Helping or hurting? Can institutions help disadvantaged students in engineering without understanding socioeconomic status?

The utility of academic advising as a retention tool for socioeconomically disadvantaged engineering undergraduates remains unknown because of the scant research interrogating the meaning of such disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 9 engineering academic advisers, this research uses Bourdieu’s theory of stratification to explore how they understand socioeconomic status. The findings suggest that like the extant research, descriptions of socioeconomic status were diverse and at times conflicting. The discussion highlights the relevance of engineering academic adviser perspectives, and how to better align engineering student needs and institutional retention strategies that consider socioeconomic disadvantage. The paper closes with a call for more attention to demography beyond ethnicity/race and gender in engineering, acknowledging the complicated nature of socioeconomic status.