Successful Women Engineering Students: A Survey Assessment To Guide Our Efforts To Boost Women’s Retention

In the fall of 2009, a college of engineering and applied science at a public, Rocky Mountain region university embarked on a new inclusive excellence initiative called Broadening Opportunity through Leadership & Diversity (BOLD). The BOLD Center is a new K-16 organizational structure to increase the performance, representation and retention through graduation of students who are underrepresented in engineering, including women, students of color, low income and first generation college attendees. A BOLD Center focus of concern is the declining retention rate of women that has dipped below that of men recently in our College. A survey consisting of 41 questions was distributed to all undergraduate engineering women in the college that incorporates scales from the Assessing Women in Engineering (AWE) assessment and from the Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES). Five research questions were posed in the survey design: • Do women express a loss of interest during their program? • Is there a chilly climate for women in the college? • Do women‟s self-efficacy levels change during the program? • Do academic performance levels play a role in women‟s retention in engineering? • Do women have an adequate support structure in the college? The survey generated 116 responses from 2 solicitations, with women students represented from every major across all four undergraduate years. An unintended outcome was that the sample largely consists of women with high grade point averages. Thus, this paper offers insight on top performing women‟s self-efficacy and their views on the college climate, the benefits from various support systems – advising, mentoring, social and financial – and the existing programming and initiatives that can play a role in their achievements. The results indicate that women students are interested and efficacious with respect to obtaining an engineering degree, and that the college climate is, on average, warm and accepting. However, women were less satisfied with advising, mentoring, and their financial support. Women students also perceive that they must sacrifice their outside interests to “succeed” in engineering and in order to handle the course workload that they perceive as overly heavy. These results and others to be presented in this paper will shed light on the factors we can address to increase women‟s retention and success in engineering education.