his project is supported by an NSF BPE grant. Career choices, such as engineering, are influenced by a number of factors including personal interest, ability, competence beliefs, prior work-related experience, and financial and social supports. However, financial and social support, a particularly significant factor for rural students’ career decisions, is often overlooked in the literature exploring career choice. Moreover, little work has explored how communities serve as key influencers for supporting or promoting engineering as a career choice. Therefore, the goal of this study is to explore the ways in which communities provide support to students deciding to pursue engineering as a college major.
To better understand how students from selected rural area high schools choose engineering as a major, we conducted focus group discussions consisting of 4-6 students each from selected schools to talk collectively about their high school experiences and their choice to major in engineering. Choosing focus group participants from different schools enabled us to elicit tacit perceptions and beliefs that may not be evident when students from the same community talk with one another. That is, as students share their experiences across schools, they may recognize differences in their experiences that, though otherwise unconscious or unacknowledged, proved significant in their choice of college and major. We expect that certain community programs and the individuals involved will have some influence on students’ decisions to study engineering at [University Name].
We anticipate that the results will yield two key outcomes:
1. A holistic understanding of the communities that effectively support and encourage engineering major choice for rural students.
2. Locally driven, contextually relevant recommendations for policies and programs that would better enable economically disadvantaged, rural schools in southwestern Virginia to support engineering as a career choice for high school students.
By understanding the ways some economically-disadvantaged rural communities support engineering as a career choice and linking a broad spectrum of rural communities together around this issue, this project will broaden participation in engineering by increasing support for students from these areas. By shifting our focus from students to communities, this research broadens our understanding of career choice by capturing the perspectives of community members (including not only school personnel, but also community leaders, students’ families, business owners and others) who often play a key role in students’ decisions, particularly in rural communities. Our research will bring these voices into the conversation to help scholars learn from and respond to these essential community perspectives. In doing so, we will provide a more nuanced model of engineering career choice that can then be explored in other rural contexts. This work thus contributes to the research on career choice, rural education, and engineering education.
© 2018 American Society for Engineering Education
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Communities Support Engineering as a College Major Choice
Broadening participation in engineering is critical given the gap between the nation’s need for
engineering graduates and its production of them. Efforts to spark interest in engineering among
PreK-12 students have increased substantially in recent years as a result. However, past research
has demonstrated that interest is not always sufficient to help students pursue engineering
majors, particularly for rural students. In many rural communities, influential adults (family,
friends, teachers) are often the primary influence on career choice, while factors such as
community values, lack of social and cultural capital, limited course availability, and inadequate
financial resources act as potential barriers. To account for these contextual factors, this project
shifts the focus from individual students to the communities to understand how key stakeholders
and organizations support engineering as a major choice and addresses the following questions:
RQ1. What do current undergraduate engineering students who graduated from rural high
schools describe as influences on their choice to attend college and pursue engineering as
a post-secondary major?
RQ2. How does the college choice process differ for rural students who enrolled in a 4-year
university immediately after graduating from high school and those who transferred from
a 2-year institution?
RQ3. How do community members describe the resources that serve as key supports as well as
the barriers that hinder support in their community?
RQ4. What strategies do community members perceive their community should implement to
enhance their ability to support engineering as a potential career choice?
RQ5. How are these supports transferable or adaptable by other schools? What
community-level factors support or inhibit transfer and adaptation?
To answer the research questions, we employed a three-phase qualitative study. Phase 1 focused
on understanding the experiences and perceptions of current [University Name] students from
higher-producing rural schools. Analysis of focus group and interview data with 52 students
highlighted the importance of interest and support from influential adults in students’ decision to
major in engineering. One key finding from this phase was the importance of community college
for many of our participants. Transfer students who attended community college before enrolling
at [University Name] discussed the financial influences on their decision and the benefits of
higher education much more frequently than their peers. In Phase 2, we used the findings from
Phase 1 to conduct interviews within the participants’ home communities. This phase helped
triangulate students’ perceptions with the perceptions and practices of others, and, equally
importantly, allowed us to understand the goals, attitudes, and experiences of school personnel
and local community members as they work with students. Participants from the students’ home
communities indicated that there were few opportunities for students to learn more about
engineering careers and provided suggestions for how colleges and universities could be more
involved with students from their community. Phase 3, scheduled for Spring 2020, will bring the
findings from Phases 1 and 2 back to rural communities via two participatory design workshops.
These workshops, designed to share our findings and foster collaborative dialogue among the
participants, will enable us to explore factors that support or hinder transfer of findings and to
identify policies and strategies that would enhance each community’s ability to support
engineering as a potential career choice.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734834
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10166544
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Zone 1 Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education
- ISSN:
- 2332-368X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34307
