Engineering Recruitment vs Retention

I saw the following on the University of Saskatchewan WISE blog (which, by the way, is worth subscribing to):

Myth Of High Engineering Dropout Rate Refuted By New Study
Posted by Heather Published in News, Research

Female engineering students are not more likely to drop out than male students and they perform just as well as their male counterparts in engineering. This is according to research conducted by Matthew Ohland, an associate professor in the School of Engineering Education, Purdue University who looked at data on 70,000 engineering students from nine institutions in the southeastern U.S.

Ohland states, “People naturally assume there is a female persistence problem because only about 20 percent of undergraduate engineering students are women [but] the problem of few women in engineering, however, is one of recruitment, not retention.”

To read the full ScienceDaily article (August 4, 2009) visit: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090804114104.htm