Attrition in undergraduate engineering students is an issue across the country, with some researchers reporting that close to 50% of those who start college as engineering majors have switched by the time they graduate.
In UC Santa Barbara’s Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering, computer science professor Elizabeth Belding had been looking at student data in the early 2020s to discern how UCSB engineering students were faring. “The second year is when we start to see attrition,” she said. During their first year, students primarily take general education requirements such as math, chemistry and physics, and only a handful of courses in their engineering major — so students may be leaving the major before they really get to experience it.
They also may not have had time to develop a community within their major to support them through these challenging early years, Belding said, and they might be leaving without seeing the many possible career paths that lie ahead…