Investigating Performance in First-Year Engineering Programs as a Predictor of Future Academic Success

First-Year Engineering Programs (FYEPs) consist of a common curriculum that is taken by first-year engineering students upon their enrollment into a college of engineering at certain institutions. Since FYEPs are most engineering student's first exposure to the discipline, it has great potential to shape students' concepts of engineering and of their future coursework. If FYEPs contain content that is suited to a particular set of majors, some students could be underprepared for their continuing studies or have misinformed expectations of their major. This could lead to academic underperformance in their major or delayed enrollment times into their eventual graduation major. This study sought to determine if students in different majors had varying levels of academic performance in their FYEPs, if FYEP academic success correlated to academic performance in upper-level coursework, and if enrollment times into graduation programs were affected using data from three large, public institutions. It also sought to determine if students across different institutions had varying degrees of academic success within the same major. This research indicates a correlation between performance in the FYEP engineering coursework and future academic performance, and invites future research to uncover the extent to which FYEP performance can predict future academic success.