Those That Leave — Assessing Why Students Leave Engineering

This paper describes the results of a survey designed to uncover the reasons why students choose to leave engineering. The authors collected profile information hypothesized to be factors in retention or attrition (e.g. academic preparation, reasons for choosing engineering, participation in academic support and extracurricular activities) and measured the factors that influenced students’ decision to switch out of an engineering degree program. The reported results are from a data collection effort from five institutions in the U.S comprising 120 students who left engineering during the 2003 – 2004 academic year.