Background: In the United States, there is increased demand to expand the engineering workforce. Many military veterans have received technical training that can be leveraged in engineering. Their pursuit of engineering degrees has great potential to expand and diversify the engineering workforce. Purpose: This study examines the pathways of US…

Dropout rates in engineering degree programmes at universities are high, and skilled workers are needed. Universities try to prevent dropouts with different offers one of which is attending bridging courses. Research on the effects of these programmes is rare, especially in subject-specific programmes and study formats like cooperative education.…

Background: To address complex challenges of modern society, engineering education needs to help students develop sociotechnical perspectives of engineering. Research has documented efforts to incorporate sociotechnical thinking into undergraduate engineering education, but those perspectives must often compete with more dominant technocentric…

The experiences students have as they pursue graduate degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are governed by numerous dynamics that are at play outside the context of any classroom. The relationships students share with their peers, advisors, administration, and university significantly impacts their trajectory as…

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological qualitative study was to describe the precollege interactions of undergraduate engineering students with low-income and economic marginalization (LIEM). Our analysis yielded three major themes regarding precollege interactions: (a) family and kinship as a source of motivation, (b) educators as…

Relying on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with 13 Latino male undergraduates in engineering, this study explored students experiences and sense of belonging within a Minority Retention Program at a 4-year public university in California. Findings support extent research on the importance of structural interventions in science, technology,…

When students enter higher education, they can encounter the feeling of unpreparedness. In fact, students who lack the appropriate prior education are less prepared. Therefore developing and implementing appropriate interventions for incoming students is important. This study examined the effectiveness of two new interventions at the Faculty of…

Transitional engineering students are those who are academically ineligible to enter a bachelor's engineering program but are enrolled in an associate engineering program with a university. Successful completion of such an associate engineering program allows the higher achievers to transfer to a full bachelor's engineering program. The associate…

The vision of Smart Connected Community (SCC) is to integrate technology to improve economy, safety, education, health and provide equity in the society. Human factor plays a vital role in the SCC in human societal, psychological, physical factors in the technology uses from various aspects. In this research, first, we have studied the impact of…

Although the number of engineering students is increasing, dropout rates remain high. This problem is also present in the Faculty of Engineering Technology (FET) at KU Leuven, Belgium, which resulted in the need for an in-depth analysis of the academic achievement of the bridging students there. This study examines the contribution of a range of…

Research on students' transition, retention and experiences in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has increasingly focused on identity formation and on students' integration in the study programmes. However, studies focusing on the role of the curriculum in this process at the level of higher education are scarce. The present…

This study investigates how the college readiness of participants in a compensatory program designed to facilitate interest in science and engineering was determined. Archival data were used to qualitatively analyze the performance reports of 205 student participants during the compensatory program's first 5 years. Findings indicate participants…

There is increasing pressure to make pathways to higher education more accessible to students from a wide range of backgrounds, including those from lower socioeconomic circumstances. Often, those students gain vocational qualifications but those qualifications do not always support them fully to articulate to higher education. This is, at least…

There are many approaches to solving the problem of underrepresentation of some racial and ethnic groups and women in scientific and technical disciplines. Here, the authors evaluate the association of a summer bridge program with the graduation rate of underrepresented minority (URM) students at a selective technical university. They demonstrate…

This paper presents a case study in which the authors attempted to understand the impact, on student choice, of reforms in tertiary education in Australia, namely, a shift towards a demand-driven system and the blurring of the distinction between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education. The authors compared the advanced…