How an Excited Student Became a ‘Washout’
What can we learn from engineering dropouts who succeed in other fields?
By Matthew Meyer and Sherry Marx
University engineering programs in the United States typically have high dropout rates, ranging from 50 percent nationally to 75 percent at the university where our study took place. Whereas many previous studies have used large surveys to quantify the dropout problem, we sought to better understand why undergraduates leave engineering qualitatively, from their own perspectives. We recruited volunteers who had recently left the program at our university to talk about their experiences, sending an invitational email to the 120 students who had migrated out of engineering during their sophomore year in 2012. Very few responded, perhaps illustrating how painful it must have been for these recent dropouts to talk about their experience. Four former engineering students participated in our study. Here is the story of one participant, Zach.
To gather participants’ stories, we asked them to draw and then discuss pictures representing their journeys into and out of engineering. Zach’s illustration shows him starting at a high point and then plunging downward. His switch in majors is represented by a rescue helicopter.
An engineer’s son with several years of work experience, Zach initially felt well prepared for and excited about pursuing a degree in engineering. At the beginning of his journey map, he shows himself as a happy surveyor on the top of the hill, seeing vast opportunities for the future. Zach and his wife had planned to purchase a home the weekend he decided to go back to school. “It was a choice between the house and school. We backed out of the house and chose school,” he said. Zach began his civil engineering curriculum at a branch campus of the university. Due to poor advising, he took three classes that did not count toward his degree and cost him an extra $1,000. He took all the engineering classes available to him at the branch campus, and then packed up his family to move across the state to complete his degree at the main campus.
After two semesters and several contentious meetings with the engineering advisers, however, his attitude changed drastically. As depicted by the deep pit on his journey map, he described the engineering advisers as very condescending. “They sat there with all their power deciding who would hold the title of engineer and who wouldn’t. . . . They need to realize that I write their check.”
Zach’s frustration with advising and mounting financial stress, combined with increasing difficulty in his classwork, led him to lose confidence in his academic abilities. His grades dropped, and his motivation to study diminished. Finally, Zach stopped referring to himself as an engineer, and began looking for a way out. Separating himself from engineering came at a high emotional cost. “I let myself down. . . . I used to make fun of other [non-engineering] majors, and now here I was one of them, a washout,” he said. He saw the business department (the helicopter in his journey map) as his savior from the quagmire of engineering. Zach transferred to the business department, where he is now earning straight A’s. He plans to graduate next spring, two full years earlier than he would have graduated from engineering.
While Zach’s journey into and out of engineering is unique to him, it illustrates the common challenges of other study participants, including institutional factors such as inadequate preparation for the difficulty of the engineering program and time commitment required, and individual factors such as a loss in motivation due to poor performance in classes. All participants felt a deep sense of loss when faced with the prospect of failure in the profession of their choice. Zach broke into tears when describing how he had let himself and his father down by “washing out” of the engineering program. Although all participants struggled in engineering, they were succeeding academically and satisfied with their new majors. The experiences of these four students could inform institutional efforts to retain engineering students.
Matthew Meyer is a doctoral student in engineering education at Utah State University, where Sherry Marx is an associate professor of qualitative research, ESL education, and multicultural education in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership. This article is excerpted from “Engineering Dropouts: A Qualitative Examination of Why Undergraduates Leave Engineering” in the October 2014 Journal of Engineering Education.