Service-Learning (S-L) and engineering education share the common goals of relating theory to practice and of civic engagement ("public problem solving"). In the current effort, servicelearning is being integrated into a broad array of courses so that students will be exposed to S-L in every semester in the core curriculum in each of the five engineering departments at University of Massachusetts Lowell. The focus here is on the learning of traditional engineering content by engaging diverse learners in solving authentic problems in the community and in the process achieving ABET criteria and attracting underrepresented groups into engineering. Thirty-three faculty members out of 75 in the college integrated S-L into 52 different courses in 2005-06. Readers will find a wide array of projects and examples that can be adapted to their own courses.

The results support the proposition that, when employees work overtime, adverse outcomes--and indirect costs--do not increase with advancing age in any kind of wholesale fashion. Where rates of adverse outcomes do increase, they are confined to certain subgroups of employees doing certain types of work and occur on certain dimensions at certain levels of longer work hours. It is argued that carefully calibrated approaches vis-à-vis older workers are needed to maximize employer capacity to address the unique challenges posed by this increasingly important portion of the workforce.

Service-learning (S-L) is the integration of academic subject matter with service to the community in credit-bearing courses. In an engineering context, service-learning provides a project-based experience in which students are presented with real clients and their problems, often of immediate need. This paper reflects on three years of service-learning integrated into a first engineering course with approximately three hundred students per year. The costs and benefits of service-learning to students, faculty, and clients are analyzed through several means including traditional teaching evaluations, blind pre- and post-assessments by students and clients, multi-year institutional data regarding student performance, and others. The results indicate that a majority of students personally believe that the described service-learning project is a valuable experience and should be integrated throughout the engineering curriculum. However, the service-learning experience varied significantly across teams, students, and course offerings.

Ongoing student surveys, supplemented by interviews, reveal that service in general and servicelearning (S-L) in particular are more attractive to those from underrepresented groups in engineering than to their counterparts. Courses with service-learning projects have been integrated into existing required courses in engineering over the past six years in five departments at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Entering engineering students have been sampled every fall with a "pre" survey, and then all students are surveyed "post" at the end of the spring semester. Evidence continues to mount of the significant difference in responses in attitudes toward community service and S-L in engineering with women especially and to a lesser extent other minorities in engineering. Voluntary participation in S-L projects involving work with and in developing countries continues to attract females at a rate of more than 3 times their underlying population. The results of these ongoing S-L courses and surveys point to a growing difference by gender in response to community service in general and service-learning in particular. If the engineering profession wants to attract and retain more people from underrepresented groups, more servicelearning in engineering appears to be one approach.

In this study, an average of nearly 800 students per semester has participated in S-L projects integrated into courses throughout the four-year engineering curriculum at a public university. Over the academic years 2004-2008, an average of 30 core required engineering courses have had S-L projects each year. The hypothesis is that because the students would see with S-L more directly how engineering can improve the lives of those in the local and international community, they would be more motivated to enter and stay in engineering and try to learn the subject matter better. In terms of recruitment, S-L is advertized to prospective students as the number two reason to come to the college (number one is value). Twenty-two percent of first year students at the end of their first semester reported that S-L was one of the reasons for coming to the college, roughly the same as the 24% in December 2007 and 23% and 21% the previous years. In terms of retention, at the end of the spring 2008 semester, from a representative sample of students across 4 years and 5 departments (n = 369), 64% reported that S-L had a positive impact on the likelihood that they would continue in engineering (25% reported a very strong impact, i.e., chose 9 on a Likert scale of 1-9), while only 3.5% reported a negative impact, with the rest neutral. Females and underrepresented groups by race indicated a significantly (5%) more positive impact of S-L on retention on average. The retention responses also correlated positively with a number of responses indicative of factors known to affect retention (e.g., relationship with faculty, previous S-L experience). Enrollments have in fact increased, and overall retention has remained about the same over the last three years, but the effect of the S-L program will probably not be felt for some more years as it matures and improves. In conclusion, the effect of S-L on recruitment and retention of engineering students appears to be positive from the students themselves, and underrepresented groups in engineering appear more motivated to persist and be concerned about helping others in the profession.