The effect of financial support on academic achievement and retention of female engineering students

Abstract

While women have become well represented in some STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields such as biology, life science, and medical fields in recent years; they remain severely underrepresented in engineering. Among those who enter engineering, women are more likely to drop out of the major than men. Research has indicated that financial difficulty is among the top factors influencing retention of students in engineering in general, underrepresented students, and non-traditional students. Yet little research has looked the influence of financial factors on retention of women. This study examined how financial support influenced the retention and academic achievement of women in engineering. This study focused on another type of financial support - a loan repayment award - and its influence on undergraduate women's academic achievement and completion in College of Engineering at Kansas State University. Specifically, a private organization, the E. Eugene Carter Foundation, provided an incentive for degree completion, the Carter Opportunity Award, to undergraduate women in the form of a repayment of subsidized student loans upon completion of an engineering degree. In this study, we examined whether this financial incentive of a student loan repayment awarded upon graduation influenced undergraduate women's retention and academic achievement in engineering. This quantitative study used a pretest-posttest quantitative design. Forty sophomore women engineering students, stratified by first generation status and ethnicity, were randomly placed into the experimental group (selected to receive repayment of their subsidized student loans on completion of an engineering degree) and the control group (not selected to receive loan repayment upon completion of an engineering degree). At the beginning of the study, students in the experimental group were told that their subsidized loans incurred during their time at Kansas State University would be paid off after graduation with an engineering degree. Students in the control group were not told about the program. The initial grade point averages (GPAs), the final GPA, graduation status, and demographic information were collected from all participants. Multiple statistical methods were used including independent t-test, repeated-measure analysis of variance, and chi-square test. We found that (1) while the experimental group and the control group as a whole were very similar in terms of their initial average GPAs, participants in the control group who successfully graduated with an Engineering degree had statistically significantly higher baseline GPAs than those who did not graduate; by contrast participants in the experimental group who graduated with an engineering degree had statistically similar initial average GPAs as those who did not graduate. (2) The results from analysis of covariance showed that among those who graduated with an engineering degree, the final GPAs between the experimental group and the control group were not statistically different after controlling for the initial GPAs. (3) The experimental group completion rate was statistically significant higher than the control group. We concluded that the loan repayment award not only had a positive influence on completion rates, but also influenced completion by a greater variety of students in terms of GPAs. Students in the experimental group had a wider range of GPAs and lower average GPA than the control group, suggesting that loan repayment may improve persistence for engineering students with lower GPAs. We argue that the findings presented here may have the potential of changing how the resources be distributed to intervention programs. The result-based financial support may be used as a new way to recruit students of underrepresented populations including women and minority students.