Year: 2014
Type: report
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: We present our completion findings across four, five, and six years to provide an understanding of time to degree and to offer insight as to which students and which institutions tend to have a shorter time to degree across all STEM disciplines as well as in the particular sub-disciplines of engineering, biomedical sciences, and physical sciences.The balance of the paper details the data source, key variables, and analytic methods used to address the three research questions articulated above before moving into a discussion of the findings. Methods DataAnalyses for this study relied upon several data sources.All of the trend analyses and analyses focused on the characteristics of students who intend to pursue STEM and non-STEM majors at college entry examined nationally weighted data collected from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's (CIRP) annual Freshman Survey (TFS).Each year CIRP's TFS surveys hundreds of thousands of first-time, full-time entering freshmen at four-year colleges and universities nationwide.NSF relies on data provided by CIRP's Freshman Survey in its annual Science and Engineering Indicators report.Freshman Survey data are weighted within institution and within institutional type by gender, and the weighted data represent characteristics of the national population of first-time, full-time freshmen in nonprofit four-year colleges and universities in the U.S.To examine persistence and completion rates of students, this study analyzed data from the 2004 CIRP TFS matched with enrollment and completion data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC).NSC provided term-to-term enrollment data as well as information about the type of degree (i.e., A.A., B.A., B.S.) students completed as well as the academic discipline or field of that degree.The timeframe for the NSC data ranged from August 2004 through June 2010, which allowed for analyses regarding four-, five-, and six-year degree completion for students who entered a four-year college or university as a first-time, full-time freshman.The TFS-NSC dataset also has been weighted by gender within institution and within institutional type to make this sample of first-time, full-time freshman representative of the national population of first-time, full-time students who entered college in the fall of 2004. VariablesThe CIRP Freshman Survey includes more than 250 variables representing student characteristics, pre-college experiences, and educational and career goals.To identify characteristics of students intending to pursue STEM majors upon college entry, we primarily relied upon student demographic characteristics, intended major, and pre-college academic preparation.These same student variables and institutional characteristics were merged with STEM completion data to understand differences in STEM completion rates across types of students and institutions.
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2932519256