In any engineering college, there is a recurring trend about the students year after year: the number of enrollees consistently goes down. Many freshmen and sophomore students are packing their bags out of engineering schools after experiencing a semester or two.
Reasons could vary. But perhaps the most common is the engineering students’ perception of a learning environment that fails to motivate them.
This is according to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, who believes that more engineering students would have stuck around if engineering programs were a lot more rewarding, socially relevant and designed to help the students succeed.
In a capsule, engineering students drop out of their course because they are bored.
GIF via Imgur
Executive director of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) thinks that if engineering schools do not retain their students, it doesn’t matter how interested they were at the beginning. This is alarming considering that more jobs in most parts of the world now require technical engineering skills, only to lose those with the potential in the process of molding them.
The dropout rate in engineering maintains or worse, gets a surge depending on the university. As the level of difficulty increases, the number of people leaving does the same.
Another common reason could be the financial instability, but the prevailing reason of the dropouts, as mentioned earlier, are that they no longer find it interesting to study engineering.
It’s almost always that the students find it easier to leave engineering than to go to engineering. It’s easier to transfer out than transfer in. And what should universities do? Keep the newbies engaged to their engineering programs.
Source: Product Lifecycle Report
