I went to a presentation by the dean of the college of engineering the other day about 25 by 25, and why it is happening in the first place, and how they are going to achieve it. I came in very opposed to 25x25, and while I haven't done a full 180 on my position towards it, I feel way better about it now.

First, the 25,000 enrollment counts engineering academies (basically partnerships with community colleges), online students, Galveston, and Qatar. And they're looking for about 5,000 of the 25,000 to come from those remote sites, so we only need 20,000 here. Currently, there are 16,000 here. The plan to get those 4,000 extra students is increasing retention, not increasing enrollment. Her point was that our freshman engineering retention is about 50%, and at similar universities, it's about 75%. So almost all of 25x25 is increasing enrollment at remote sites and improving retention.

Thoughts?

How did they propose improving retention?

Their plan for improving retention has 3 main points:

1. Work with College of Sciences to make intro math and science courses more relateable to engineering, and less abstract and academic. More real-life. Also, they want to redesign those courses to teach in different ways so less people fail, but still meet the learning objectives. It sounded ridiculous/impossible, but Dr. Banks told us about how this past fall, they actually did that with a physics class, and the fail rate went from 30% to 15%, and the students in the "redesigned" physics class performed the same on a common proficiency exam that students in the "traditional" physics class did. The take-away being that it is possible to simply teach the classes better.

2. Work with engineering faculty to make sure that they're teaching well and students are getting support. I think this mostly relates to increasing the number of professors of practice (which we already have a large number of), using more flipped classrooms, and increasing the number of peer tutors that are paid by the departments to help other students.

3. No more automatic admit for College of Engineering. Top 10%ers get into A&M automatically, but not College of Engineering.

The schools she mentioned during her presentation that I remember were UC-Davis, Georgia Tech, Purdue, Illinois Urbana-Champagne, Florida. I thought those were fair comparisons. I hate when people try and compare us to Ivy-Leagues, but these are all state or land-grant schools I think.

Good Bull Jones 17 said:

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I hate when people try and compare us to Ivy-Leagues and overly liberal schools, but these are all state or land-grant schools I think.

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What does being an "overly liberal" school have to do with comparisons? Example?

Eh. That didn't really make sense of me to say. I guess I don't like when people compare us to places like UC Berkeley or CU Boulder because I'm not a big fan of them, but that really has nothing to do with academics.

They passed that handout out at the Presentation. Pretty helpful.

Fourth Deck - Caltech is a pretty fair engineering school too.

But I agree with your point, the big public universities are outstanding in engineering. According to US News, five of the top ten undergraduate engineering colleges are public universities. Seven of the top eleven graduate engineering programs are offered by public universities (including Texas and Texas A&M).

There are some ok points in the update.

https://engineering.tamu.edu/25by25/25-by-25-report

The whole effort seems to be almost entirely focused on undergraduate education though. I had a friend who was approached about one of these professor of practice gigs and it sounded like a horrible deal. I'm not sure how she intends to wrangle great teachers when they'd be on a year-to-year basis.

It's nice that they're putting together an engineering quad. The parking garage has been needed for a long time, but I think she's being dishonest by saying she expects it to be open by 2019. If that was the case they'd be preparing to turn dirt on it.