Freshman Retention Study in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arkansas

Retention of freshman students has become a focal point for many engineering colleges throughout the country.With many literary sources written on the retention of students in engineering programs, there are many references that address why some students leave without completing a degree and why other students stay to ultimately complete a degree.It is important for institutions to understand the factors that affect the choice to leave or stay, or at a minimum become aware of them, in order to increase their retention of freshman.The College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas has tracked freshman retention since 1985, but only since 1998 has this been done for each engineering department.This information provides the Department of Mechanical Engineering with valuable information to which it can quantitatively compare with the College and the University in an effort to ultimately improve the six-year graduation rate.The first step to improving the six-year graduation rate is to address the department's freshman attrition problem by determining the factors that influence freshmen in their decision of whether or not to continue in the program.In order to determine these factors, a 32-question survey of the Mechanical Engineering freshman students in Fall 2004 was administered which included surveys completed by some students who had already changed to another major.Students of the freshman cohort were separated into two groups.One group was deemed at high-risk for changing majors and the other was at low-risk for changing majors away from Mechanical Engineering.Primary results from the study indicated that there are three areas where these two groups differed significantly.Those are the students' preparation for college while in high school, their study techniques, and their expectations about the curriculum in which they are beginning.In addition, the paper includes historical mechanical engineering retention data from 1998-2003, a discussion of freshman performance in math and science classes, a thorough description of the survey, analysis of the survey results, and a discussion of future efforts to improve the department's freshman retention. introductionIn recent years, many engineering programs have focused on improving freshman retention and identifying the factors that influence it.Since many College of Engineering (COE) programs have similar departmental freshman curricula, retention related activities are often evaluated at this level.The University of Arkansas (U of A) is no different and has an ongoing effort to increase its six-year graduation rate through improved retention.In addition, the U of A Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME) is trying to better understand its six-year graduation rate by first focusing on the retention of students during their freshman year.For the sake of comparing retention data internally and externally, some common definitions need to be established to foster uniformity.A freshman is universally defined as a person who is going to college for the first time in their academic career and who is considered a full-time student with regard to the institution.Freshman retention is commonly defined as the return of a freshman student in his/her second consecutive fall semester to the same program in which he/she started.The University of Arkansas uses these definitions as criteria for its retention data generation.For the COE and the ME, freshman retention is defined the same as that of the U of A, but stipulates that the student enroll in the same college and department, respectively.The recent growth of freshman class-sizes in ME came after a period when the department experienced a gradual decrease in total enrollment.The total enrollment of ME for 1998 was 290 and by the year 2002 had declined to 224 students.This phenomenon likely resulted from a 34% reduction of incoming freshmen to the U of A from 1998 to 1999 coupled with consistently low numbers of incoming freshmen through 2002.ME began to reevaluate its approach to the recruitment of freshman students and implemented some changes to that process that resulted in an 81% increase in freshman from 2002 to 2003.This surge of incoming freshmen caused the department to shift its focus from recruitment to the improvement of the retention rate for ME freshmen.