Measuring the Retention Strategies of a Minority Engineering Program: A Service Quality Perspective

Minority Engineering Programs (MEPs) use several strategies designed to retain underrepresented minorities in engineering disciplines. It is necessary to evaluate MEPs to determine which strategies contribute to the effective recruitment and retention of minorities in engineering disciplines. One method of measuring program effectiveness is to solicit the opinion of minority students about program effectiveness since they use the MEP services. This article discusses the development and administration of an instrument to assess the quality of service minority engineering freshmen received from an MEP. The results indicate that students were generally satisfied with the quality of service they received from the seven retention strategies the institution employed. These results lend further credibility to the best practices used by MEPs and is an additional piece of the evaluation puzzle that provides empirical evidence to support the effectiveness of MEP retention strategies.