Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505150019
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Page 103 of U.S. News & World Report's March 20 issue carried the distressing news: Virginia Tech's College of Engineering had dropped to 34th in the magazine's annual ratings of the nation's top 50 graduate engineering schools.
Down from 26th last year. Down from 17th in the first poll in 1987.
"It hurt," said Tech President Paul Torgersen, dean of the college from 1970 to 1990. "But I can tell you candidly, it hurt me more for the people who are immediately involved."
Increasingly, the people working in the hallowed halls of the College of Engineering are wondering: Is the college standing at the edge of a precipice?
Maybe.
On one hand, its strong reputation holds. If you look closely at the U.S. News rankings, you'll find the college's overall score has actually improved slightly from last year. And, in what may be the greatest measure of any school's value, engineering firms surveyed put Tech at No.18 in terms of producing graduates they would hire. State Secretary of Education Beverly Sgro called it "one of the real gems" for Virginia.
On the other hand, "there's an interesting little spiral that's started," said Ron Kander, an assistant professor in materials science engineering.
"Perception is reality, unfortunately.'' When a student's mom and dad ``look at those rankings and see tuition going up and the ranking going down, they opt to go somewhere else,'' he said.
Ratings may play only the high-profile role in the growing concern at the college, which has been largely buffered from six years of budget cuts that have hit Tech's other colleges. With an endowment worth more than $30 million and 45 separately endowed, named professorships, with $40 million in research that returns both money and prestige, the college next year faces its first painful state budgets cut.
The university faces a $12.2 million shortfall, caused partly by a substantial drop in out-of-state students. To help make it up, engineering, like the other colleges, will return 5 percent of its state funding to the university.
That's $1.4 million. Plus, $400,000 is already headed out the door in the pockets of workers who have taken advantage of two buyout plans. Restructuring lies ahead, although Dean Bill Stephenson said he can't yet give specifics.
"Personnel are very important to us," he said. "We're trying to look at what makes good sense: Where can we get efficiencies in programs?''
Rising concerns over funding may have led to a situation Professor Ed Henneke has noticed in the past two months. He has received four or five phone calls of a type he used to receive only once a year: professors from other universities calling to ask about job candidates from Virginia Tech.
``People have been more willing to say in the past, `No, I'm not interested,''' Henneke said.
That could change. Faculty are growing frustrated.
"We've been getting the same budget cuts [as the rest of the university], but because of the hard work of the faculty - research activities and tightening belts - we've used outside activities to keep the instructional program going. Well, we've done as much as we can," said Henneke, head of the engineering science and mechanics department.
The growth of the college is widely credited to Torgersen. He willingly asked alumni to endow faculty teaching chairs and asked the General Assembly for money for buildings. Around the college, people still say he built the place by hiring the best faculty he could find.
After a decade of building came the strong thumbs-up from industry.
"In the early '80s, during the recession - here was a recession where major companies who recruit at major universities were cutting back - but they were still coming to Virginia Tech," said Peter Rony, a chemical engineering professor.
"The Hokie engineering student is coming out of a world-class engineering program," said Jim George, corporate vice president and general manager for Motorola's Digital Signal Processing Division.
Graduates tend to be hard-working and ready to prove themselves, he said. Those who come out of "certain hot areas of the field," such as mobile-cellular communications or large-scale integration chip technology, find employers all but fighting over them, said George, who also is chairman of the advisory committee for the college's Bradley Department of Electrical Engineering.
Since the early '90s, though, tuition has grown and Tech's out-of-state student base has shrunk, even though the engineering college pulls 37 percent of its students from outside the state.
Out-of-state students at peer institutions such as North Carolina State University or Georgia Tech pay less for tuition, fees, room and board. N.C. State, where tuition may go up this summer, costs $12,600. Starting next quarter, Georgia Tech costs $12,534 for room, board, and fees. Virginia Tech will cost $13,859 next year for the same services - and freshmen engineers pay a mandatory additional $2,800 for a computer.
"Before, when we were the same price, people could make a decision based on Atlanta or Blacksburg," said Assistant Dean Pamela Kurstedt, who made the pitch and watched families respond to the comparatively safer Southwest Virginia college town over big-city Georgia Tech.
In Georgia, the engineering college's assistant dean had reassuring words for Virginia Tech.
``My point with students [is], `You have to make that decision - whether you want to be out in the countryside with a lot of space, or do you want to live in the city?''' Assistant Dean Jane Weant said. "I don't think the comparison of the educational value is something they need to worry about. They're going to get it either way."
Graduate students fall into a separate category: They cost the university money because they earn stipends, but they also produce research.
"The university is a research university and depends on research funding. What happens [is], when the state budgets are cut, things are moved to grants." said Joel Donahue, a Ph.D. student and one of Tech's valued Bradley Scholars.
Even grants for research have taken a cut from the federal government, which has reduced money for so-called overhead - the phone calls, the electricity, the faxes.
"The biggest problem I have is, the professors are stretched thinner," Donahue said. "They're more anxious, they're more upset because the money situation is beating on them directly. When you deal with them, they're not quite as available. They're not quite so optimistic. They're spending more time running around trying to find money."
In some cases, they're running around trying to pick up pieces dropped elsewhere on campus.
Consider the story related by Kander, the assistant professor in materials science, who is recruiting a couple of strong graduate students. One is a minority student just out of Clark Atlanta University.
"He sent all his records that he needed to apply for graduate school," Kander said.
Kander's not sure where part of the student's application got lost, but it did, after the student had sent it to the graduate admissions office.
"He called. They said, 'It's incomplete.' He sent it again," Kander said.
Part of it got lost again.
"He called me" and made his dilemma clear, Kander said: He had an offer to another graduate school.
"I had to get all his stuff, shepherd it through the system, and make sure he got a warm and fuzzy feeling about coming here," Kander said.
The student enrolled. But, Kander said, that sort of problem didn't arise five years ago.
Nationally, the number of full-time undergraduate engineering students dropped 6,000 from 1984 to 1993. Over the same period, 47 new engineering schools sprang up. Since then, Virginia has added another, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond headed by former Tech chemistry professor Henry McGee. Tech is helping help start up the new college, which opens to undergraduates in the fall of '96. The state has pledged $16 million to aid the new school. Meanwhile, Motorola has said it is coming to Virginia.
"Motorola is planning to build a three billion - that's with a `b' - facility, employing 5,000 people in high-skill, high-wage jobs and numerous spin-off jobs,'' McGee said. "Motorola would not be in Virginia at all unless VCU engineering existed and Tech played, and continues to play, a prominent role in the existence of VCU engineering. I think this is a vote of great confidence."
The new competition is viewed with a wary eye in some corners at Tech's engineering school. McGee, who knows it takes years to build such a school, sees limited reason for worry.
"Our whole school is smaller than Tech's electrical engineering department," he said. Plus, the school will focus heavily on the relationship between engineering and medicine, a subject that is not available at Tech.
In fact, McGee gives great credit to Tech's engineering school, with its 6,000 students, nine departments, and nearly 300 faculty members, for the aid it has given the new school.
But Motorola's George is troubled.
"I'm really concerned about the strategy in the state of Virginia for the way the state of Virginia is going to deploy their advanced engineering agenda - multiple colleges of engineering at multiple universities," he said.
"It seems the strategy is almost one of tearing down the steeples to fill in the valleys," he said, suggesting that satellite campuses of a major college such as Tech's would work better.
With concern high that their school could slip - and their hard work along with it - faculty and administrators inside Tech's engineering college see a way out, to the benefit of the university as a whole.
An internal report compiled in March shows the college returns $9 million to the university, including tuition and $1.2 million in research overhead.
"I believe the College of Engineering is in a position to help attract the best students," Stephenson said. "Many corporate employers have us on their must-visit list.
"It's very important to Virginia Tech that this college remain strong."
Torgersen, with his overall view of the university, has asked that a similar analysis be made of all colleges.
But he also said he's not yet prepared to agree wholeheartedly with the engineering college. Take the College of Arts and Sciences, he said. Next fall, it may need to teach basic courses to an unexpected 400 additional freshmen who've applied. Arts and sciences may believe it needs additional resources, too, Torgersen said.
If it turns out the engineering college is earning for the university, "it could very much be a significant factor in allocating resources in the future," he said.
Whether the cuts affect undergraduates seems an open question. Junior Ray Easterling, who will be back next year, praises the engineering college. He's impressed that Torgersen still teaches a class there - which Easterling says he eagerly made this semester, each Friday at 11 a.m., following all-nighters putting together the student-run Collegiate Times.
Departing senior Kevin LeClaire says he got a terrific education, but he wonders about the continued impact of cuts.
So do professors.
"In my opinion, the product of the university is students. I'm trying to recruit and retain one student at a time. I'm trying to make sure students I've got are insulated as much as possible from what's happening," Kander said.
Would Weant, the assistant dean at Georgia Tech, send her child to Virginia Tech's College of Engineering?
"Sure," she said. "In a minute. If that's where my child wanted to go."
by CNB