Humanitarian Aspirations of Engineering Students : Differences between Disciplines and Institutions

This study explored the aspirations of undergraduate engineering students in regard to helping others, examining potential differences between disciplines and institutions. Over 1,900 undergraduate students from 17 U.S. universities responded to a survey in spring 2014. In open-ended responses, 15.5 % of the students included some form of helping people and/ or the world as one of the factors that motivated them to select their engineering major; for 6.7 % of the students this was the primary or only motivating factor listed. Helping as a motivation was not equally prevalent among different engineering disciplines, being much more common among students majoring in biomedical, environmental, materials, and civil and less common in computer and aerospace. Different disciplines also varied in the priority for helping people relative to other future job factors – highest in chemical/biological, moderate in civil and related majors, and lowest among electrical/computer and mechanical. Institutional differences were found in the extent to which students indicated an importance that their career would help people and the extent to which an ability to help others was a central message in their major. The results indicate the percentages of engineering students who are most likely to embrace humanitarian engineering; fostering these aspirations in students could help with attraction and retention.


INTRODUCTION
The current "Generation Z" students have been characterised as "motivated to serve, particularly through volunteerism" and they "believe they will be the generation that will help Americans realise better futures through their civicmindedness" (Teammates 2011, p. 1).The American Freshman survey found that helping others who are in difficulty was an essential or very important objective for 72.2 % of 153,015 students entering college for the first time (Eagan et al. 2014).Students in this generation often have goals to realise their helping and service motivations through their jobs and profession, with 60 % indicating that "having an impact on the world" will be important in their job (Beltramini & Buckley 2014).Studies in the UK and Denmark also found that many students were motivated toward engineering due to social good and a desire to make a difference in the world (Alpay et al. 2008;Kolmos et al. 2013).Therefore, the service-related elements of engineering are likely to be motivating and attractive to these students.
Humanitarian engineering has been defined as "the artful drawing on science to direct the resources of nature with active compassion to meet the basic needs of allespecially the economically poor, or otherwise marginalised, always seeking a balance of listening and learning from the traditional people whilst humbly sharing appropriate engineering knowledge" (Colledge 2012, pg. 3).Lucena et al. (2010) termed the period since 2000 as an "explosion of 'engineering to help' activities".Well-known groups that promote humanitarian engineering include the Peace Corps (Manser et al. 2015), Engineers Without Borders (EWB) (Sacco & Knight 2014), Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) (Dale et al. 2014), Engineering World Health (EWH) (Malkin & Calman 2014), Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) (Reichle et al. 2009), and Habitat for Humanity (Leach 2014) While the engineering community appears to have increasing interest in humanitarian goals (Munoz & "Humanitarian Aspirations of Engineering Students" -Bielefeldt & Canney Mitcham 2012), it is unclear the extent to which this is common among all engineering students or rather represents the aspirations of a limited sub-group.Previous research at a single institution found that 75 % of incoming first year engineering students agreed that "service should be an expected part of the engineering profession" (Duffy et al. 2011a); female and minority students agreed more strongly with the statement "It is important to me personally to have a career that involves helping people" than males and non-minority students, respectively (Duffy et al. 2011b).This specific institution advertises and promotes service-learning that is integrated into numerous courses through all four years of the curriculum for all engineering disciplines.A study based on a 2012/2013 survey found that a desire to have an impact on society and help others in their career was a more common motivation for female than male students (Canney and Bielefeldt 2015a), was more common among environmental engineering students over civil engineering students over mechanical engineering students (Canney and Bielefeldt 2015b), and that learning through service involvement correlated with these attitudes (Bielefeldt and Canney 2014).However, previous studies have not determined how these attitudes vary across a wider range of engineering disciplines, nor if these attitudes vary at different institutions.The research questions explored in this paper are: RQ1.Are there differences between engineering disciplines and institutions in the extent to which helping others a motivation for students selecting their engineering major?
RQ2. Are there differences between engineering disciplines and institutions in the extent that helping others is a priority for future engineering job?

RQ3.
To what extent do engineering students in different majors and attending different institutions believe that the ability to help others is a central message in their major?

Overview
This study presents a sub-set of the results from a larger study to explore the professional social responsibility attitudes of engineering students To answer RQ3, responses to an additional Likert-item that stated "An ability to help others is a central message in my major" were examined.The next large section of the survey asked students to characterise the typical frequency that they had engaged in community service activities since beginning college; responses to this question were explored in a previous study (Canney & Bielefeldt 2015b).
The survey concluded with items to gather demographic information about the respondents including institution, major, and academic rank.When indicating their engineering major, students were allowed to "check all that apply" from among 23 options; students earning dual degrees could indicate both disciplines.Students who indicated "other" or "open" could write-in their major/intended major.

Data Analysis
Response rates from the 17 institutions (Table A1) were highly variable, ranging from 30 % at a small, Christian institution to 3 % at a large public Master's institution."Humanitarian Aspirations of Engineering Students" -Bielefeldt & Canney Low response rates can bias the results and threaten the ability to draw valid conclusions.A calculation of the confidence interval for each institution was conducted, using a 95 % confidence level and entering the population and sample size (Creative Research Systems 2012).Institutions with a response rate under 20 % and a confidence interval over 10 % were not included in institutional comparisons (italicised in Table A1), leaving 11 institutions for evaluation of potential institutional differences.
Open-ended responses to the second survey question about factors that led students to select their current major were used to answer RQ1.There were 1,906 individuals who wrote a response to the question (50 left it blank).These open-ended responses varied from 1 to 242 words, with a median of 16 words.To provide an initial overview of the responses, a word cloud was generated (Appendix Figure A1) . Then the open-ended responses were coded using emergent methods (Creswell 2007) and responses related to "helping people" were analysed in this study.
The first author coded all of the responses, and the second-author coded a randomly selected sub-set of 50 of the responses as a check for inter-rater reliability (IRR).Cohen's Kappa was calculated using IBM SPSS Statistics version 22; Kappa above 0.6 indicates a good level of inter-rater agreement (Landis & Koch 1977).1. Engineering disciplines of survey respondents differences when the null hypothesis was rejected; asymptotic significances (2-sided tests) at less than 0.05 were considered significant.

Participants
Over 1,900 undergraduate students from a broad array of majors completed the survey.At some institutions this also included students from non-engineering majors still within the College of Engineering, such as computer science and math.Some students likely included minors or concentrations among their responses, as a few indicated options that were not available as majors at their institution.Of the 1,937 students who indicated a major, 86.5 % indicated a single major, 11.2 % indicated two majors, and 2.4 % indicated 3 or more majors.Students were "counted" for all of the majors they indicated (Table 1).Write-ins that were similar to the provided choices were counted with those.For example, software engineering is similar to computer engineering, and was counted as such.Less than 30 individuals indicated the following disciplines: agricultural, architectural, biological, construction management, industrial, mining, nuclear, open, petroleum, applied math, and engineering physics.
For some analyses, similar majors were grouped into clusters because these majors are often offered from the same department and a number of students indicated more than one of these majors.The number of respondents from each of the 17 institutions are provided in Table A1.Other demographics of the respondents (not explored in this study) included: female 35 %, male 65 %; white (not Hispanic) 74 %, Asian 12 %, Hispanic 6 %, multiracial 6 %, Native-American 2 %, African-American 1 %; first-year 14 %, sophomore 28 %, junior 29 %, senior 29 %; grew up primarily outside the U.S. 7 %.

Helping as a motivation for selecting major
In response to the open-ended question "what factors led you to choose your current major", many students included multiple factors.The most common responses revolved around an interest and/or aptitude in math and science, personal interest, and working with things).
Elements related to humanitarian engineering appeared with less frequency.The themes around these responses that were identified from emergent coding are shown in Table 2.
Of the 1,906 responses, 18.4 % (n=351) included some form of helping people and/or the world as one of the factors that motivated them to select their major in engineering.Among those individuals, for 36 % (n=126) it was the primary or only motivating factor listed.
Helping people was most commonly cited, followed by helping the world/environment/humanity, then society, and community.Some students also just said "make a difference" without specifying a target (i.e. in my community, in the world, etc.).
Helping as a motivation was not equally prevalent among all of the engineering disciplines (chi test p<0.001).A higher-than-average percentage of students majoring in biomedical (36 %), environmental (31 %), materials (24 %), and civil (21 %) cited helping people/world as a factor that motivated them to select their major.Students majoring in computer and aerospace cited these helping people goals less frequently (6 % and 8 %, respectively).
Helping was the primary motivating factor for 18-19 % of the biomedical and environmental engineering students, versus only 7 % of the materials and 11 % of the civil engineering students.This supports and expands results seen previously among only environmental, civil and mechanical engineering students at five institutions (Canney & Bielefeldt, 2015b).
Institutional differences of helping people as a factor in selecting their engineering major were also identified; 32 % of the students attending PublicM3 cited helping people/ world reasons, compared to 20 % at Christian2, 18 % at Christian4, 17 % at Christian1 and PublicDoc3, and 9-12 % "Humanitarian Aspirations of Engineering Students" -Bielefeldt & Canney at PublicM1, PublicDoc4, PublicB1, PrivateDoc1, and Christian3.There were not significant differences in the percentages of students at different academic ranks who cited helping people and/or the world as factors in their choice of major (16 % first year, 17 % sophomores, 14 % juniors, 15 % seniors).Therefore, it seems that the institutional characteristics might differentially attract students with these helping goals, which then persist over time.Further longitudinal research would be needed to verify this assertion.

Helping as a goal for engineering career
The number of the ten stones that the students used to indicate the importance of "helping people" in their future engineering job ranged from 0 to 10 among the 1,956 responses, with two being most common (2 = mode and median; 2.45 = average) (Figure 1).The average was higher (3.2) among students who were motivated to choose engineering based helping others according to their open ended question responses discussed earlier (median and mode = 3).
There were significant differences between engineering disciplines in the extent to which "helping people" was an important quality of their future engineering job.The box-and-whiskers plot shows the median (line in box), first quartile (bottom of box), third quartile (top of box; There were also differences between related disciplines.For example, within the Civil+ cluster, the environmental students were significantly higher (median 3) than architectural students (median 2); independent samples median test p=0.011.

Helping attitudes of students
Three of the 7-point Likert-items were examined to determine if there were differences between the attitudes toward helping people through engineering among students in different majors and/or institutions (Table 3; Figure 2).Most students agreed that it was important to help others through engineering, indicated by first quartile scores of 5 (somewhat agree) or higher.There were differences between majors in attitudes toward using engineering to help or serve others; most positive for ChBio and Civil+ and lowest for ECE and mechanical.Paired tests between majors for "use my engineering to serve others" found differences between ChBio and

Major Institution
Survey Item Statement Median sig.
I think it is important to use my engineering to serve others 0.000 0.000 0.087 0.007 It is important to me personally to have a career that involves helping people 0.000 0.000 0.011 0.002 I will use engineering to help others 0.000 0.000 0.311 0.140  ECE, Civil+ and mechanical, Civil+ and ECE.For the importance of a career helping people (Figure 3), there were significant differences between ChBio and ECE, ChBio and mechanical, Civil+ and ECE, Civil+ and mechanical.Paired tests for using engineering to help others found differences between ChBio and ECE and Civil+ and ECE.
For institutional differences, examples are highlighted in Figure 2. Most of the institutions had student response distributions similar to PublicDoc1, with a median and third quartile of 6.Based on paired post-hoc tests from the median test, the Christian3 institution was different than three other institutions, PublicM1 was different than two institutions, and PrivateDoc2 was different than three other institutions.

An ability to help others is a central message in my major
The extent to which students felt that an ability to help others was a central message in their major ranged from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree".This distribution was significantly different between majors.Example results are shown in Figure 3, where Civil+ engineering students were the most likely to agree with this statement (73 % on the agreement side of the scale), in contrast to 45 % of the ECE students saying the same.
The responses to this question gauge how students feel about the messages being communicated about their major, likely through courses and perhaps also via co-curricular activities.These messages are not intrinsic to particular majors, but vary between institutions; Table 4 shows the averages for institutions where the major had 10 or more respondents; grey highlights the highest and pink the lowest.The Christian institutions were often among the highest across multiple disciplines.Perhaps courses common across all engineering majors, such as required ethics and/or religion-related courses, emphasise the message of helping others through your career.In addition, perhaps the engineering instructors at these institutions emphasise this message in their courses.In contrast, PublicDoc1 had the lowest scores for ECE and mechanical majors, but was among the highest for Civil+; this indicates "Humanitarian Aspirations of Engineering Students" -Bielefeldt & Canney that helping others is not consistently high or low across an institution but rather departments can set this tone.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The who desire to help others, it seems clear that a "one size fits all" educational approach may not be adequate for all engineering majors.Disciplines with higher percentages of students who are motivated with humanitarian engineering ideals may benefit from adjusting course offerings, course content, or even just adding humanitarian engineering context to traditional engineering problems, as a way of acknowledging and supporting those motivations.
Disciplines with lower percentages of students may wish to look at messaging that attract students to see if an ability to help others may reach a broader range of potential students.
The study indicated that the culture at particular institutions may differentially attract students with humanitarian goals, while courses and community service opportunities at the institution and within the local community may also foster these ideals.Institutions should work to make students aware of service opportunities that match their goals and interests.
Incorporating service-learning into required courses may be particularly effective, given that students often have busy schedules and financial constraints that may limit their ability to engage in co-curricular and/or volunteer activities on their own time.Asking students to reflect on their responsibilities toward community service and helping people as professional engineers may also help to foster these goals.Future work should focus on measuring how the humanitarian goals and aspirations of engineering students change over time, and potential links to persistence and retention in engineering through college and into the workplace.It is also important to establish the extent to which these findings are generalisable outside the U.S.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Distribution of importance of helping people in future job -all students (left) and box-and-whisker plots for different disciplines (right)

Figure 2 .Figure 3 .
Figure 2. Box-and-whisker plots of Likert-responses to the importance of having a career helping people for different majors (left) and institutions (right)

Table
undergraduate students in different engineering disciplines and from different institutions were evaluated using independent samples non-parametric tests conducted via IBM SPSS Statistics version 22. Non-parametric tests were needed because the data was interval (number of stones) or ordinal (Likert responses).Kruskal-Wallis and median tests were conducted with post-hoc tests to explore pairwise

Table 2 .
Factors that led students to select their current engineering major related to humanitarianism Interest in civil works projects: their scale, scope, and effect on public welfare.Civil engineering also seems to be a stable career with better-than-average pay, and many directions to take (from project managing, to design, to financial oversight).
Help people / world (HPW) sole or greatest motivation 126 0.601 The ability to improve society and help other people was the main one.I also really enjoyed math, science, and problem solving.

Table 3 .
Results of statistical tests for differences between majors and/or institutions "Humanitarian Aspirations of Engineering Students" -Bielefeldt & Canney

Table 4 .
Average response at different institutions for "ability to help others is a central message in my major"

Table A1 .
Institutions Participating in the Study