Factors Influencing the Choice of the Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Program

Choosing a career is one of the most important decisions a person makes. The literature reports various investigations of the factors comprising students' career decisions, including educational and career aspirations, socioeconomic status, ability, parental encouragement, college attributes, and financial limitations. Some research suggests that these factors change during the school trajectory. Other studies state that the most critical factors are academic reputation followed by employment records. Literature also reports that parents, friends, guidance teachers, visiting recruiters, and school advisors most influence a person's institutional selection (in the presented order). Our ongoing research identifies the main factors influencing undergraduate industrial engineering choices at a multi-campus, private university in Chile. The university's industrial engineering discipline has two undergraduate programs, Civil Industrial Engineering and Industrial Engineering. Since we acknowledge that many factors may affect students' career choices and institutions, we sent a survey to determine the influence level of those factors on those students in the industrial engineering undergraduate programs at this university. Three hundred seventy-six industrial engineering students participated. Our findings were like other studies, which had differences among the program categories. From the results, we will focus our future work on what should be the program's admission strategies and how resources can be maximized. In addition, we will identify the primary factors for the university's other engineering undergraduate programs and then cluster them to create a profile of the prospective students.