Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates

• Published in: Frontiers in Sociology
• Main Authors: Chrystal A. S. Smith, Hesborn Wao, Gladis Kersaint, Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo, Phyllis Gray-Ray, Ellen Puccia, Julie P. Martin, Reginald Lee, John Skvoretz, George MacDonald
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-05-01
• Subjects: STEM degree persistence; equity; engineering education; professional engineering organizations; social capital
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2021.671856/full

Professional engineering organizations (PEOs) have the potential to provide women and underrepresented and minoritized (URM) students with social capital (i.e., resources gained from relationships) that aids their persistence in their engineering undergraduate programs and into the workforce. We hypothesize that women and URM students engineering students who participate in PEOs are more likely to persist in their engineering major and that PEOs contribute to their persistence by providing them access to insider information that supports their persistence. Each year for five years we administered surveys with closed- and open-ended items to examine the association between participating in PEOs and the persistence of a cohort of engineering majors from 11 diverse universities. We used logistic regression and thematic analysis to analyze the data. URM students who participated in PEOs and other engineering related activities were more likely to persist to the second year than URM students who did not (adjusted odds ratio = 2.18, CI: 1.09, 4.37). Students reported that PEOs contributed to their persistence by enabling them to network, reduce gender and race/ethnic isolation, and access professional resources. URM students should be encouraged to participate in PEOs beginning in their first year to increase their integration in their major, which we have found to increase their persistence.