Retention - No longer an issue?

As part of my work, I am always in midst of conversations about the need to increase the participation of students into the Engineering, Science, Technology and Math areas. In fact, the topic has remained in discussion for most of the last decade. What is concerning policy makers and educators is that US is not producing enough science and engineering (S&E) graduates. This issue has been reported in the 2002 S$E indicators: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/pdf/c02.pdf - The 2002 report mentions that of the 25% students who enrolled in bachelor Science and Engineering degree programs nationwide, about one-third dropped out of the programs in their second year, and about 38% actually completed an S&E degree. That is why it was quite surprising to me that the 2010 S&E report does not mention retention as an issue. Also, if the increased federal funding during the past decade has helped increase the retention, that has not been reported in the 2010 report either (at least to my knowledge). What I would like to see is whether this issue has been addressed and if so, what strategies have been successful.

Program Upgrades

2010 turned out pretty busy for me. I wrote a proposal for updating the Engineering and Mechanical Engineering programs at my college. At our college, we have a "Two Meetings" rule - the course or program proposals pass through a rather lengthy governance process that consists of two meetings at each of the following levels: departments, divisions, academic standards committee, and general body meeting of the college faculty. During the first meeting, the course comes in for "Information only" and then in the second meeting, the committees/departments/divisions have to vote on the proposal. If the course withstands the scrutiny, it passes to the next level. The procedure took about a year and half to approval and implementation. The course and programs were approved in Spring 2010 and were implemented this year (2011).

One of the major changes we made to the program was inclusion of an engineering computation course. The course is an ambitious course that can serve as introduction to engineering and gives students access in their early, formative years as engineers to state of the art tools, and technology. This kind of access is particularly important when the schools are struggling to keep students interested in the STEM careers, and to graduate more engineers and scientists. I will write about my experience about teaching this class soon.

Just when you introduce a new course, it becomes important to take a hard look at your existing offerings. The programs at community colleges have to be in harmony with those at the four year institutions where the CC students transfer. Most four year schools only accept a limited number of credits from community colleges, and therefore programs at CC can never be too heavy in the number of credits.

We have tried our level best to ensure that we offer a leaner, cleaner program that would allow students to transfer maximum number of credits when we made these changes.

The process was no doubt lengthy and sometimes even frustrating to some, but is also very educational. Not only you learn about programs at other institutions, but you also learn about the college, the governance processes, and most importantly about the people who make this happen: your colleagues from your divisions, and faculty and staff you would have no chance of knowing otherwise.