A Study of the Impact of Minority Engineering Programs at the FAMU‐FSU College of Engineering

Abstract

AbstractThe Engineering Concepts Institute, and the rest of the comprehensive minority student development program that followed it, has served students of Florida A&M University matriculating to the Florida A&M University—Florida State University (FAMU‐FSU) College of Engineering. A significant relationship between participation in the programs under study and graduation/retention was identified with the Pearson Chi‐squared test, Cochran‐Mantel‐Haenszel statistics, as well as the Mantel‐Haenszel estimate. Students who participated in the program were estimated to have significantly higher odds of five‐year graduation and six‐year graduation than students who did not participate in the program. A comparison of high school GPAs identified a selection bias, and high school GPA was then used to control for this selection bias in a multiple logistic regression model. While multiple individual cohorts remain statistically significant, the aggregate of all cohorts lacks significance due to the small number of participants and the possible overly stringent penalty imposed by the addition of high school GPA. Nevertheless, the results continue to show the positive trend observed earlier—that Minority Engineering Program participants are 25 percent more likely to be retained and graduate in engineering than students who had similar high school GPA but did not participate in the program—it is expected that continuing longitudinal study will bear out this trend as statistically significant. Although the programs described in this paper have been discontinued as a result of personnel changes, the study of the program is still useful as a contribution to the body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of such programs.