Critical-to-quality factors associated with engineering student persistence: the influence of freshman attitudes

National studies have revealed numerous explanations for the lack of student persistence toward a science, math, or engineering degree. At many institutions, the greatest predictor of student success has been shown to be a combination of high school grades and SAT scores. However, at Mercer University, regression analyses show that differences in high school grade point averages and SAT scores account for less than 25% of the variability in the data describing student persistence toward an undergraduate degree. We believe that student attitudes and perceptions influence decisions to remain in an engineering curriculum, and have developed a series of studies to test this hypothesis. The current study focused on a cohort of students who entered our engineering school as first-time, full-time freshmen in the fall 2000 semester. We found significant attitudinal and belief differences between those who left engineering and those who persisted to the fourth year of college. Five critical-to-quality factors were identified.