In Fall 2016, Campbell University welcomed its first cohort of engineering majors, the culmination of fourteen months of planning and recruiting. Building a new school of engineering affords a number of unique opportunities, including the chance to develop a program based on best practices, engineering education research, and the recommendations of national reports such as "Educating the Engineer of 2020," among others. Central to starting a new engineering program is crafting a unique business case, complete with a marketing and recruiting plan designed to attract a cohort of students willing to partner with the faculty and staff to create the communicated vision. In this paper, we identify some of the key obstacles to attracting a diverse cohort of students to a new program, along with evidence-based strategies used to tackle those obstacles in recruiting for the new engineering program. We report here on the diversity of our newly admitted students. We will also report on retention efforts, derived from best practices, and enrollment data at the end of the first semester, as well as examining an early snapshot of the second cohort of entering students.
展开▼
