Student Demographics and Outcomes in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Including Migration Between the Disciplines

There is a large amount of overlap in Mechanical (ME) and Aerospace Engineering (AsE) curricula, and yet the student populations look quite different in terms of race and gender representation. This study includes institutional data from 6 institutions, all of which offered ME and AsE over the period 1987-2010. This large sample (over 20,000 first-time-in-college engineering students) allows us to adopt an intersectional framework to study race and gender together. In this paper, we examine the demographics of students in ME and AsE and their sixyear graduation rates. Then we consider the exchange of students between these two similar disciplines and how that affects the graduation rate of each. Overall, ME does not recruit many women, but it retains many to graduation. AsE, however, has recruitment and retention patterns that highlight the intersectionality of race and gender. For example, being a Hispanic female in AsE is more complex than just the superposition of being a Hispanic student in AsE and being a female in AsE. Within each racial/ethnic group, men who start in engineering choose AsE and ME at higher rates than women who start in engineering. In Aero, the gender gaps are small to moderate among White, Hispanic, and Asian students, with a larger gap between Black men and women choosing AsE (9% vs. 4%). Mechanical Engineering on the other hand, has large gender gaps within all racial/ethnic groups with more men than women choosing ME Many students switch from AsE to ME and vice versa. By studying the differences between AsE and ME and the exchange between them, both disciplines can learn from each other about how to improve their recruiting and retention of underrepresented groups.