Predicting Time to Graduation in Engineering by Student Behavior and Gender.

Our state, like many, is currently under pressure to reduce time to graduation of college students to satisfy various local, city and state stakeholders. As a consequence, we seek to develop a systematic method to take into account both good reasons for delaying graduation (such as spending a semester in a co-op or internship) and negative reasons (such as failing classes). We also want to quantify an estimate for the delay based on each experience. The hope is that this model helps inform the discussions in our institution's upper administration and state legislature regarding time to graduation. This study looks at retention and graduation patterns in engineering by gender, seeking specifically to understand why students tend to take longer than the advertised 4 years to graduate, and focusing on one institution only. While much attention has been given in the past to the issues of retention of women and under-represented minorities in engineering, most analyses use data collected at multiple institutions (thus blending together results coming from vastly different campus cultures) and tend to focus on the experiences of those who graduate versus those who don't. In this work, we focus on why the students who do graduate usually take much longer than the four (4) years that are routinely advertised. This study follows in the footsteps of previous work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]