International Diversity and Student Engagement in Graduate Engineering Research Groups

The purpose of this study was to explore student engagement by student nationality in U.S. engineering graduate programs. An online survey was developed and administered to four universities across the United States during fall 2010, with responses from 640 engineering PhD students from 5 international regions. Five constructs were found to be both statistically and practically significant relative to students’ satisfaction with their graduate experience, including: expectations, international diversity, learning and development, project ownership, and organization. Univariate ANOVA and post hoc pairwise comparisons highlight differences in specific nationality groups.