Department has had success despite columnists' allegations

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department
Letter to the editor

In the Friday, Nov. 7, issue, the Daily Egyptian published the column entitled "Number of graduate students too high" referring to the graduate programs in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department. The following presents the perspective of the department on this issue.

The ECE Department is proud of the unprecedented success of its graduate programs. With a graduate enrollment of over 260 students and with more than 3,500 upper-level graduate credit hours taught per year, the department is second to only the University of Illinois among all the public and private universities in the State, in terms of size of graduate programs. In this vital area, the department is certainly leading the way in achieving the vision and goals of "Southern at 150."

The recently observed high demand for the ECE programs and the high graduate enrollments are, exclusively, the result of successful employment of our graduates both in academia and in industry over the past fifteen years. Many of our graduates are currently ECE professors in research extensive universities such as Oregon State, Notre Dame, Utah State, Florida Atlantic and others. Hundreds of our graduates, with M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, are successfully employed (mostly in research and development) by high technology companies.

The excellent reputation and visibility of our graduate programs has been created by the current generation of ECE faculty because of their vision, competence, commitment, hard work and loyalty to the department and to the institution. The department is committed to maintaining and to continuously improving the quality of its graduate programs. Therefore, we welcome constructive criticism and we take seriously any complaints from our students.

We most certainly agree that a proper balance between resources and enrollment is essential in maintaining both the quality and visibility of our programs. The evolution and growth of graduate programs, however, is a dynamic process that is very likely to transiently cause an imbalance between resources and enrollment. This is particularly true for institutions with no long tradition in graduate education, making the transition to join the top tier of research universities. SIUC will certainly face many challenges of this kind on the road to achieving the transition to "Southern at 150."

The balance between growth and resources must, therefore, be closely monitored and any deviations must be detected and corrected in a timely manner to avoid erosion of the quality of the programs and setbacks (sometimes irreversible) in the process of achieving the goals of "Southern at 150."

In view of the above, we would like to thank your paper and your columnist for the interest in our programs and for drawing our attention and the attention of the University to a number of legitimate issues related to the balance between the resources and the growth of the ECE programs.

Copyright 2009 - Daily Egyptian