Click above for complete view.
Staying Power
If the freshman cohort from 2005 serves as a reliable guide, women students persist in engineering and go on to graduate at consistently higher rates than men. Survey data collected and analyzed by ASEE show that in the first three years of college, retention rates of female students exceeded those of males by at least three percentage points. Women’s rate of graduation within five years exceeded that of male students by a full eight percentage points. The analysis was based on a sample of 38,679 students – of whom 17 percent were female – at 98 schools. The cohort at each participating school was based on the number of full-time, first-time freshmen who entered engineering programs in 2005. Retention percentages were calculated by taking the total number of students in that cohort who persisted in a given year and dividing it by the cohort size. Graduation percentages presented here are cumulative. The annual benchmarks do not necessarily reflect the quality of an individual program. Retention and graduation rates may be affected by such factors as admission policies, school missions, and geographic area that are beyond a program’s control.
Compiled by Amlan Banerjee
Infographic by Francis Igot