Describing the pathways of students continuing in and leaving engineering

The number of students leaving their initial engineering discipline for other engineering disciplines and other fields of study is significant. This paper displays and describes the development of a model of the pathways taken by these students through their undergraduate academic careers. Specifically this paper looks at the migration of engineering students within various disciplines of engineering. This study uses the records of over 135,000 engineering student records from the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). This research shows that approximately 20% of engineering students graduate from an engineering discipline other than that into which they matriculated, and approximately 40% of students who matriculate into an engineering discipline leave the field of engineering. This research also found that there are specific pathways popular with engineering students.