Engineering Cuts
I’d like to be the first student to come forward in support of the Engineering department’s recent decisions. The Engineering department, like every other department, has this thing called a budget. It means that they only have so much money that they can spend. And in hard financial times like now, they have to either increase their income or decrease their expenses. And since everyone loves tuition hikes, they decided to decrease their expenses by making some cuts to the technology programs. Actually, they’re not even cutting them flat. They simply aren’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 at the Dean, we need to realize that the he does not rule by decree. It was the decision of the Engineering department as a whole to dicontinue 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 Hinton348-76-3009(435)713-4591