Pathways and Outcomes of Rural Students in Engineering

This full paper aims to investigate students' academic outcomes based on their rurality classification. Despite the large number of studies investigating students' demographics across engineering disciplines, few studies consider how rurality - coming from a rural area - influences students' academic performance. This study also aims to study the variety of demographic variables and pre-college characteristics including home zip code at matriculation as a proxy for point of origin among engineering undergraduate students. Moreover, this study investigates the effects of these characteristics, on undergraduate students' likelihood of graduation and academic success across seven institutions.This is a quantitative study using a longitudinal data from multiple institutions. Students' home zip code is used to classify students to four rurality classifications using the urban-centric locale codes defined by U.S. Census Bureau. The study applies a logit regression on a dataset that includes 30,763 students to investigate the likelihood of graduation of engineering undergraduate students from seven institution. The study then applies an ordinary least squares linear regression model to a subset of 21,311 students who managed to graduate from the same institutions to investigate students' graduation GPA as a proxy of student success based on students' rurality classification. This study also analysis the results disaggregating students based on their institutions. Although the result show that there are different patterns among institutions, but generally, rural students seem at a disadvantage for both GPA and graduation at most institutions.