The Choice Opportunity Disparity: Exploring Curricular Choice Opportunities for Engineering vs. Non-Engineering Majors

Educational environments that support autonomy have been shown to foster self-motivation, increased engagement, higher-quality learning, and personal well-being 4,5,6 —all outcomes that could positively impact access and retention in engineering programs. Increasing course choice opportunities for students seeking an engineering degree could therefore encourage them to meet their innate psychological need for autonomy within the context of an engineering education and possibly benefit educational and program outcomes. This preliminary study explores the extent of curricular choice that undergraduate students encounter in working towards engineering degrees, compared to their non-engineering peers on campus. The course choices that students are given the autonomy to make while earning ABETaccredited engineering degrees in various disciplines are compared to those of students earning degrees in physics, chemistry, math, economics and psychology. “Choice Values” for degree programs at five regionally diverse universities are presented, including both public and private institutions, a large research university, a small liberal arts college and a historically black college & university (HBCU). For the purposes of this study, Choice Value is a quantified representation of the aggregate curricular choice opportunity for a given degree program, and is a function of total course choice opportunities, the proportion of degree credit hours that provide curricular choice, and the number of courses from which students may choose. Choice Values were determined using the published curriculum in the university catalogs, as well as counts for the number of individual course options for each choice opportunity. Choice opportunity examples include menus of course options, technical electives, humanities and social science electives, and free electives. Findings reveal a significant course choice opportunity disparity between engineering and nonengineering students at the five universities studied. The differentially limited curricular choices available to engineering students across all five universities and degree programs included in the study are revealed. Engineering degree program Choice Values were an average of more than 17 times fewer than non-engineering degree program Choice Values, with a median value of 4.7 and a range of 1.8 to 96.1 times lower Choice Values in engineering. Engineering degree programs allocated an average of 4.3% of total degree credit hours to free electives, compared to 19.8% of total degree credit hours for non-engineering degree programs included in the study. The comparatively dismal curricular course opportunities available to students pursuing engineering degrees leads to the question of how degree programs might provide more course choice opportunities, and if doing so might positively impact efforts at broadening participation in engineering enrollments and improve graduation rates. The General Engineering Plus (GE+) degree program, a new (2013) undergraduate degree program in the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) at the University of Colorado Boulder is presented. The GE+ degree program combines interdisciplinary hands-on engineering design plus an engineering emphasis with a student-chosen technical or non-technical concentration, providing students with degrees P ge 26512.2 of curricular choice previously unprecedented in the college’s engineering programs, a Choice Value of 405.3 compared to the average Choice Value for CU Boulder’s accredited engineering degree programs of 155.7. The GE+ program plans to seek accreditation under ABET’s general engineering program criteria.