Students in Transit: Understanding the Migration of Students between Disciplines and Disciplinary Groupings

In this paper we investigate methods for visualizing the flow of university-level students through the undergraduate academic experience. We use the lens of transit between major declarations, both in the context of specific major to major mappings, as well as mappings between disciplinary clusters. Our motivation is twofold. First, we wish to understand the implications for students, in terms of time to degree, fidelity to initial major interest, and intellectual distance travelled by students as they cross boundaries of major clusters. Second, we wish to understand the implications for degree programs, as they seek to attract and retain top students, or manage the consequences of declining enrollments. Our approach utilizes multiple visualization techniques, as we first try and develop high-level understanding of the migratory patterns of students, and then drill down to more fine-grained approaches yielding insights that are aimed at providing specific, actionable information to a diverse set of stakeholders, including students, faculty, and administrators.