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Engineering requires more bachelor's degree graduates to meet the growing demand for engineering skills globally. One way to address this demand is increasing student degree completion, which is lower than higher education in general. In particular, Black, Latino/a/x, and Indigenous (BLI) students are less likely to complete an engineering degree than their peers. BLI students experience a host of unwelcoming behaviors in engineering environments that contribute to departure without their intended degree. Improving environments to support belonging may offer one solution. Through an ecological belonging intervention, we seek to improve continued enrollment and increase belonging. Quasi-experimental methods were used in a second-semester engineering programming course. Surveys collected before and after an intervention combined with institutional data were used to test the moderation effects of the intervention on continued enrollment in engineering during the semester following the intervention. BLI students who were enrolled in intervention treatment sections were more likely to be enrolled in engineering the following fall. The intervention treatment increased belonging such that control section participants were less likely to continue to be enrolled in engineering. While research to assess the efficacy and mechanisms of the intervention is ongoing, the intervention offers promising results to address attrition, particularly for BLI students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More engineering students are needed to address climate change in their careers. These students are necessary because engineering includes designing and building machines, structures, and components that contribute large portions of society's carbon emissions. We surveyed a national sample of undergraduate engineering students (n = 4605) in their last semester of college about their desire to address climate change in their careers and the factors that predicted these responses. Possible variables for wanting to address climate change in their career included course topics, co-curricular experiences, climate knowledge, political affiliation, religion, and other demographics. The strongest factors that predicted engineering students' desire to address climate change in their career were related to a feeling of personal responsibility to deal with environmental problems, recognizing climate change as a technical (not social) issue, believing climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels and livestock production, and their engineering discipline. Students majoring in environmental and architectural engineering were more likely to want to address climate change in their careers than others. Previous known factors to increase motivation for climate action like course topics, political affiliation, student organization participation, undergraduate research experience, and environmental volunteering were not strong predictors among engineering undergraduate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]