Effect of an Entrepreneurship Program on GPA and Retention*, The

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 2004 by Ohland, Matthew W, Frillman, Sharron A, Zhang, Guili, Brawner, Catherine E, Miller, Thomas K III

In addition to the changes to the EEP program itself, it was because of the results from the formative study that the more extensive longitudinal study described below was undertaken.

V. LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE ENGINEERING ENTREPRENEURS PROGRAM

A longitudinal study of participants in the EEP was initiated following this period of formative assessment. The study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the program at meeting these objectives:

1. Retain the interest of students in engineering by involving them in meaningful design experiences early in their academic careers.

2. Improve engineering student performance by involvement in multi-semester design activities.

3. Improve retention by providing senior leaders as role models for underclassmen.

The outcome of (1) and (3) above should be an improvement in the retention in engineering of program participants over a control group with similar characteristics. While the formative assessment indicated that the lower division students did recognize the leadership role of (most of) the senior leaders, we lack enough information to prove the causality ofthat mentoring relationship in any observed improvement in retention in engineering. Thus (1) and (3) are confounded without further qualitative research, and we are therefore assessing the objective, "improve retention by involving students in meaningful design experiences early in their academic careers and by providing senior leaders as role models for underclassmen." Based on objective (2) above, we expected to observe an improvement in the later performance of students, as measured by GPA.

Notably, the longitudinal study does not investigate the gain in entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, or attitudes that students in the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program may experience, focusing instead on persistence in engineering and academic success as measured by cumulative GPA. Even though EEP students certainly develop entrepreneurship knowledge, skills, and attitudes, the extent to which this is the case is not measured, nor is any connection established between the course content and these outcomes. Thus, the observed effect may be due to a variety of causes including learning about entrepreneurship as an engineering process and career (content), the process of simulating a small engineering business (experiential learning), and the partnership of freshman and sophomore engineering students with their junior and senior counterparts (affiliation).

Longitudinal study sample: Since these objectives are related to the benefits of participation by lower division (freshman and sophomore) students, only those students are included in this study. The number of lower division participants is shown along with the total number of participants in Table 4.

While enrollment clearly fluctuates, the fall 1997 enrollment attracts attention as unusually low. The course was not supposed to have been offered during that semester, but a small group of students were enrolled in it before the section was to be cancelled. A total enrollment for aE semesters of 139 is shown in Table 3, but repeat enrollment reduces the number available for study. Table 5 shows the frequency of participation of the 107 students who most commonly enrolled only once in the course in the time period of the study.