Pathway, choice of major, and peer economic status of nontraditional students in engineering

From Deficit Thinking to Counter Storying: A Narrative Inquiry of Nontraditional Student Experience within Undergraduate Engineering Education

“…Others (McNeill, Long, & Ohland, 2014;McNeill & Ohland, 2015 examined data from the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD contains longitudinal, engineering undergraduate record level data gathered within 11 large and public research universities in the United States.…”

“…MIDFIELD contains longitudinal, engineering undergraduate record level data gathered within 11 large and public research universities in the United States. McNeill and Ohland (2015) reported that nontraditional engineering undergraduates (i.e., those age 24 or older at first matriculation) were more likely than traditional (i.e., younger) engineering students to graduate with engineering degrees in six years; they also found nontraditional (i.e., older) engineering students were to be more likely to leave the institution without a degree. These seemingly contradictory findings suggest that nontraditional (i.e., older) engineering undergraduates may possess a high level of commitment to earning an engineering degree and/or entering the engineering profession.…”

Stickiness of Nontraditional Students in Engineering

“…Aside from CpE being the lowest stickiness engineering discipline for both traditional and nontraditional students, another surprising finding was that Industrial Engineering has much lower stickiness for NTS than traditional students. Historically, Industrial Engineering retains female students at a much higher rate than the other engineering majors (Brawner, Camacho, Lord, Long, & Ohland, 2012), but that does not seem to be the case with NTS students, even though NTS has the same percentage of females as traditional students (McNeil & Ohland, 2015). It should be noted that stickiness in the values for NTS in their top-choice majors has a lower maximum value than the general student top-choice majors discussed in Ohland and colleagues' (2012) paper.…”

“…MIDFIELD is an excellent database for conducting longitudinally-designed studies on trends in engineering education, as the database contains a sample of 1,014,887 undergraduate students from 11 different participating institutions (Ohland & Long, 2016). This database has been used to explore such topics as nontraditional student pathways to the engineering degree (McNeil & Ohland, 2015), age differences (McNeil, Long, & Ohland, 2014), and student socioeconomic status (Orr, Ramirez, & Ohland, 2011;McNeil & Ohland, 2015), to name a few. The MIDFIELD database comprises approximately 10 percent of all engineering graduates from U.S. institutions that attended between 1988 and 2009.…”

Exploring nontraditional characteristics of students in a freshman engineering course

“…From the National Center of Educational Statistics (NCES), more nontraditional characteristics a student has, based on the number of characteristics alone, the less likely the student is to complete their degree 1 . Nontraditional engineering students have been found to complete their degrees at a higher rate than traditional students when comparing students by age 8 .…”