Collaborative Research: The Organizational Climate Challenge: Promoting the Retention of Students from Underrepresented Groups in Doctoral Engineering Programs

Developing the US engineering doctoral workforce is a significant opportunity to build and improve the US economy and global leadership. The long-term vitality of the US workforce relies on the full range of engineering career pathways being available to all Americans. Note all students who start doctoral programs finish them and retention varies by the various social strata of the students. The problem is not students’ inability to complete the Ph.D. degree requirements, but rather that talented students leave engineering doctoral programs before completing their doctorates. Student attrition results in a loss of human talent to the national endeavor of research and discovery at universities fueling US economic growth. This project aims to examine the organizational climate of engineering doctoral programs and their impact on promoting or hindering the persistence and retention of doctoral students in engineering. The goal of this mixed-methods project is to examine doctoral students’ perceptions of the factors that impact their persistence in degree completion and the differences in experiencing those factors based on intersecting social categories. Drawing on organizational climate research and other theories, the project’s multidisciplinary team aims to use a student-centered approach to shed light on multiple climate factors by engaging with a wide range of students. To achieve a comprehensive picture of departmental climate and persistence, iterative and complementary cycles of project implementation are planned over the project period. The project will develop, refine, and validate a survey instrument, including a climate scale that will be sensitive enough to assess phenomena unique toa range of students. The scale will be grounded in measurement invariance, in that factors will be measured in the same way across different groups to reveal similarities and differences between engineering doctoral student populations. The project is intended to result in a national survey and interviews with a subsample of survey respondents. This project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad, and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, and STEM workforce development. The program supports the accumulation of robust evidence to inform efforts to understand, build theory to explain, and suggest interventions and innovations to address persistent. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.