How we measure success makes a difference : eight-semester persistence and graduation rates for female and male engineering students

Recent research has shown that, although stereotypes prevail about women’s attrition rates in undergraduate engineering, there is no gender gap in the persistence of engineering students to the eighth semester of study. How “persistence” is measured, however, is of methodological concern as we look at what constitutes success. “Persistence” is reported in the literature in various ways as approximate measures of graduation, which is the ultimate goal. To examine the relationship between measures of persistence and graduation, analyses were conducted using MIDFIELD (the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development). The database includes student records from 75,686 first-time-incollege students matriculating in engineering at one of nine public universities in the southeastern United States. We found gender and institutional differences in the six-yeargraduation rates of students who persist to the eighth semester. An important result of this work is demonstrating how studying different outcomes can tell different stories about the same students: studying eight-semester persistence for aggregate populations can provide a reasonable surrogate for graduation, but may paint an overly optimistic picture at some institutions, and the study of both outcomes can provide new and valuable information about the student experience.