Multiple stakeholders are interested in measuring undergraduate student success in college across academic fields. Different metrics might appeal to different stakeholders. Some metrics such as the fraction of first-time, full-time students who start in the fall who graduate within six years, the graduation rate, are federally mandated by the U.S. Department of Education, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). We argue that this calculation of graduation rate is inherently problematic because it excludes up to 60% of students who transfer into an institution, enroll part-time, or enroll in terms other than the fall. By expanding the starters definition, we propose a graduation rate definition that includes conventionally excluded students and provides information on progression in a specific program. Stickiness is an even more-inclusive alternative, measuring a program's success in graduating all undergraduates ever enrolled in the program. In this work, programs are grouped into six academic fields: Arts and Humanities, Business, Engineering, Other, Social Sciences, and STM (Science, Technology, and Mathematics. Stickiness is the percentage of students who ever enroll in an academic field that graduate in the same field. We use the Multiple Institution Dataset for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) 2023 which contains unit-record data for over 2 million individual students at 19 institutions. For the academic fields studied, Engineering has the highest graduation rate and third highest stickiness. Social Sciences and Business also have higher graduation rates and stickiness than the other fields. We also track the relative fraction of students migrating to and from each academic field. This paper continues our work to derive better metrics for understanding student success.

This research full paper explores the academic outcomes of undergraduate engineering students who leave their native countries and pursue their education in the USA. These “international students” are defined as students who were not citizens or permanent residents of the USA who enrolled in engineering programs in the USA. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze metrics for international and domestic students pursuing undergraduate degrees in one of the five most popular engineering disciplines in the USA: chemical, civil, electrical, industrial/systems, and mechanical using the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD includes institutional records from over 1.7 million undergraduate, degree-seeking students in 21 programs at nineteen universities in the USA with over 85,000 men and 21,000 women enrolled in one of the most popular five engineering disciplines in the USA. Metrics used include representation at the start of university studies, initial engineering major choice, six-year graduation rate, and stickiness (the number of students graduating in a major divided by the number of students who ever enrolled in that major). Results are disaggregated by origin (domestic or international), sex (female and male), and major (chemical, civil, electrical, industrial/systems, and mechanical). Results show that there are more men than women in these disciplines and this is more pronounced for international students. In these disciplines, international students graduate at higher rates and have higher stickiness than domestic students. International females have the highest graduation rates. Industrial/Systems Engineering has the highest graduation rates and stickiness for all populations. Insights from this work can inform student services personnel and others committed to international student success.

This study focuses on quantitative analyses of international and domestic students pursuing undergraduate degrees at institutions in the USA. Metrics used include representation at start of university studies, representation at graduation and six-year graduation rate. Results are disaggregated by origin (domestic or international), sex (female and male), and major (engineering or non-engineering). Results show that more international students choose engineering than other majors. There are more men than women in engineering and this is more pronounced for international students. International students graduate at higher rates in engineering than domestic students by about 5%. This may reflect a tension between their higher academic qualifications but challenges of adjusting to studying in another country. These insights can be used to support student success.

The Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) is a unique research resource offering student record data at an unprecedented scale. This special session aims to introduce participants to MIDFIELD including the data that it contains and some key results from research using MIDFIELD, explore how to conduct research with such a resource, and explain how participants can access MIDFIELD. Understanding what data is available in MIDFIELD and how to access it will help researchers decide if this is a useful resource for their own research.

This work-in-progress presents an overview of current research with the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) and strategies for inviting and supporting other researchers to use this database in their own research. MIDFIELD is a resource for the study of students that includes longitudinal, de-identified, whole population data for multiple institutions. This enables researchers to examine student characteristics (such as race/ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic indicators) and curricular pathways (including coursework) by institution and over time. Because the dataset contains records of all students matriculating over a period of time, researchers can study students across all disciplines, not just engineering. The MIDFIELD team aims to educate the broader research community, expand the network of researchers capable of conducting this research, and share innovative research methods in addition to the actual data. We have offered workshops at several conferences as well as the MIDFIELD Institute. The inaugural MIDFIELD Institute brought together researchers from across the USA for two days in 2019. In an evaluation at the end of the Institute, participants were pleased with the Institute and rated it highly. There was high agreement about the value of the content and delivery. Most participants reported that the instituted lived up to their expectations and was a good way to learn about how to use MIDFIELD data. Areas of improvement suggested by participants included making it longer and more challenging. Several of the MIDFIELD Institute attendees are presenting works-in-progress together at FIE 2020 to provide attendees with a range of examples of research that is possible with MIDFIELD.

This workshop, similar to our 2018 FIE workshop but revised to reflect participant feedback, introduces data and tools for investigating undergraduate persistence metrics using R. Student record data are from MIDFIELD, a database of registrars’ data from US institutions. The stratified data sample includes demographic, term, course, and degree information for 98,000 students from 1987 to 2016. The midfieldr package provides functions for determining persistence metrics such as graduation rates and for grouping findings by institution, program, sex, and race/ethnicity. The goal of the workshop is to share our data, methods, and metrics for intersectional research in student persistence. The workshop is designed for R beginners.

This workshop introduces data and tools for investigating undergraduate persistence metrics using R. Student record data are from MIDFIELD, a database of registrars' data from US institutions. The stratified data sample includes demographic, term, course, and degree information for 98,000 students from 1987 to 2016. The midfieldr package provides functions for determining persistence metrics such as graduation rates or program stickiness and for grouping findings by institution, program, sex, and race/ethnicity. The goal of the workshop is to share our data, methods, and metrics for intersectional research in student persistence. The workshop is designed for R beginners.

The Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) is expanding from 14 to about 100 institutions across the USA. This special session aims to introduce participants to MIDFIELD, explore how to conduct research with such a resource, and explain how participants can access MIDFIELD.

This study uses longitudinal, student record level data from eleven public research universities in the United States over a period of twenty-eight years to investigate nontraditional and traditional undergraduate students who ever declared engineering as a major. A nontraditional student is defined as a person who is older than 24 years of age or attends college part-time for at least part of the academic year. A traditional student is defined as a student who matriculates into a baccalaureate degree program in the summer or fall after high school graduation, is younger than 25 years of age, and pursues college on a continuous, full-time basis during the academic year. The research questions addressed in this paper are: How do nontraditional students enter the engineering curriculum? Are there differences with traditional students' entry into engineering by transfer status? Are there differences in precollege academic preparation? Is the collegiate academic performance of nontraditional students different than traditional students by transfer status? Is there a difference in the graduation or withdrawal rates between nontraditional and traditional students by transfer status? Nontraditional students are very similar to traditional students. Once students choose engineering as a major, there are no differences in mean engineering grade point average (GPA) or final cumulative GPA between nontraditional and traditional students. Nontraditional and traditional students have similar SAT scores, similar high school GPAs, choose an engineering major in similar patterns, and have similar six-year graduation rates. Being a transfer student plays a larger role than being a nontraditional student.

The Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) is expanding to include 113 institutions and is being redesigned and archived to be more accessible to researchers. This special session will describe how researchers can better use or gain access to MIDFIELD. At the conclusion of the session participants should be able to: describe MIDFIELD including common data elements, discuss how new variables can be derived from MIDFIELD, understand what is necessary to access the data on the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, and define quantitative and qualitative data types and structures and outline research questions and methods of personal interest to them.

The transfer pathway, particularly from two- to four-year colleges, is often seen as a vehicle to expand the science and engineering workforce by increasing college participation of underrepresented groups, such as black or African American students. In an earlier study, after controlling for credits earned, we found that black transfer students are more likely to persist in engineering than non-transfer black students - a finding that does not hold for students of other ethnicities. In this paper, we study this somewhat puzzling difference in outcomes for black transfer students. Using an updated version of the longitudinal data set used in the earlier study that enables us to distinguish transfers from two- versus four-year institutions, we find that (1) black students in engineering are more likely to transfer from other four-year institutions than from two-year institutions, and (2) transfers from two- versus four-year institutions differ on several key characteristics, including gender, full- versus part-time enrollment status, and education outcomes including six-year graduation in engineering. Observing that our earlier results were driven by transfer students from four-year institutions, we focus this analysis on transfers from two-year colleges to identify factors associated with their performance and persistence in engineering. We find that gender and academic achievement (engineering GPA) - not transfer status - are driving graduation outcomes for two-year black transfer students. Black women are 28 percent less likely to drop out, IS percent less likely to fail an engineering course, and 25 percent more likely to graduate in engineering in six years than black men. In terms of performance, for every tenth of a grade point increase in engineering GPA, the odds of a black student graduating with an engineering degree in six years improves by 13.7 percent. These results should inform debates regarding the effectiveness of the two-year transfer pathway in engineering for black and other minority students.

This study uses longitudinal data from eleven public, research universities in the U.S. to compare grades in required courses, graduation rates, and final cumulative grade point average of traditional (TRS) and nontraditional (NTS) students who ever declared engineering as a major. There have been national calls for increasing the numbers of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees in the U.S., and nontraditional students represent a large potential source of STEM majors. Engineering is studied separately because it has been found to be different than other STEM disciplines. The participating institutions are representative of large public universities that offer a large majority of U.S. engineering degrees. Understanding the choices and outcomes of nontraditional students can inform the process by which the students earn their degrees. Our results show that NTS earn grades that similar (but consistently higher) to those earned by TRS in Science, Mathematics, Engineering courses and have similar cumulative final grade point averages. NTS also graduate in six years at higher rates than TRS. By recruiting and matriculating more NTS, engineering programs can increase six-year graduation rates and graduate more engineering students.

Research on transfer students identifies the specific reasons why students embark on the transfer pathway. Our study adds to this literature with its focus on understanding the broader context of transfer pathways and the relative timing of the decisions to transfer and to major in engineering. Our goal is to identify the entry points into the transfer pathways and how the decision to transfer interacts with the decision to major in engineering. We focus on student intentions and the alterations to their planned pathways. To achieve our goal we analyzed 47 in-depth interviews of traditional-age engineering transfer students from three research universities. The results reveal four distinct transfer pathways characterized by different levels of intentionality and diverse decision making sequences. The findings have important implications for broadening the transfer pathway into engineering.

A new metric, “stickiness,” is proposed, tracking longitudinally all students who have contact with a discipline to determine the likelihood those students will “stick” to that discipline and graduate in it. This metric has the versatility to be relevant for students making contact with engineering through a variety of pathways. Stickiness exhibits significant disciplinary differentiation. Whereas earlier work has shown that Industrial Engineering is the most successful at attracting and retaining students, the disciplinary distribution of stickiness shows that Industrial Engineering is exceptional. Disaggregating by race/ethnicity and gender, much larger variations in stickiness are observed (as much as 48 percent), and positive and negative outcomes are identified where students in particular subpopulations are more or less likely to stick than expected. Aggregated by race/ethnicity and gender, the stickiness of transfer students ranks the disciplines in the same order as the stickiness of first-time-in-college students, but transfer stickiness exhibits less disciplinary variation and transfer students in all disciplines exhibit higher stickiness than first-time-in-college students.

Longitudinal data from ten U.S. institutions are used to characterize outcomes of three matriculation models: Direct Matriculation to a specific major (DM), First-Year Engineering programs (FYE), and Post-General Education Programs (PGE). Both DM and FYE programs show high persistence rates, but FYE programs are less likely to attract transfer students and switchers. FYE graduates are the most likely to stick with their first choice of major (after completing FYE requirements), followed by DM graduates who begin in undesignated engineering (taking extra time to decide), then DM graduates who choose their major as part of the matriculation process, and then PGE graduates. FYE students also have the shortest time to graduation. We conclude that encouraging students to associate with engineering or an engineering discipline from the start, yet maintaining the curricular flexibility to allow alternate entry points onto the engineering path improves persistence, accessibility, effectiveness of major choice, and time to graduation.

Transfer students make up a significant share of engineering college graduates, yet their persistence is seldom studied, largely because of the lack of longitudinal data. This analysis used longitudinal data from 11 universities enrolling large numbers of engineering students to investigate the demographic characteristics and educational outcomes of transfer students in engineering relative to non-transfers. We find that students who transfer to four-year engineering programs are more likely to come from under-represented minority groups (URMs) and less likely to be women, although both groups are over-represented at two-year colleges. The findings confirm existing research indicating that, on average, non-transfers outperform transfer students, and non-URMs outperform URMs. But we also find that URM transfers, and especially Black transfers, are no less successful than nontransfer students - indicating that the transfer pathway is an effective bridge to a four-year degree. This is partly true for women transfers who do as well as men but are outperformed by women non-transfers. Finally, we find significant variation in outcomes between full- and part-time students, which may be driving the observed differences by transfer status. Our results should inform debates regarding the efficacy of the transfer pathway in engineering, particularly for women and URMs.

The purpose of this study is to examine differences in student performance among engineering disciplines, as measured by term GPA's. Results indicate that: 1) Women outperform men in most engineering disciplines; 2) Student performance starts low at the freshman level, drops slightly at the sophomore level, and then increases over the junior and senior levels (without controlling for mortality); 3) Significant differences in GPA's remain between majors after controlling for relative SAT score, academic class level, race, and gender; 4) After controlling for major, relative SAT score, academic class level, and race, the gender gap in performance grows even larger.