Description

The transportation industry faces a growing shortage of professional engineers and planners. One key strategy in solving this problem will be to encourage more civil engineering and urban planning students to specialize in transportation while completing their degrees, so that employers have a larger pool of likely recruits. However, very little is known about how these students choose a specialization. To help fill that gap, this report examines the factors that lead civil engineering undergraduates and urban planning masters students to specialize in transportation, as opposed to other sub-disciplines within the two fields. The primary data collection methods were web-based surveys of 1,852 civil engineering undergraduates and 869 planning masters students. The study results suggest steps the transportation community can take to increase the number of civil engineering and planning students who choose to specialize in transportation.

Publication Date

6-1-2009

Publication Type

Report

Topic

Workforce and Labor

MTI Project

2408

Keywords

Civil engineering, Education, Job opportunities, Planning, Transportation careers, Urban planning, Transportation planning, Universities

Disciplines

Transportation

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PavingWay_ResearchBrief_Final_100107.pdf (117 kB)
Research Brief
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