LETTER: Support the dean

Editor,

I’d like to be the first student to come forward in support of the Engineering College’s recent decisions. The College of Engineering, like every other college, has this thing called a budget. It means that it only has so much money that it can spend.

And in hard financial times like now, it has to either increase its income or decrease its expenses. And since everyone loves tuition hikes, it decided to decrease its expenses by making some cuts to the technology programs.

Actually, the college is not even cutting them flat. It simply isn’t continuing them. I don’t know if we all read that part, but everyone in these programs will get to graduate with a tech degree from USU.

A key factor in university budgets is research money. There isn’t a whole lot of high-level research that can be done in tech programs when compared to other programs in engineering. That means that welding was funded primarily by tuition and not generating very much research income on its own.

And before we start making personal attacks on the dean, we need to realize that the he does not rule by decree. It was the decision of the College of Engineering as a whole to discontinue the tech programs, not just some ruthless dictator who wanted to make students mad.

In closing I want to remind us of why the department is “changing directions.” The dean said, “We’re more interested in designing the space shuttle, not building it.”

Bryan Hinton