BackgroundGraduate engineering student attrition is prevalent, but most literature that studies graduate attrition is accomplished in disciplines outside of STEM or engineering, yielding an incomplete understanding of either attrition or persistence.Purpose/HypothesisThe purpose of this article is to investigate the relationships between motivators of attrition for engineering graduate students.Design/MethodData were collected using an online Web‐scraping “bot” that mines data from the online forum Reddit. The anonymous textual forum threads collected were qualitatively analyzed through open‐coding methods.ResultsThe emergent themes reveal the interconnectedness between the roles of the advisor, student perception of cost, their support network, goals, their perceptions of how others perceive them, and quality of life and work. Our model is flexible in that it illuminates underlying combinations of factors that can influence student attrition.ConclusionThis study provides a framework by which various stakeholders can approach the support and education of graduate students, including mentoring students both toward or away from graduate school per the student's goals.

Background: The retention of traditionally underserved students remains a pressing problem across graduate engineering programs. Disciplinary differences in graduate engineering identity provide a lens to investigate students' experiences and can pinpoint potential opportunity structures that support or hinder progress based on social and personal identities. Purpose: This study investigates the impact of discipline, gender, race/ ethnicity, advisor relationship, and years in a program on graduate engineering identity variability.Methods: Cross-sectional survey data from a national sample of doctoral engineering students were analyzed with multilevel modeling. Multilevel modeling measured the differences at the individual and discipline levels for graduate engineering identity and the domains of engineer, researcher, and scientist. Independent variables included were gender, advisor relationship score, race/ethnicity, and years in a program. Results: The engineer identity sub-construct of recognition significantly varied among engineering disciplines. Traditionally underserved students (i.e., Women and minoritized racial/ethnic groups) expressed lower engineering recognition levels, with this relationship varying based on discipline.Overall, our model explained 30% of the variation in engineering recognition among disciplines. Conclusions:The disciplinary variation in graduate engineering identity combined with the significance of gender and race/ethnicity indicates traditionally underserved students do not experience equivalent opportunity structures compared with their well-represented peers. Modifying traditional opportunity structures to serve students better may provide the needed changes to engage and retain traditionally underserved populations.

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Background:The retention of traditionally underserved students remains a problem across graduate engineering programs. Women and men of color and white women leave graduate programs without their intended degree at higher rates than their white male peers. Experiences of discrimination may hinder degree progress for students with marginalized identities.Purpose/Hypothesis: This study investigated women and men of color and white women's experiences of discrimination in graduate engineering programs through the lens of ruling relations.Design/Methods: Semi-structured qualitative individual interviews explored the experiences of doctoral engineering students. Comparative analysis methods uncovered themes derived from participants' experiences of discrimination in engineering graduate education.Results: Women and men of color and white women experienced discrimination from peers, faculty, and advisors in settings such as classrooms, offices, and labs. Based on the themes and ruling relations identified, three significant findings can be distilled: (1) marginalized students recognize some of the norms and systems that marginalize them;(2) interactions that marginalize students are set into the social fabric of engineering and include excluding some students while including others; and (3) everyday interactions sustain and reproduce the oppressive norms. Conclusions:This study offers perspectives that can help graduate program directors and graduate advisors and faculty cultivate equitable environments and assist peer graduate students in understanding their marginalized peers. The implications of this work point to steps necessary to improve the graduate engineering environment for marginalized students.*Author affiliations can be found in the back matter of this article 54 Bahnson et al. Studies in Engineering Education 56 Bahnson et al. Studies in Engineering Education 57 Bahnson et al. Studies in Engineering Education 65 Bahnson et al.

Engineering lacks quantitative measures of racism and sexism in engineering graduate education. Racial and gendered disparities in participation, persistence, and experience combined with qualitative evidence indicate that discrimination interferes with marginalized students' well-being and degree completion. The Discrimination in Engineering Graduate Education (DEGrE) scale helps researchers identify environmental gender and race/ethnicity-based discrimination in engineering graduate education. The scale development and initial assessments reported here demonstrate the validity, internal reliability, and utility of the DEGrE subscales. The DEGrE scale will assist engineering colleges and departments evaluate their graduate students' experiences to guide decision makers in identifying changes needed in their graduate programs to improve equity and inclusion of marginalized students.