Powering the Knowledge Economy

Top-25 effort takes flight and soars

Just two years into a momentous 10-year, $180-million effort to build the College of Engineering into one of the country’s Top-25 engineering institutions, students are flocking to the program in such large numbers that OSU has been ranked the 23rd largest engineering school in the nation.

And the enrollment figures aren’t the only impressive numbers being generated by the Top-25 initiative. Research funding has more than doubled, the College has added 23 new faculty members, and a new $45-million technology building is about to be constructed at the heart of campus.

According to the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Report, OSU’s engineering undergraduate enrollment ranking jumped nine places, from No. 32 just one year ago. The ASEE report also ranked OSU No. 35 for the number of engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded, up from No. 40 last year.

“This clearly shows that we are growing faster than other engineering schools. Because most of the schools larger than OSU are top-tier public engineering programs, we are entering the ranks of the nation’s best,”says Ron Adams, Dean of the OSU College of Engineering. “This increase in students, and the corresponding increase in faculty to serve them, is helping us build the critical mass we need to achieve our Top-25 goal.”

The number of new OSU engineering students who are considered "top students" (those with GPAs above 3.9 and SAT scores above 1300) has more than doubled over historical levels. Graduate student enrollment has jumped 18 percent. The number of undergraduate engineering degrees awarded has climbed 13 percent. And this fall, 28 of the 34 Oregon high school seniors awarded four-year, $10,000 American Electronics Association scholarships have chosen to attend OSU (see story, Students page 2).

The recent enrollment surge has been so phenomenal that the College is scrambling to hire faculty and staff to accommodate the wave of new engineering students, and to arrange additional classroom and office space in buildings that are already at or above capacity.

Construction of a new $45 million high-technology learning and research center next to OSU’s College of Business will help ease the crunch. The new building will include e-connected classrooms, business incubators, state-of-the-art multidisciplinary laboratories, dynamic office space designed to enhance faculty-student synergy, cyber cafés, and more.

Although being ranked one of the nation’s largest engineering programs does not yet make OSU a Top-25 engineering institution, it is a major indicator that the College is moving quickly in that direction, hitting the major milestones that will lead to a Top-25 program by 2010 (see chart, State of COE page 3).

Research funding College-wide has also exploded—up 50 percent since the Top-25 effort was launched. During the past year alone, research funding grew by 27 percent, including a number of prestigious grants and awards that are bringing several world-class research centers to the OSU campus.

These new centers include a $4.8 million Tsunami Simulation Research Center, the largest and most powerful facility of its kind anywhere in the world (see story, Research page 1); a $5.5 million Western Region Hazardous Substance Research Center, one of only five such centers nationwide (see story, Research page 8); and the $1.6 million Kiewit Center for Infrastructure Technology, which will open on campus this fall to help address the nation’s crumbling infrastructure (see story, Research page 10).

During the past two years, the College hired nine new academic faculty members. This fall, it added 14 more. And these new professors are choosing OSU over other top-ranked engineering schools, citing the energy and excitement being generated by the Top-25 campaign as a key factor behind their decision to join Oregon State.

One new hire, computer science faculty member Ron Metoyer, will bring his cutting-edge virtual reality and animation research from Georgia Tech to OSU, where, in addition to teaching, he plans to work with OSU’s football program to design a virtual reality quarterback trainer for the National Football League.

To date, the Top-25 campaign has raised almost half of the targeted $180 million in private and public funding from supporters in industry, the Oregon State Legislature, OSU alumni, and other donors.

“The groundswell of support from all fronts for what we’re building here at Oregon State is very encouraging,” says Adams, who earned his master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the nation’s No. 1-ranked engineering school, MIT. Fittingly, Adams uses an aerospace metaphor to sum up the fundraising timeline for the campaign. “We want to raise the $180 million by 2005, which will give us the afterburner that will boost us into the Top-25 by 2010.”

Hold on. It’s bound to be an exciting flight.