This paper is based on completed research. Retention of college students is a priority for universities across the country. Educators are constantly looking for ways to retain students and to help them perform well academically. While academic success has typically been predicted by standardized test scores and high school performance, they do not fully explain the variance in students' success. Students need to have effective behavioral skills to successfully overcome difficulties in college. Effective self-regulation allows students to better control their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral processes. Help seeking is an important self-regulatory behavioral strategy that can be used when faced with either emotional or academic difficulties. This study looks at the attitudes toward psychological help seeking and academic help seeking and how it impacts engineering student success. In addition, the level of depression among male engineering students was surveyed and the resulting effect on helping seeking attitudes was measured. A survey of 582 male engineering students revealed that students with depressing symptoms were more likely to avoid seeking help than the students who had not indicated that they were distressed. In addition, there was a significant difference in high school rank between the distressed group and non distressed group indicating that those students who self-reported distress or depressive symptoms may have had emotional difficulties prior to entering college that affected their high school academic performance. The theory and research are reviewed, along with the implication of finding so many students with depressive symptoms for administrators, faculty, and advisors working with this cohort of students.
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Mary Goodwin (2020) studied this question.