Graduation Year

2018

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Second Department

Special Majors

Reader 1

EMMA STEPHENS

Reader 2

HEATHER ANTECOL

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2018 Cindy U Onyekwelu

Abstract

This paper extends upon Jennifer Hunt’s research on “Why do women leave science and engineering?”, that contributes to existing literature that overlooks underrepresented minorities level of commitment to STEM fields based on their STEM educational backgrounds and additional contributing factors that relates to women engineer’s leaving their felid to another felid that does not have any relation to their STEM degree. The following independent factors are the respondents’ gender, reasons for leaving the felid of major, how much does their highest degree relate to their current principle/ primary job, parents’ level of education, current citizenship status, level of highest degrees obtained and salary survey data impact on exit rates of STEM identifying URMs. This is done by running multiple linear regression statistical analysis models by creating dummy variables for underrepresented ethnic/ racial minority grouped all together and isolated each URMs’ group dependent variable along with the contributing factors as my independent variables. In order, to figure out which factors are heavily correlated to the exit rates of URMs departing from STEM fields. In addition to learning more about the reasons behind the increasing exit rates of STEM identifying URMs, I will be discussing the shortcomings of using the 2015 National College Graduate Survey as my data and how the survey respondents’ level of exposure to STEM education from their primary school years suggests that the respondent is more likely to stay within a STEM felid that collates with their highest STEM degree than someone who has rarely been exposure to STEM education from youth.

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