Expanding access to and participation in the multiple institution database for investigating engineering longitudinal development

Abstract

Retention and graduation are the dominant metrics for studying student success in engineering education and in higher education in general; yet available national datasets do not facilitate establishing national retention/graduation benchmarks. A national, longitudinal, engineering student unit-record database would make it possible to calculate retention and other metrics consistently. This would permit benchmarking, support peer comparisons, and the use of new metrics backed by community support. Sharing longitudinal student record data is critical to addressing important questions that are being asked of higher education. The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) is a multi-institution, longitudinal, student record level dataset that is used to answer many research questions about how students maneuver through required engineering curricula and what obstacles stand in their way towards graduation. MIDFIELD comprises whole population unit-record data for undergraduate, degree-seeking students - including students who matriculate in engineering, those who migrate into engineering from other majors, students who come to engineering as transfer students, part-time engineering students, and students who have never enrolled in engineering. This diversity results in a dataset that currently comprises twenty-five years of data that includes 1,014,887 unique undergraduate, degree-seeking students. Of those students 210,725 were ever enrolled in engineering. While the original database contains only eleven institutions, the plan for MIDFIELD has always been to expand the database to include all public institutions in the United States that offer undergraduate programs in engineering. An award by the National Science Foundation (#1545667, $4,010,978.00, 03/01/16 to 02/28/2021) will support increasing the number of partner institutions to 103. Students in the expanded MIDFIELD will comprise over half of the undergraduate engineering degrees awarded at U. S. public institutions and approximately two-thirds of the U. S. undergraduate engineering student population in any given year during the past 30 years. The expanded MIDFIELD will contain unit record data for over 10 million individual students and will contain minority serving institutions and institutions from a broad range of research classifications.