UNDERSTANDING UNDERGRADUATE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ENGAGEMENT AND ITS IMPACT.

UNDERGRADUATES; STUDENT engagement; COLLEGE student attitudes; CAREER development; RETENTION of college students; TIME to degree (Education); COLLEGE placement services

Professional Development Engagement (PDE) is defined as the level of undergraduate engagement in professional development. It reflects career-related work preparation for "life after college" and is a distinct externally-focused component of student engagement (SE). The increased college retention and subsequent job placement challenges faced by today's U.S. college graduate suggest the need to study PDE and its impact. Utilizing the SE literature, five different antecedent variable sets are proposed to increasingly affect PDE, i.e., student background; pre-college credentials; college-related; organization-related; and motivation-related. PDE is expected to positively impact two outcomes: timely graduation and appropriate job placement. The PDE model is adaptable for testing across a wide variety of current U.S. college and university environments. The latent construct definitions of variable sets allow for additional variable inclusion beyond the measurement examples given, contingent on the research setting characteristics and resources. The goal is to stimulate empirical testing of this model. (149 words) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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