With every spring and fall semester comes an inevitable uptick in hastily changed majors. Faced for the first time with a career-defining choice, it’s not unusual for college students to find themselves eye-to-eye with a field that, for one reason or another, is not for them. 

But for some students, the issue is not one of compatibility. Frequently crushing financial pressure and the absence of an institutional social network from peer to peer can create an environment where students may fall through the cracks, dropping away from their majors or, in some cases, from college entirely. 

The slow attrition of any given student cohort is no secret. Haroon Stephen, an assistant professor at UNLV’s department of civil engineering, said roughly 18 percent of freshman civil engineering students, on average, drop out of the program before the end of their first year. 

It’s a number that is only slightly better than UNLV’s broader freshman retention rate (79.4 percent in 2019) and roughly on-par with the national average (81 percent in 2018) but still far below that of the nation’s most selective institutions, where nearly all freshmen return for their sophomore year.

And amid the chaos of a pandemic that has gutted higher education revenues and forced steep budget cuts at the state level, and where the nation’s economic future remains so uncertain, the need to retain students who might otherwise have dropped out has only become more urgent. 

“It's a concern, you know, we want to know why students are leaving so we can minimize that and cater to the students who may feel that their needs are not met,” Stephen said. “We want to make sure that their needs are taken care of.”

It was a few years ago that Stephen and a handful of colleagues from UNLV’s colleges of engineering and education suggested a program that would buoy the student social safety net and re-examine the roles faculty and curriculum play in student retention and, ultimately, graduation. 

Now, backed by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers have begun piloting these ideas in practice, steering a small cohort of engineering students through a dedicated 5-year program meant to plug the gaps. 

First and foremost among them is the social element. Las Vegas is no college town, and UNLV — a commuter school — notably lacks the expansive on-campus living experience common to other similarly sized universities. 

Without that on-campus living, program researchers say students are less likely to stay on-campus after class, less likely to meet their peers and less likely to figure out whether they really belong in the college they’ve chosen. The new program, Stephen said, aims in part to supplement that lost experience.  

“These freshmen and sophomore civil engineering students [in the program] participate in social activities, they get together on a weekly and sometimes every two weeks basis,” Stephen said. “And they're just hanging out with each other, they're talking about what classes they are taking, how are they progressing through their classes, exchanging ideas with each other — a totally social environment.”

Stephen said that these students, better able to network with their peers in the department and not “left aloof” from the community, have a substantially higher chance of sticking with that degree program. 

It was a blow, then, when the coronavirus pandemic emerged in the U.S. in mid-March, shuttering schools and businesses alike as governments and health officials scrambled to contain community spread. 

UNLV was no different, as it and Nevada’s other higher education institutions scrambled to move the near-totality of daily instruction to a virtual space in a matter of weeks. In the time since, Stephen said the program has adapted to meet the new reality — even if the end result is nowhere near what the team first envisioned. 

“We did recognize that the spirit of cohesion-building was not fully achieved through online learning, because now students are missing the face to face part, Stephen said. “But at the same time, that's the best we can do under the circumstances.”

With roughly three-and-a-half years left in the pilot program, Stephen said he expects that the program will adapt to whatever “new normal” emerges in a post-COVID world. 

Still, in the eyes of program leaders, social networks will only go so far. To buoy those community connections, the program has also sought to implement “culturally responsive teaching,” essentially shifting teaching methods to match the lived experience of the students being taught. 

Eakalak Khan, a researcher at UNLV’s civil engineering school and one of those working on the program, said such trainings have already shifted his thinking, opening his eyes to simple realities of a modern college experience — one where some students have to work full-time to support their school or their families, and where school is yet another stressor. 

“I never thought that would be a problem, that would be a big issue, until I saw the data that was presented to me and was like, ‘Wow, I mean, this really makes an impact,” Khan said. “Sometime, we gotta understand that not all students are coming from a rich family or well-to-do family.”

Khan said the program training also addressed the cultural aspects of the teaching process, leading to changes as simple as using different analogies when presenting new material.

“As an instructor, you have to understand them, and you want to allow them more flexibility, and you might want to get them help if they need,” Khan said of students. 

To this end, the program has also sought to tweak the curriculum itself, adjusting the earliest classes to ensure that freshman and sophomore engineering students are engaging with engineering coursework early enough to “hook” them on a major that might otherwise be mired in a year or more of engineering-adjacent prerequisites. 

“People are not aware that engineering students in that first year or even first two years, they don't get exposed to engineering contents of the curriculum,” Khan said. “The students last year, the 10 students who participated, said, ‘Wow, that was an eye opening experience,’ and that got them hooked.”

Though it has grown from its inception, the program is ultimately still a small one; just 10 students participated in an abbreviated first year of the program, and roughly two-dozen have entered the program for year two. But, Stephen said, the ultimate goal of all these small changes is to drive “a cultural change.”

“We have the designation of [Hispanic Serving Institution], we have the designation of [Minority Serving Institution], but we want to be the institute that actually serves those communities,” Stephen said.