The University of Oklahoma (OU) will study the factors that impact the retention of female undergraduate majors in its Industrial Engineering program. The program is especially successful: as of Fall 2001, 58% of the undergraduate majors in Industrial Engineering are women. This proportion is strikingly higher than both the nationwide proportion in industrial engineering and the proportion in other STEM degree programs at OU. Furthermore, the proportion has more than doubled in the space of five years, having steadily increased from 27% in 1996. OU did not set out specifically to accomplish this rate of retention of female students.
The study will investigate combinations of factors that affect students' choices. For example, one factor is the proportion of female faculty. Industrial Engineering at OU has a high proportion of women faculty (4 of 10 faculty, 40%), which is one of the factors identified by Seymour and Hewitt (1997) as having an impact on retention of women majors. This phenomenon alone is unlikely to account for the present high retention, as evidenced by nationwide trends in other disciplines (e.g., chemical engineering and computer science).
The primary source of data will be 600 interviews with students. Students will be sophomore to senior, as well as alumni. During the first year, the team will interview only Industrial Engineering majors at OU. In the second and third years, they will interview students at OU majoring in Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics, in addition. Finally, during the third year, they will include additional interviews of Industrial Engineering majors at Arizona State University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and the University of Pittsburgh. To assure triangulation, other sources of data will include student transcript records, the Pittsburgh Engineering Attitudes Toward Engineering Survey(copyright), and interviews with faculty, program directors, advisors, and graduate students, all of whom affect student experiences in college.
The fifteen-person research team consists of two anthropologists, two educational researchers, two faculty in industrial engineering at OU (one with expertise in engineering education research), one faculty liaison for each of the other participating departments at OU (one with expertise in undergraduate mathematics education research), one faculty liaison with each of the participating institutions, and an experienced project director.
