Enhancing Educational Equity: Leveraging NLP to Understand Diverse Student Perspectives in Engineering

This paper delves into an extensive analysis of nearly 70,000 student comments from the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences, employing advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to decode the spectrum of student sentiments. We aim to harness this rich data to cultivate an educational environment that embodies sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion. The study unveils a detailed landscape of student emotions and perceptions: I. Positive Feedback Dominance: Approximately 60% of comments were positive, indicating high student satisfaction and highlighting the faculty's dedication to academic excellence and inclusive teaching practices that resonate with a diverse student body. II. Scope in Negative Sentiments: With 16% of comments being pessimistic, there is a clear opportunity for targeted improvements, emphasizing the faculty's commitment to an equitable educational experience for all students. III. Understanding Unclassified Comments: About 15% of the comments were not readily classifiable by NLP tools, which is a typical outcome in studies of this nature. These comments often consisted of non-informative inputs such as single characters, punctuation marks, or brief notes of thanks. This reflects a common occurrence in feedback collection rather than a limitation of the NLP tools used. IV. The Undercurrents of Neutral Sentiments: A significant portion of feedback was neutral, identifying areas for nuanced enhancements that could profoundly impact student satisfaction across various demographics. Our findings highlight the critical role of NLP in analyzing and interpreting large-scale student feedback, which is essential for promoting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive academic setting. These insights are invaluable for institutions aiming to align with Society 5.0's goals by improving educational quality and enhancing student experiences. This study demonstrates NLP's transformative potential in informing strategic decision-making in higher education.