Socioeconomic Status And The Undergraduate Engineering Experience: Preliminary Findings From Four American Universities

In this paper, we present preliminary findings relating socioeconomic status (SES) of undergraduate engineering students in the United States to a variety of issues related to their educational experiences, decisions and perceptions. Results from the first deployment of the Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES) suggest that SES plays a role in professional persistence in engineering, confidence in technical skill sets, extracurricular fulfillment, perception of curriculum overload, and general satisfaction with their collegiate experience. SES does not appear to play a role in other areas, such as academic persistence in engineering, academic disengagement or motivations for studying engineering. We discuss the challenges of defining SES for college students relative to the literature, and propose a simplified approach based on parents’ levels of education and perceptions of family income level. To analyze the APPLES variables, we compared the highest and lowest SES quartiles. Where possible, we contrast our findings to those of non-engineering undergraduate students at American institutions. One of our primary conclusions from this preliminary analysis is that SES should be controlled for studies of engineering students.