Factors that engineering students consider

As engineering schools experience total enrollment declines, more attention is focused on increasing recruitment of women and underrepresented minorities. At the same time, because many universities are experiencing budget cuts, there is an increased demand for fiscal accountability. Recruitment must be justified in terms of both budget and efforts, so available funds are invested in the most effective programs. Arizona State University has increased recruitment efforts in the last several years and added a Women in the Applied Sciences and Engineering Program (WISE) in 1993. Recruitment efforts include several specialized day-long or evening programs for students, their teachers and parents, and a summer WISE-UP program for high school women. In addition, students and staff are involved in a variety of outreach efforts designed to encourage engineering enrollments. To help determine if early outreach strategies result in significant change in enrollments, and longer still to determine the relationships between recruitment efforts and graduation, the authors have begun to survey new students each semester to determine their exposure to recruitment efforts and to collect data on the impact of the tools.