Engineering graduate students' critical events as catalysts of attrition

Abstract

Background: While attrition from the PhD has been attributed to many high-level causal factors, such as funding, advisor relationship, and "fit" into a department, few studies have closely examined the mechanisms of attrition or why and how graduate engineering students begin to consider attrition from their doctoral programs.Design/Method: This study analyzed interviews with current and former doctoral engineering students at research universities across the United States, collected through two closely-related studies on graduate engineering experiences and attrition consideration. We used critical event analysis as a methodological approach to understand the experiences of a subset of 13 participants, who, at some point in their graduate career, experienced a singular event that caused them to question whether to persist in their PhD program.Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of the present paper is to investigate how graduate engineering students begin to question whether they should remain in their PhD programs of study.Results: We categorized the environments in which critical events occurred into four quadrants along the lines of University and Nonuniversity Settings and Routine versus Unexpected Contexts, mapping critical events and supporting events to themes from prior literature. The findings demonstrate how seemingly mundane experiences for faculty can be cataclysmic in the eyes of the student; how critical events serve to magnify other issues that had been accumulating over time; and how students may not self-reflect on their rationale for pursuing a PhD until a critical juncture occurs. Conclusions: Critical events are one mechanism by which students may begin considering departure from their engineering PhD programs. Some critical events masquerade within mundane contexts, like conversations or conferences (although, in retrospect, students can identify other relevant features contributing to dissatisfaction). From this work, we provide implications geared toward administrators, advisors, and graduate students on how to address and potentially mitigate critical events or their effects, including engaging in conversations about leaving.

Mitigating Ceiling Effects in a Longitudinal Study of Doctoral Engineering Student Stress and Persistence

“…During graduate school, some students experience critical events that alter their worldviews on remaining in graduate school, which have been shown to lead to departure considerations and eventual early departure (Lott et al, 2009;Zerbe et al, 2023). While many life experiences can be critical events for students (Zerbe et al, 2022), many factors influence departure considerations, including advisor and peer relationships, discrimination, and employment opportunities (Artiles & Matusovich, 2020;Bahnson et al, 2022;Berdanier et al, 2020;Lott et al, 2009;Sallai et al, 2023;Zerbe et al, 2023). In other students, more general dissatisfaction and unhappiness build with no identifiable critical event leading to departure.…”

Exploring the Viability of Agent-Based Modeling to Extend Qualitative Research: Comparison of Computational Platforms

“…Randomizing the student-agents' experiences with each variable is important for ABM because it allows for these experiences to fluctuate from positive to negative. For example, a good advisor in one academic year has the potential to become a "bad advisor" the next year: Testimonies from our interviews and literature [30], [31] indicate that many students had positive experiences with their advisors, until something changed within the advisor's personal or professional life (becoming department head, children, change in relationship with student, etc.) which led students to feel neglected or uncomfortable in their situation.…”

“…Understanding that all graduate students' experiences differ in their educational journeys is part of what makes those experiences so difficult to study. In an attempt to understand the changing landscape and difficulties of engineering graduate school, we referred to previous research [21], [30], [31]on graduate student attrition to develop the set of rules our student-agents follow. Transforming previous research information from qualitative data into a programmable quantitative format required multiple steps.…”

“…The interview data also provided additional insights into important factors of graduate school that were not as heavily focused on in the GrAD model, but that were investigated in subsequent work [22]. As such, our model includes a variable for critical events [31] with the potential to completely change a student's career path as well as a modifier to represent sunk cost after each year the student-agent completes.…”

“…A larger range with larger values indicates a greater weight of that variable and potential for that variable to impact motivation more than others. One example is that literature indicates that one of the most impactful variables that impacts a graduate student's experience and well-being is the student-advisor relationship [21], [31]. Specifically, we understand that a difficult advisor relationship can severely impact a student's intention to depart from their program.…”