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whether the gender of the student affects their satisfaction in this respect. Because a
feeling of belonging is integral to remaining in a major, students’ assessment of peer
relationships and their sense of community in engineering were also important to assess.
Finally, we also asked the students about satisfaction with course load,
opportunities offered, how the program was run, and advisement.
In this chapter, after describing our indicators of satisfaction with the Rowan
program, we analyze each type of satisfaction to determine which type of student is most
satisfied or dissatisfied with that aspect of the Rowan program. We consider the extent to
which the input students bring from family and pre-college preparation influences their
satisfaction with the Rowan engineering program. A critical question is whether the
program satisfies only the most highly qualified students, or whether it caters to students
who have less strong preparation; whether students who had the greatest chance of
acceptance into another engineering program are more or less satisfied with the Rowan
program.
Many would say that satisfaction is closely related to academic performance, those
who do better being more satisfied, those doing worse, less satisfied. We look at the
relationship between academic performance and satisfaction. To get an idea of what
kinds of involvement in the Rowan program might lead to more or less satisfaction with
the program, we also relate the student’s involvement in extra-curricular activities to their
levels of satisfaction.
We then consider how engineering self-confidence is related to satisfaction with the
various aspects of the program. While we recognize that the two may affect each other,
we start out by looking at how levels of self-confidence measured in the fall semester are
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