would have lose anyway because either they just legitimately couldn’t cut the mustard in an engineering curriculum or else weren’t motivated enough (or for the right reasons) to get their ducks in a row. The idea behind these programs is that you can use them to save the rest of the drop-outs who might have been savable if the early-years curriculum wasn’t so rigid or if they had been in the correct engineering discipline from the start, and let the ones who don’t make it get out in time to salvage some semblance of a GPA before the meat of the engineering curriculum shreds them.
Whether it works this way in practice is, in my opinion, the important question, and I think the level of success is likely to vary (perhaps substantially) by university. In theory, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Cal Poly is completely opposite. Not only do they admit directly into a major, but it is competitive only amongst those who are applying to that major. For example, if you apply to ME at Poly you are ranked only against other ME applicants. Once admitted, if admitted, you have your spot. They aren’t known for a high rate of attrition, but the CENG is still the largest major exporter among all the colleges on campus.
Personally I don’t think that people who are unqualified should be admitted and have a chance to fail when failure has a clear and severe consequences for the student (debt, career uncertainty, damage to grad/professional school prospects). Students who can succeed but will have trouble should get additional help, and those who aren’t capable enough should not be permitted to attend engineering school. Given how high the switching costs are for universities, this system is a pretty dishonest bait and switch.
Some schools admit frosh directly to the major, and only require them to stay in good academic standing (2.0 GPA and/or C grades) to stay in the major. Some well endowed private schools have sufficient excess capacity in all majors to allow students to enter any major for which they have passed (C grades) the prerequisites for. Some less selective schools have excess capacity in engineering majors because the demand is too low because weaker students are less likely to want to go into a “hard” major in the first place.
I think we can all agree on this. The problem is that, in practice, it is nearly impossible to tell exactly who is going to succeed and who isn’t. Tests that are meant to be objective aren’t really and might also simply reflect test anxiety or being able to game the test (which is essentially what courses like Kaplan teach). High schools have a very wide range of quality, as well, so students with the same high school GPA or class rank from two different schools might come in at wholly different levels of preparation. This problem is exacerbated in states that have auto-admit laws like those in Texas, since in that case you can’t reject an unprepared student if he excelled at a bad high school.
Again, I think most would agree with this. The question is, in light of the previous fact that you can’t always tell who will succeed easily and who won’t, how do you go about doing this? This is why in recent years I have become more sympathetic to at least some of the first year (ish) engineering programs. If they are done correctly, it would give colleges time to identify students that need additional help (or students to identify themselves) and then get those students extra help, all without dropping them straight into the thick of the engineering curriculum right off the bat where they are more likely to fail or take a huge GPA hit before that help can arrive.
It also means that those who are still doomed to fail have a greater chance of realizing that before their GPAs take such a huge hit that it seriously complicates their transfer, job, and grad/professional school prospects. It may even mean they’ve wasted less time trying engineering courses before ultimately moving on to other fields. In that regard, too, the first year programs have the potential to alleviate the issues you cite.
Sure, but what are the job prospects for a person who graduates with a 2.0 GPA? They aren’t spectacular, and I think you could make an argument that they might have been better off doing something else. Alternatively, if they were forced to essentially slow-play the first year or two of school in order to make sure their GPA was higher and they were (likely) more prepared before starting the core engineering courses, you could also make an argument that their job prospects are better and they will be a better engineer for it.
Okay, then let’s just remove the word “literally” from my post and say most. Or we could restrict it to schools that are peers with those you mentioned, i.e. R1 universities that are competitive. My point was that no matter what, for those sorts of schools that lots of people dream of attending, there will always be some bar that students have to clear to be admitted, and that bar moves every year.
The criticism shouldn’t be the moving bar here. It should be that you essentially have to compete twice to get into your choice of major: once to get admitted to the college, and then once for the department. Some of that downside is alleviated at the universities who take this approach and then have a hard minimum GPA that guarantees admittance to your first choice. That bar doesn’t move and it isn’t a crapshoot in that case. The issue would be the people under that bar, which is why I actually like the TAMU system (in theory) because you have a 4 semester window during which you can apply to your choice of departments, so you have more of a chance to make it over that bar eventually. Presumably once you do, it would indicate that any uneven preparation left over from high school has been trained out of you as well, which would mean that once you do start the core curriculum, you are likely better prepared to succeed in it.
So, to me, the question isn’t whether or not these first year programs are bad or whether they should be avoided on principle. To me, in theory, they may actually be pretty fantastic and be able to solve some of the challenges facing modern engineering education. The question in my mind is what would you have to do in terms of implementing and structuring it such that it turns out to be better than the more traditional direct admission. I don’t know enough about the programs at Purdue, Washington, or Minnesota to really judge that, but I do think that the TAMU program is at least on the right track, even if the program is still too new and the sample size too small to draw any real conclusions yet. They started in 2014, so it probably won’t be until 2020 or so that they have the sort of data they need on its efficacy. Purdue has been doing it longer, so I’d be interested in seeing their data.
The problem clearly is multi-faceted and highly dependent on whether you take the perspective of the institution or the student. How do you avoid both those who don’t have the horsepower and those who don’t have the work ethic, while simultaneously retaining those who are truly committed, but for what ever reason, are struggling?
Certainly the best way to reduce attrition is to not declare anyone is in engineering until they are juniors and have successfully competed for a limited slot. Very few of them will drop afterwards. Thus, attrition, officially, is low. On the other hand, that approach will cast off many who have both the desire and the ability.
I get the original question @ucbalumnus was asking. I also understand that no matter what you do, engineering is very hard and cannot be distilled past a certain point without losing its essence. As a result, it will likely always have a higher attrition rate than most other majors. I say that not as an engineer, but as a health care provider watching a very sharp child navigate engineering education. What he is doing (what most of you did) is WAY more difficult in both intellectual capacity required and work ethic to achieve than any pre-health care student, or for that matter any medical/dental/optometry/podiatry student goes through.
But what should the threshold GPA be, and how should it be set? Is it necessarily true that a GPA threshold based on capacity limitations relative to the popularity of the major (the usual means of setting the threshold) will necessarily match the GPA threshold where one can predict a reasonable chance of success or not? I.e. a student with a 3.1 GPA (usually considered respectable enough by employers) may be admitted to his/her major if it is not that popular, but may be forced out if it is a popular major that does not have enough capacity.
Also, a student who has a rough high school to college transition may start off in a deep GPA hole, even if s/he does much better in later semesters. Starting with a 2.5 first semester GPA may make it very difficult to get to a 3.5 GPA to enter a popular major.
Both of my sons went to engineering schools that do not admit to major (UVa and Virginia Tech). You are admitted to the engineering school but not initially to a particular major within engineering.Engineers take the same classes the first year (called general engineering at VT). Virginia Tech may place you in University Studies first if there is any thought that you may not be ready for engineering school (so they set a decent bar at both schools into engineering to begin with). My VT kid ran into this because despite > 700 Math SAT, 5 on AP Physics and great EC’s, he had some GPA issues in high school and was initially placed in University Studies. He did so well his first semester of college that he quickly was moved into engineering. Starting out for a year taking general courses really did not present a problem and gave them an opportunity to explore the different disciplines before committing to a particular major.
I think that’s probably one of several million dollar questions. I don’t honestly know the answer, and while I was probably closer than the average poster to how the TAMU process came about, I still wasn’t close enough to know how they decided that specific cutoff.
I would imagine that setting the cutoff based on capacity is more of a pragmatic choice than anything meant to meaningfully set the point where one is expected to make it to graduation or not. At least in the TAMU case, the GPA threshold is quite high (3.5 is a rather nice GPA after all) and it is a universal criterion across all of the departments. So I doubt that threshold was chosen to cut down on people getting into impacted majors like mechanical engineering. Instead, it seemed to me like they chose that as a high bar that left little doubt that a student could succeed and then are leaving the rest to be handled either at a later semester after bringing up the GPA or else on a case by case basis much like admissions at most other schools. I’d be interested in seeing the stats on how many students the mechanical engineering department admits that came in under that 3.5 GPA bar.
There are certainly students that could get left behind by this process due to the influence of impacted departments as opposed to their scholastic abilities, and that is unfortunate. Ultimately, they are probably a little worse off in such a system because if they had been denied admission due to the impacted major originally, instead of doing a first year program, they could pursue other universities sooner instead of after 1 or 2 years of school. I don’t honestly have an answer to how you solve that issue.
I think TAMU’s approach to solving it is that they are dramatically expanding their departments to accommodate more students. I think that’s ultimately the solution: grow the faculty to give each department a little more cushion to support more students than they generally have quality applications, and this becomes a non-issue. The issue is simply one of economics and whether you can actually afford that type of growth, and with the current level of funding for higher education (and the amount going to seemingly gratuitous administrators), that is going to be too much for many schools to handle. TAMU’s approach isn’t perfect - I myself am skeptical of the sheer size they plan to achieve and whether that will be a good thing - but I do think that some sort of growth is the only way to solve this issue while impacting the fewest students negatively, whether a school has a first year program or not.
That’s a danger, but that is why I like the approach of offering a flexible window on when to apply to the specific department. It gives the students more time to catch up before starting the core curriculum. While it might take them an extra year or so to finish, they will be on much more equal footing with others starting at the same time than in the more traditional system.
Consider the alternative, i.e. the current approach. If a student coming in with a weak background starts all the core curriculum with everyone else, they struggle from the start, and that tends to build up as the classes continue to build on one another. In essence, they, too, are digging a deep GPA hole, only they have less time to dig back out of it. I think this is actually the central issue that has bent me back toward having a more favorable opinion of first year programs: it gives students who start out disadvantaged more of a chance to play catch up without ruining their GPA in courses they weren’t actually prepared for. I think a properly designed program will help out more people than it leaves behind.
It’s all a very interesting set of pros and cons, though.
Texas A&M just might have the most in flux engineering admission policy at the moment. For the class of 2017, A&M will impliment holistic admission for ALL engineering applicants - including the top 10%. This is in line with how the Univ. of Texas operates, but UT admits directly into a specific major and A&M will admit to general engineering.
The challenge will be keeping up with the growth of students and commesurate quality faculty. In addition, preventing the entry to major from becoming a system like Univ. of Washington where many impacted majors admit less than half of students when they go to apply their sophomore year. UW’s system probably deters many qualified candidates for that reason.
On a macro level, I think A&M’s system is on a positive track. On a micro level, I’m glad my S was admitted to engineering under the old rules. Today, under a holistic admission policy, he surely wouldn’t be a shoe in, mostly because of average SAT/ACT scores, but in reality he has done extremely well in engineering at A&M. As boneh3ad said, it is hard to tell sometimes who is going to succeed, and with my S, determination and work ethic could not be scored on paper, but those traits were key for him.
https://engineering.tamu.edu/academics/advisors-procedures/entry-to-a-major has some stats, but not exactly what you are asking. For ME in 2015, the admission rates were 26%, 75%, and 15% for spring, summer, and fall respectively. Minimum GPA of admits was 3.1, 2.6, and 3.0 respectively, though it appears that admission is not purely GPA based, since there are three essays to write to apply to a major. Also, students must apply to at least three majors, so they may not necessarily get their first choice.
However, any unused capacity at a highly desired state university may be seen as “wasteful” spending, so there may be pressure to admit more students (both at the frosh/transfer admission to the school and at the admission to major stage) to completely fill the capacity, which would allow less “breathing room” to accommodate year to year changes in student demand without excessively high GPA thresholds based on capacity limitations.
Hmmm, perhaps that is why Texas A&M’s engineering major admission process seems to resemble that of Washington’s (including an essay to apply to an engineering major), although it does not appear to be as competitive as at Washington (higher admission rates, students with lower GPAs admitted at Texas A&M compared to Washington).
The policy was thought up several years before the new president arrived. It was pushed in large part by the Dean of Engineering when she realized they were turning away a large number of qualified candidates. Some pushed out by the top 10% rule (which is not a criteria going forward) and some pushed out by retention policies they did not feel were adequate (i.e. too many students changing majors mid-stream). The new president, however, is probably well aware of UW’s issues and probably doesn’t want to see A&M go down that path.
It really comes down to how random and fair does it seem to the current students. If most (with “decent” GPA’s) are getting into their first or maybe second major, it’s not much of an issue. If students go into the process with little confidence in which major they may be assigned too (after being at TAMU for 2 to 4 semesters), then it’s going to &#$# , and students will hate it. Hopefully it’s the first case and not the second.
