Putting Up With It: How College Students Reconcile the Costs of STEM Persistence

• In Event: Belonging at What Cost? Identifying and Regulating Costs of Existing and Persisting in Educational Spaces

Abstract

Objectives and Framework
Situated expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020) suggests that motivational beliefs (e.g., competence and value) predict whether students persist in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields (Wang & Degol, 2013). However, STEM persistence requires more than simply adopting positive beliefs, as students must remain in a field over a sustained time period, while continually experiencing challenges that raise concerns with what they must give up to belong there (called costs). Students must weigh costs against positive beliefs and regulate the costs in order to keep persisting, especially students from historically marginalized backgrounds, whose STEM challenges deeply intersect with their racial and gender identities (Cheryan et al., 2017; Matthews & Wigfield, 2024).

To date, few researchers have studied how students regulate costs of belonging in STEM domains, or whether this regulation matters for STEM persistence. Thus, using a large sample of college students, we evaluated: (1) What regulation approaches do students use to persist in STEM despite costs of belonging? (2) Do different regulation approaches uniquely predict grades and STEM persistence intentions, above and beyond motivational beliefs themselves? (3) Do gender or race/ethnicity relate to findings?

Method
College students (n = 1065; 56.3% women; 12.7% first-generation; 13.3% racially marginalized in STEM) were recruited from introductory chemistry, biochemistry, and statistics courses at a public midwestern university. Twice in the semester, students completed surveys assessing motivational beliefs for their courses and intentions to persist in STEM-related careers. In the second survey, students explained why persistence in STEM career paths was worth challenges along the way (open-ended). Instructors provided final course grades. Two researchers completed inductive and deductive coding of open-ended data to determine themes regarding how students regulated costs (see Table 4a).

Findings
Students reported varied approaches to regulating costs of belonging in STEM, with the most common being to focus on positive features of their chosen path (e.g., passion for it, a career would allow them to help others, financial perks), determining that challenges would pay off later, thinking they could overcome challenges, thinking alternative paths would be worse, or acknowledging good aspects of challenges (Table 4a). Regressions (Table 4b) showed that students focusing on interest-related benefits, and students who thought challenges would pay off, had higher grades and STEM persistence intentions; students who saw challenges as good also earned higher grades. Racially marginalized students were less likely to focus on interest-related benefits, χ2(1) = 15.59, p < .001, but they were more likely to show higher STEM persistence intentions when focusing on financial-related benefits, β = .09, p = .035. Women were more likely to focus on benefits related to helping others and long-term identity, and less likely to focus on financial benefits, χ2’s(1) > 4.07, ps < .05.

Significance
To persist in STEM, students must regulate costs of belonging; we find that how students reconcile these costs matters for STEM outcomes and differs by gender and race. Helping students regulate costs more adaptively may be useful for addressing such costs in the future.

Authors

• Emily Quinn Rosenzweig, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Patrick N. Beymer, University of Cincinnati

• Yichi Zhang, University of Georgia

• Halle Jacobs, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Heather Putman, University of Cincinnati

• Kitley Ann Kern, University of Cincinnati