PACE Home Page

What is PACE?

Funded primarily by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with a supplemental grant from The Engineering Information Foundation, the Project to Assess Climate in Engineering (PACE) is a multi-site research project intended to identify issues that affect persistence rates among engineering undergraduates. PACE is headquartered at the Center for Workforce Development at the University of Washington and pays specific attention to the intersection of race, gender and academic experience.

PACE Participants

Arizona State University * Boston University * California State University, Los Angeles * Clemson University * Howard University * Michigan Technological University * New Jersey Institute of Technology * New Mexico State University * North Carolina State University * The Ohio State University * The Pennsylvania State University * Purdue University * Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute * Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology * Texas A&M University * Texas Tech University * University of Maryland * University of Michigan * The University of Texas at Austin * The University of Texas at El Paso * Virginia Polytechnic Institute * Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Click HERE to see a Google map of the 22 PACE schools

PACE Goals

The goal is to identify and address university climate issues to improve retention for all undergraduate engineering students. The action steps to achieve the goal are:

Provide data to participating colleges/universities that will help identify areas that require attention in order to improve the academic climate for all students;

Provide aggregated and institution-specific data to participating colleges/universities regarding student attitudes organized by sex and ethnic/racial categories for benchmarking purposes;

Supplement quantitative survey findings with aggregated qualitative data from interviews conducted with currently-enrolled majority and under-represented minority populations at select colleges/universities;

Supplement institutional climate analysis with qualitative interviews with students who have exited or are in the process of exiting engineering programs at participating colleges/universities; and

Conduct telephone survey with each participating college/university 6, 12 and 34 months after receipt of the PACE project report in order to track actions taken to improve the climate.