Transition from high schools to engineering education

Pre-university engineering education has received increasing attention to attract more students to engineering and make them better prepared to enter engineering studies at university level. Denmark is one of the countries that offer established high school curriculum that makes engineering the core identity of the school. In a longitudinal research project, the cohort of all Danish engineering students who were enrolled in 2010 has been followed. This study takes a quantitative approach to highlight the differences in preparedness for engineering students who have a background in respectively general high schools and profession-oriented high schools where the technical high schools represent the most common pipeline. The study highlights differences when just entering the study and just before graduation. Findings indicate that students from the profession-oriented high schools assess themselves as being better prepared in relation to the conduct of experiments, engineering analysis and tolls, as well as in relation to process competences as design, problem solving and teamwork. The students from the profession-oriented high schools also find themselves better prepared in relation to business awareness. On the other hand, students from general high school programmes are more oriented toward ethics. After five years of study, the differences, however, are vanishing.