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Improving retention rates of engineering students in higher education has been a nationwide goal aimed at expanding and diversifying the engineering workforce. Initial mathematics placement in institutions is a major predictor for attrition, with 52% of students from two-year institutions starting below calculus as opposed to 14.4% of students from four-year institutions starting below calculus. Consequently, national data shows that the attrition rate for engineering students at two-year institutions is 69% while the attrition rate for engineering students at four-year institutions is 37%. As the prevalence of students taking an indirect path towards completing an engineering degree increases, the examination of those students’ pathways towards an engineering degree is necessary. In the SC:SUPPORTED project, we conducted focus groups with students from two-year and four-year institutions across the state of South Carolina. Themes related to academic influence, social influence and family influence emerged from analysis of the focus group data. Within family influences, which are the ways family members affect a student’s persistence in education, choice of major, and choice of institution, there were differences between students attending two-year institutions and those attending four-year institutions. Family members include parents, siblings, other relatives, and also “fictive” family. The goal of this paper is to discuss the factors that influence why students choose engineering and choose to attend a two-year or four-year institution. 

Previous research has shown that initial mathematics course placement in college is a strong predictor of persistence to an engineering degree. This study examines whether greater access to devices used in high school STEM courses is positively related to a student’s college math course placement. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed. In the quantitative analysis, data on freshmen in Engineering and Engineering-related programs from across 20 public institutions within the same state revealed that classrooms with wireless access and the number of devices dedicated for student use in their high schools were not useful predictors of their math course placement in college. This runs counter to intuition and may provide new insight into the effectiveness of technology implementation within high school classrooms. In a qualitative analysis, the type of devices, frequency, and manner in which the devices were implemented in high school math courses were examined.