The Ultimate Diversity App
To change the face of engineering, change admissions policies.
By Beth M. Holloway, Teri Reed, P. K. Imbrie, Ken Reid
While an abundance of literature describes the virtues of precollege and recruiting programs and their potential effect on increasing the number of applications to engineering schools, little to no research informs institutional policy on important factors to consider in the engineering admissions process. Few previous studies have focused on the role of admissions policy as a potential barrier to being able to study engineering. If admissions policies have a significant role in the opportunity to become an engineer, changing such policies may play a role in increasing the representation of groups such as women and minorities in engineering.
At a midwestern public university, institutional data indicated that from 2006 through 2010, the number of women engineering applicants increased by 46 percent and correlated with increased recruiting efforts. Over that same period, however, the number of women admitted into engineering increased by only 24 percent. A mismatch in the growth rates of women applicants and women admitted was unexpected and raised questions about equity in the admissions process. A statistical analysis of the university’s engineering admissions process confirmed a gender bias, which was traced to the policy through which applications were assessed. Research-based success modeling was then used to identify key admissions factors that could produce a different result from the university’s engineering admissions policy.
These research findings (including bias and important admissions factors) were used to influence the admissions process and policy for which the college of engineering had no direct responsibility. When the researched admissions factors were reprioritized and the cutoff score for standardized math tests removed, the number of women admitted to the college of engineering increased and mitigation of gender bias was statistically confirmed.
The direct impact of this research project was a change in the admissions policy at this university, which increased the number of women admitted to engineering. In addition, this work shows how modeling student outcomes can be used to inform educational practices and policies.
Modeling student outcomes has been viewed with skepticism since historically underrepresented populations could be marginalized because they are present in lower numbers and thus have little to no effect on the outcome of an overall model. This research project confirms the need to consider historically underrepresented populations individually. Although the project was conducted at a single university, many facets of the process are transferable to other institutions of higher education, such as using the same techniques to address the composition of their own student bodies and to create policies and programs for admissions, student success, and retention, which can create a broader impact in engineering.
More generally, this project shows the important role of research in policy change. The use of research to inform engineering educational policy could have a significant impact on the higher education system, when administrators understand the power of applied research and researchers understand the potential for research-informed policies to influence systemwide change.
Beth M. Holloway is assistant dean for undergraduate education and director of the Women in Engineering Program in the College of Engineering at Purdue University. Teri Reed is assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs for the Texas A&M System and associate professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University. P. K. Imbrie is director of undergraduate engineering education and associate professor in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M. Ken Reid is an associate professor of engineering education at Virginia Tech. This article is excerpted from “Research-Informed Policy Change: A Retrospective on Engineering Admissions” in the April 2014 Journal of Engineering Education. Part of this research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant EEC-0416113.