Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Attracting more and diverse students into engineering programs has been identified as one of the strategies for achieving the overall national goal of increasing the number of engineers needed in the workforce. However, research shows that barriers to entry and high dropout rates for students in engineering programs pose a challenge to achieving this goal. Although much attention has been given to the gap in engineering degree attainment across racial and gender groups, there has been relatively little attention paid to geographic differences, even though the literature consistently shows that college outcomes for rural students lag behind those of their counterparts from non-rural settings (i.e., urban and suburban locales). One potential reason for these gaps is evidence that rural schools often lack the resources of other schools. For example, rural schools in our setting offer fewer courses in advanced math and science topics on average, yet research has established that such courses are important predictors of success in engineering programs.

We use a newly constructed 14-cohort dataset that contains information on all students from public high schools who entered a public college in Missouri from 1996-2009. For each cohort, we have a record for a student’s declared major upon college entry, whether the student graduated, and the field of study for her degree. We use these data to determine how much students’ high schools (including course access, measures of high school quality, and other measures of high school resources) and geographic locations contribute to the observed rural-nonrural engineering degree gap. In essence, we decompose differential engineering degree attainment into observed characteristics using integrated data on high schools, students, and college pathways that is richer than what has been available in past research. These rich data are important because examining college outcomes based on students’ geographic background is subject to different sources of potential bias; factors such as socioeconomic background, high school performance, high school preparation, and future career and residential plans are correlated with students’ locale.

Engineering and science professions have one of the highest labor market returns and are expected to experience much greater job growth than other professions. Increasing the number of engineers from rural communities might, therefore, be a viable strategy to not only meet the future workforce demands but also to revamp economic growth in many rural communities across the United States, which have been negatively affected by the changes in the US economy over the recent decades.