American Society for Engineering Education

Retention Project

Updated August 27, 2012

Best Practices and Strategies for Retaining Engineering, Engineering Technology and Computing Students

The American Society for Engineering Education invites you to explore promising practices and strategies for retaining students in Engineering, Engineering Technology and Computing (including Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Technology, and related disciplines) programs.

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President Obama supports the "Engineering: Stay With It" campaign

The "Stay With It" kick off video:

The "Stay With It" Video Contest Winner:

President Obama spoke on February 8, 2012 at a reception hosted by the PCJC in the Old Executive Office Building and attended by approximately 100 engineering deans and administration officials and staff. Read more here.

The PCJC, dominated by organizations that depend upon a highly skilled technological workforce, began to focus on the issue of attraction, retention, and graduation of engineering and computer science students in 2011. In 2012, the PCJC launched a national “Stay With It” campaign (the Facebok page is here) , in partnership with academia, the private sector and the entertainment industry. It will focus on accelerating engineering experiences, providing encouragement, increasing the prestige of engineering and helping students graduate with engineering degrees.

As part of this effort the PCJC turned to deans of engineering at UC-Berkeley, Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, and Duke, enlisting their leadership and advice on creating a national recognition system for universities that excel at retention and graduation criteria. The PCJC used the February 8 event to announce a partnership with ASEE to develop and monitor retention and graduation metrics suitable for use for engineering and engineering technology disciplines across the broad array of higher education institutions with such majors. Speakers at the event included PCJC chairman and Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the president’s advisor for science and technology, John Holdren, Georgia Tech dean of engineering Gary May, and former Georgia Tech Dean of Engineering and current ASEE president, Don Giddens.

Read the event program.

Read remarks at the event from ASEE President Don Giddens.

Read excerpts of remarks made at the event from Intel CEO and Jobs Council member Paul Otellini. See his talk below.

Read remarks at the event from Georgia Tech dean of engineering, Gary May, shown below.

ASEE will continue work on the retention issue, in part with the Innovation with Impact Report. This report follows the work that was done in 2009, in a report titled Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering Education.

In addition, ASEE will name a task force to oversee the retention initiative and will use a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to document and establish a baseline of retention across schools of engineering and engineering technology.

ASEE will attempt to collect data from all 380 institutions with ABET-accredited engineering programs, segregating data by school size, types of degree offered, public/private status, and other important measures. Data will be collected based on defined cohorts for the fall semester of the years 2001 to 2010.

Data from this project will build on a Sloan-funded pilot study completed in 2009, which enabled ASEE to develop a four-stage collaborative project involving engineering colleges to identify, analyze, and summarize existing knowledge and practices for collecting and analyzing data on student success, focusing on retention and time-to-degree.

For a thorough look at the issue, read "Keeping Students in Engineering."