Identifying Causal Configurations for Engineering Graduate Student Attrition Outcomes Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Open Access
- Author:
- Ellery, Megan
- Area of Honors:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Catherine G P Berdanier, Thesis Supervisor
Bo Cheng, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- engineering education
attrition
engineering pathways
graduate engineering
graduate education - Abstract:
- The statistics surrounding graduate engineering student attrition are staggering and have seen little to no improvement in past years. The Council of Graduate Schools reports a 24 percent attrition rate for men and a 35 percent rate for women (Council of Graduate Schools, 2008). Rates are only higher among students who fall into minority groups (Sowell et al., 2015). While past research had identified prevalent factors that strongly influence doctoral students’ decision to remain in or depart from their Ph.D. programs, this study aims to identify how these factors work together to form common pathways to student attrition outcomes including questioning, departure, and persistence. Interviews were conducted with engineering graduate students (N=41) from the top 50 engineering Ph.D. granting universities who had previously or were currently considering leaving their program along with students who had already departed. Participant were asked to share their personal experience in graduate school including their path into graduate school, relationships with advisors and peers, experiences with research, perceived costs, and how their experiences contributed to their thoughts about leaving. Student narratives were used to craft quantitative input data to be analyzed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) in order to identify combinations of factors which frequently lead to the same student attrition outcomes. QCA has long been used in social sciences but this is the first study to apply the method to engineering education. Findings indicate that while engineering graduate student experiences are varied, common pathways to questioning, departing, and persisting exist and are made up of multiple attrition factors acting simultaneously. In addition, results indicate that the combinations that most heavily influence men and women differ. The findings of this study contribute to the growing body of graduate engineering education literature and provide a deeper understanding of how graduate engineering students, graduate advisors, and university engineering departments can develop better practices to ameliorate graduate engineering attrition and to ensure that graduate engineering students are receiving the necessary support and tools to achieve success.