Perhaps I'm just geared in a way that works well with the curriculum I've been in. Or maybe my school is just different. But either way, it seems to me that my university (Oklahoma Christian University, or OC for short) has a very effective program when it comes to keeping students. I began with 40 students in my Mechanical Engineering Seminar class and ended my Sr level design class with 20 students. Maybe a 50% retention rate sounds poor, but the national average is only a 60% retention. Also, do keep in mind that OC is a private college, so students have to spend about $400/credit, and finances drive a lot of students to other universities. I also don't have a way of knowing if students that didn't make it through OC's engineering program left because they wanted another major or because they just couldn't afford to continue attending. Finally, this is just the retention rate for Mechanical Engineers based on how many people were in my first and final classes. I also don't have access to a list of students that changed to any other type of engineering offered on my campus. So 50% is actually pretty awesome.
I began to wonder what OC does differently. The NY Times article mentioned that a lot of students burn out because they get bogged down in math and theory and didn't get very many hands-on projects to keep them interested. This is what really piqued my interest. At OC, the engineers have several lab-based classes sprinkled throughout the curriculum. For example, my first semester, I had a class called Engineering Computing. This class introduced all of the freshmen to a programming software called MATLAB. We would do a few exercises in MATLAB that involved displaying graphs, which was great because it was a quick and easy way to make sure we had things right and that we were understanding what was going on. After we got the hang of MATLAB, we used K'nex to design and build little golf ball putters. By the end of the semester, we were going to use MATLAB to predict how high to lift the putter to hit a golf ball into a "hole" on the carpet. It was tons of fun.
The next semester (Spring of my Freshman year) I had another class called Engineering Fundamentals. We built a basic robot and used a BASIC Stamp chip to program to help it navigate a maze to find a light bulb. It was a simple robot with two motors to rotate wheels independently and was equipped with photoresistors on the front to detect which direction the light bulb was in, and bumpers to detect walls. That was all. But we had a lot of fun testing them and making them work well. One student even built a circuit on his robot to play the Star Wars theme song when his robot found the light bulb. The professors were encouraging and came around to offer help and to check in to make sure we weren't just too scared to ask for it.
While I didn't have any engineering labs my 3rd semester, I did have them in my 4th, and 5th semesters. Then when I started my final three semesters I was working on my capstone design classes, which may as well have been a lab. So basically, I never got "bogged down in theory" because I had at least one lab that would let me be hands on.
What I think most universities need to do, assuming they want students to stick around in the engineering realm (and have them paying tuition, etc.) would be to incorporate labs into more classes. Do you have a lecture on manufacturing processes and materials? Why not add a lab that involves working in a machine shop? If you have a lecture on controlling dynamic systems, why not have a lab that lets the students try to do that? I had one project in a lab that involved maintaining the temperature inside of a cardboard box, within a certain tolerance, using a light bulb and a fan to heat and cool, respectively. It wasn't something that was excessively difficult, and it was something that helped the whole Dynamic Systems class make a lot more sense. Lab classes are a critical part of a STEM education. Not because they let students practice handling real-world issues, although that is a good thing, but because the sense of accomplishment and, for me, sheer giddiness at times, from being able to make a self-navigating robot that can go around and backs up when it bumps into something while you just sit on the couch while checking in on your Facebook.
So if you want to keep engineers in their majors. Make them take labs, and be sure the professors are obvious about being invested in the success of the students.
And don't grade on a curve. Curves aren't merit-based, and you can lose a lot of brilliant people by making them fail out even though they had an 80% on an exam.
*STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering & Math
