Work in Progess: A Decade-Spanning Longitudinal Study on the Curricular Complexity of Engineering Programs

This work-in-progress research paper provides preliminary results from a longitudinal study using new curricular data collected to supplement the existing Multiple Institution Database for Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD is a comprehensive dataset providing valuable information about how diverse engineering students have performed and been represented across disciplines since the 1980s. Although the descriptive power of MIDFIELD has uncovered disparities among different groups while debunking myths about others, it fails to identify the mechanisms driving specific gender and racial distributions beyond demographic characteristics. Accordingly, our focus in this study is formally characterizing the curriculum's role in perpetuating systemic barriers to degree progress for underrepresented groups. We employed the Curricular Analytics framework from Heileman et al. to quantify the complexity of plans of study across five engineering disciplines, where available, at 13 institutions over a decade since their most recent observation in MIDFIELD (n = 494). We are currently exploring our data and, in this work-in-progress, offer initial descriptive statistics as we finalize our dataset for public release. Our work is expected to benefit researchers and practitioners interested in systematically analyzing curricula. As we continue exploring our data and supplementing the dataset with new disciplines and institutions, we hope that this new lens for exploring student retention can enable us to pose and address a wide variety of new and old research questions.