Message from Dean Matt O'Donnell
The academic year begins with good news about the year just ended, and bad news from Olympia about continuing declines in state revenues and further across-the-board budget cuts.
The good news reveals the growing strength of our program and ability to maintain our most vital academic and research activities through these difficult times.
Last year for the first time, research funding surpassed $100 million. Actually, we blasted past to $112 million in awards. While the total includes some federal stimulus money, growth in research funding has been phenomenal, much of it due to young faculty who are winning big grants.
In each of the past four years we have brought in 12 to 15 new faculty members and are recruiting exceptionally well at the highest level. Only occasionally do we lose a candidate to MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley, and none to the next tier of Illinois, Michigan, UCLA, and UC San Diego. A story on the faculty news page introduces you to three new faculty we lured away from other institutions, all outstanding researchers and teachers with growing reputations in their fields.
In June, we graduated the largest number of students ever — 770 with bachelors degrees, 400 masters, and 105 doctorates. Enrollments are up, but now we are at capacity, with no more resources to expand at the undergraduate level. We admit only 50 percent of UW students who apply to our programs for junior-year entry, and many fine students leave the state for engineering schools elsewhere.
"Students are pounding on our doors wanting to get into UW Engineering." — Matt O’Donnell, Dean of the College of Engineering
Engineering slots at Washington universities increased only modestly over the past 30 years while the state’s population roughly doubled, and the high-tech economic sector boomed. It’s the perfect tsunami — a huge surge of interest in engineering careers, a flood of undergraduate applications, and no capacity to absorb them. The one benefit is the steadily rising quality of applicants; we could expand enrollment by 25–30 percent and still hold firm on quality.
This is not a national trend. Applications to most engineering schools are holding fairly steady, while students are pounding on our doors wanting to get into UW Engineering.
Maintaining the status quo in engineering enrollment fails to service the state. If Washington wants to expand its high-tech sector, it needs to make investments required to train more engineering students who will help fuel that expansion and build a stronger economy.