Student attitudes about diversity: “If the field of engineering were more diverse, what would that mean for you?”

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If the field of engineering were more diverse, what would that mean for you? The ways in which answers to this question vary provide useful insight into how students view efforts to advance diversity & inclusion in engineering. In this paper, we use the Tripartite Model of Attitude to explore students' evaluative reactions to a hypothetical, more diverse engineering environment. We interviewed undergraduate (n=19) and graduate students (n=22) at a single institution. We asked each student to imagine a world in which the field of engineering were more diverse and, subsequently, describe how their personal experience might be different. Our findings highlight a range of attitude components such as engineering career changes at the personal and global levels as well as changes in interpersonal interactions. Across participants, themes suggest that majority students articulate more functional, cognitive elements (e.g., being exposed to more diverse ideas), while underrepresented students more often discuss affective elements (e.g., feeling more comfortable). Our results advance understanding of students' attitudes about diversity and enable us to provide practitioners with suggestions for discussing this topic with engineering students. This work is part of a larger effort to better integrate diversity into engineering education and is directly geared towards educators and researchers interested in inclusion and diversity.