Students’ demographics in postgraduate engineering education : the case of international students

Abstract

Engineering was informally viewed as skills that were passed down from engineers who were mostly European immigrants. As times changed and development occurred, these engineering skills were integrated into the curriculum to train engineers to meet the regional economic need in various countries of the world. As a result of various needs of people and of the international community, internationalization of higher education has gained interest recently. In an attempt to unravel this, there must be an understanding of their demographic characteristics, enrolment, and support. In this demographic study, postgraduate engineering international students were the study group and data from the National Science Foundation (2018) was used in this study. Data was collected from graduate students and post doctorates in science and engineering (GSS). This research is a demographic study of doctoral and postdoctoral non-tenure researchers in engineering education. Findings from the study revealed that there was more male enrolment than female in postgraduate programmes.