UT Dallas school of engineering continues its rise through the rankings
April 5, 2007 -- The Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas has shot up through U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of graduate schools, gaining seven places to become No. 47 among the nation’s public graduate schools of engineering.
“This is solid evidence that we’re succeeding at transforming the Jonsson school into one of the top 50 engineering schools in the country."
When compared head-to-head with graduate programs at all other schools of engineering, the UT Dallas engineering school now ranks No. 77 nationally, up 12 places from last year.
“This is solid evidence that we’re succeeding at transforming the Jonsson school into one of the top 50 engineering schools in the country,” said Dr. Bob Helms, the school’s dean. “Two years ago we didn’t even make the U.S. News list of top graduate schools, but we’ve embarked on ambitious goals of expanding our faculty, launching new programs, increasing our research and multiplying our output of Ph.D. graduates, and the latest rankings demonstrate that we’re getting people’s attention.”
Two of the Jonsson school’s major academic programs also rose in the rankings. The graduate program in electrical engineering is now No. 44 among public schools (up from 48 last year), and it’s 73 overall (up from 77 last year). And the graduate program in computer engineering, which didn’t even make the list last year, is now ranked 39 among public schools and 63 nationally.
Helms joined UT Dallas in 2003 and was a key player in one of the largest economic development agreements in the nation in recent years. Under an innovative arrangement, Texas Instruments agreed to build a $3 billion chip fabrication plant in Richardson near the UT Dallas campus, and the state and private sector agreed to ensure UT Dallas received an infusion of up to $300 million to help it become one of the nation’s top research universities.
One of the first fruits of that infusion was the completion late last year of the university’s Natural Science and Engineering Research Laboratory, a state-of-the-art 192,000-square-foot research facility designed to promote collaborative projects among research groups from chemistry, biology, physics, electrical engineering, materials science and engineering, and behavioral and brain sciences. It’s like nothing else on campus, and Helms says it’s bolstering the Jonsson school’s efforts to recruit world-class faculty.
“I’m confident you’ll see us continue to rise in the rankings for quite a few years to come,” he said.
Survey methodology: U.S. News surveyed programs at 199 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees. Rankings were calculated based on a weighted average of 10 indicators, including a quality assessment, peer assessments, recruiter assessments and student selectivity. Seventy-nine schools made the publication’s final cut based on their quality assessment scores.
