CHAPEL HILL (October 23, 2024) – When a proposed budget from the state House included $8 million in June to launch a College of Applied Science and Technology – in other words, an engineering school – at UNC-Chapel Hill, it caused a stir.
It didn’t come to pass due to the legislature’s failure to update the state budget. But it raised questions about the intentions of UNC-Chapel Hill – which hasn’t had a college of engineering since 19351 – and whether it would infringe on other UNC System campuses with engineering programs.
“STEM is the fastest-growing profession and is where we have been unable to meet the job needs,” House Speaker Tim Moore told reporters at the time. “So we believe that UNC-Chapel Hill can be a key part of that. It would be a different type of engineering. I don’t see it competing with N.C. State, like in civil engineering and those sorts of things.
“The thing that’s very important is it would leverage additional federal research dollars to the state of North Carolina.”2
In 2021, state legislators approved “Engineering North Carolina’s Future,” with $125 million for expansion of engineering at NC State, UNC Charlotte and N.C. A&T. At NC State alone, the initiative will expand engineering students by 40%, or 4,000 students.3
In an interview with Public Ed Works, UNC-CH Chancellor Lee Roberts said there’s plenty of engineering instruction already underway in Chapel Hill.
“Folks don’t think of Carolina as an engineering school,” Roberts says in the accompanying video. “But the truth is we have about 170 professors now teaching engineering disciplines.
“We have very strong programs in Applied Physical Sciences, in Biomedical Engineering, in Data Science and Environmental Engineering. Very strong student demand for those programs. Very strong employer demand for those students.”
Despite its reputation for a next-generation workforce, Roberts says, North Carolina is graduating a lower percentage of engineers than the national average.
“We need more engineers in North Carolina, and more broadly. The demand for our students coming out of these programs shows that,” he says.
A working group appointed by Roberts last spring recommended expansion of UNC’s existing engineering disciplines, but also exploration of such new programs as materials science, polymer processing, computational science, pharmacoengineering, artificial intelligence and computational biology.4
“What we’ll continue to explore is, should we grow those programs, and if so, how? Should we add to them, and if so, in what way?” Roberts says.
“I don’t think this initiative – whatever we decide to do about engineering – is about holding anybody else back. The workforce need is significant. And everybody needs to continue to grow very strongly for North Carolina to have the kind of engineering talent it needs to succeed in the 21st-century economy.”
1 https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article289349040.html?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=f65a7fc3-6ffb-4a83-8e2c-cba9ee9af7da.
2 https://www.wunc.org/politics/2024-06-18/unc-chapel-hill-engineering-nc-house-berger-budget-bill.
3 https://publicedworks.org/2022/07/nc-state-a-40-increase-in-engineers/.
4 https://chancellor.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1276/2024/09/UNC-Chapel-Hill-Applied-Sciences-Working-Group-Report.pdf.
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