Black Students’ Engineering Pathways: The ET Enigma

• In Event: Exploring Cultural Cost Among Students with Minoritized Identities Across Varying Sociopolitical Contexts

Abstract

Purpose
Black students are disproportionately enrolling in Engineering Technology (ET) over traditional engineering, a trend noted by the American Society for Engineering Education (2018). This qualitative study explores how systemic racism's cultural costs—including racial tracking, cultural dissonance, belonging uncertainty, and stereotype vulnerability—influence these choices, and how ET program experiences shape students' personal and professional identities.

Theoretical framework
Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT) posits that students' academic and career choices, persistence, and performance stem from their expectations of success and the subjective values they attribute to different disciplinary fields. These values include attainment value (importance of doing well), intrinsic value (enduring interest), and utility value (usefulness for future goals), alongside the costs associated with a chosen domain (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002). The Situated Expectancy-Value Theory (SVET) recognizes that these factors are shaped by social and cultural contexts (Eccles & Wigfield, 2023). Recently, cost has emerged as a key research focus, hindering motivation (Flake et al., 2015). Identified costs include psychological (stress), effort (perceived exertion), and opportunity (loss of other activities; Perez et al., 2014). This study emphasizes the need to incorporate cultural costs, which threaten "individuals’ self-integrity and adequacy," into SEVT. Recognizing these cultural and racial costs is crucial for understanding the educational trajectories of marginalized students, such as those pursuing professional engineering (Archer et al., 2022, p. 91).

Data sources
This study, conducted at two Midwestern Predominantly White Institutions, recruited a purposive sample of Black ET students via email. Four students from Institution A participated in individual interviews, and five from Institution B participated in focus-group interviews.

Method
The interview protocol included questions on their high school and college experiences, motivations for selecting the major, and the influence of guidance counselors, academic advisors, and college professors on their decisions. Thematic analysis of data, both inductive and deductive, was conducted to identify the patterns of meaning and recurring themes across the interviews.

Results
Preliminary analysis of two focus group interviews with Black students in an Engineering Technology (ET) program indicates their choice was influenced by systemic racism: the cultural costs of biased advising by high school teachers, counselors, and college recruiters that steered them away from Engineering Science (ES). Concerns about belonging uncertainty in ES also played a role. Participants protected their self-worth by downplaying the perceived superiority of ES (in terms of status, rigor, and career prospects) and instead amplifying ET's practicality and hands-on learning. Through this, students empowered themselves, becoming more agentic in maximizing their ET learning experiences.

Additional analysis of the interviews in the second program will be completed for the final paper.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study
This study highlights the need to re-image the SEVT framework to include the impact of cultural costs on students’ subjective valuing of different academic domains and efficacy beliefs. In practice, high school and college advisors should recognize that their advising can result in tracking Black students into ET instead of ES, significantly affecting their long-term career paths.

Authors

• Revathy Kumar, University of Toledo

• Joshua Archer, University of Toledo