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does reflect for the most part the number of years of exposure to the Rowan program. It
does not, however, control for changes in the program that may have occurred at various
stages of these years, and thus is a very rough proxy for more precise measurement of
changes over the course of the undergraduate career. Further, the differences between
cohorts (in terms of actual students and differences in the program that they experienced)
may explain some of the differences between students at different levels in the program
rather than changes in their development as they progress through the program. We will
return to this point below, when we do look at how students change over the course of the
academic year.
Confidence to Stay in Engineering
The longer a student has been in the engineering program at Rowan, the more
confident he or she is that they will stay with engineering as a major and as a career
(Figure IID-1). To some extent this is because some of the students who lack this
confidence drop out of engineering; those who remain with the program have a greater
investment in succeeding and are more likely to believe they will.
IID-130