Academic Attrition of Engineering Transfer Students

Abstract

PERIODICALLY some of the careful observ ers of the higher education scene express in creasing concern about the relatively high rates of academic attrition found at most institutions. In spite of any benefits which a student may re ceive from a contact with a college or university, be it as little as a single semester, the opinion is stated that the failure of sizable percentages of students to graduate has resulted in an unnec essary dissipation of energies and finances. Were a rechanneling of these efforts possible, appreciable gains to both the institutions and the students concerned are envisioned. An answer to the problem would be, of course, a more careful screening of applicants reque st ing entrance to engineering curricula. Efforts to find those characteristics which are highly re lated to academic success in engineering have been numerous (8). The predictive usefulness of the high school grade-point average (9), scho lastic aptitude tests (2, 5,11), other aptitude tests (10), reading tests (3), interest tests (7), and personality scales (6), individually and in combination, has been investigated. In many in stances the results have been promising, even though incapable of offering a near perfect selec tion scheme. In tjie case of engineering colleges in which sizable numbers of students enter as transfer students, the problem of selecting the most prom ising students is further complicated. At the Iowa State College, for example, estimates have been made that as many as 40 percent of the en tering engineering students at the beginning of a fall term had received college credit from other institutions of higher education. A study (1) of the transfer students entering the Engineering Division of this college during the 1946-47, 1947 48, and 1948-49 academic years revealed that most students (80%) had attended only one college prior to enrolling at the Iowa State College, and that the college was usually located in Iowa o r an adjacent state and enrolled less than 2 50 0 students. Furthermore, of the 804 students in cluded in the study, only 246, or 31%, graduat ed in engineering. The remaining 558 either failed, transferred to non-engineering curricula at the Iowa State College, transferred to other institutions of higher education, or dropped from college for miscellaneous personal reasons. Even though a few of the 558 may have been aca demically successful elsewhere, they can be properly classified as attrition students in the eyes of the engineering faculty. Although the foregoing study investigated the relationships between a series of numerical var iables and the tendency to graduate in engineer ing, no attempt was made to study the possible influence of non-numerical characteristics on this criterion. An extension of the study, there fore, seemed in order. On the basis of a preliminary examination of the data available, one of the non-numerical fac tors which seemed to warrant examination was