Edwin C. Lewis

Interest and Ability Correlates of Graduation and Attrition in a College of Engineering

With the strain that increased enrollments are placing on the resources of many colleges and universities, these institutions are becoming more concerned with minimizing the inefficiency arising from student transfers. To both the student and the college, a transfer represents loss of time and money-whether the shift is between institutions or within a university. Perhaps nowhere is transfer a more disturbing problem than in colleges of engineering. Induced by propaganda extolling the rewards of an engineering career, many young men enter engineering programs with unrealistic conceptions both of their own abilities and interest and of the demands of these programs. The result is that these curricula tend to lose more students by transfer than they gain. Saddler (1950) found that these transferring-out students tended to score differently on the Strong Vocational Interest Blank for Men from the students who remained in engineering. Differences between graduates and nongraduates of engineering programs have been found on the Kuder Preference Record (Reid and others, 1962). It has also been established that graduates of the various engineering curricula within a college can be differentiated according to their interest profiles (Reed, Lewis, and Wolins, 1960). The present study was designed to discover whether the interest patterns of students entering the engineering program of a specific university differed according to the ultimate academic outcomes (within that university) of the students. It extends the findings of the studies cited above by considering these outcomes in more detail.