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The “leavers” were fairly evenly distributed between the majors. The slightly
lower proportion of leavers who are chemical engineering majors results from there being
fewer chemical engineering students who took the survey that year. The slightly lower
proportion of students who dropped whose major was “general” is actually somewhat
misleading, since this major was available primarily for first-year students and less than
10% of the entire population of engineering students had this major. Of all students in our
survey who had a “general” engineering major, 20% of them later dropped out, as
opposed to 8-11% of each of the other majors. This is one of the reasons that the
“general” major was later eliminated from the program; it functioned as a “catch-all”
category for students who were undecided about their specialization and made it more
difficult for these students to form connections with other students and faculty in their
first year or two.
Of the students who took our survey and later dropped, 27% were female. Given
that women are 20% of the students in engineering at Rowan, this might be construed as
meaning that more women drop out than men. However, this is not the case, as we
presented above. The slightly higher percentage of women among those took our survey
and later dropped out is because there is a slightly higher representation of the women in
the program in our survey than from the male students.
IIF-220