As Drexel embarks on its academic transformation and prepares to welcome a new president, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment, presenting both opportunities and challenges. Many of the “transformational” changes have been proposed multiple times over the years, such as the change to semesters and making Biomedical Engineering part of the College of Engineering. So why is this transformation finally happening now?
The “Unit Integration” part of the transformation stands out, and in particular the combination of the College of Engineering (my home), the School of Biomedical Engineering, Sciences, and Health Systems and the College of Computing and Informatics into a new unit. Two quick history notes. First,BIOMED was founded as a separate unit in 1998 and has never been in the College of Engineering, and second, CCI was founded in 2013 by removing the Department of Computer Science from the College of Engineering and moving it to the (then) College of Informatics. Combining these units is long overdue, and I welcome their integration.
The administration proposed this integration to the Faculty Senate in writing late last year for its approval but is yet to grant it. The need for integration was explicitly justified by citing the declining undergraduate enrollments of COE and BIOMED that are only partially offset by increasing enrollment in CCI. The income that enrollment and tuition bring are Drexel’s lifeblood, and enrollment growth is urgently needed. The new unit would likely fare better against undergraduate demand fluctuations and would increase efficiency gains by eliminating redundancies.
The administration’s justification is quite correct: since a peak in about 2014, total full-time undergraduate enrollments of both COE and BIOMED have shrunk from a combined high of over 4,000 to a current count of about 2,500, a nearly 40 percent decline. Both units have also individually shrunk by the same percentage. Yet these numbers were not cited in the written proposal. This is perhaps because they represent double the percentage decline in both the total number of engineering students nationwide and the aggregate engineering enrollment of our regional and admissions peers since 2014.
Worse: compared to twenty years ago, there are 30 percent more engineering undergraduates in the US, including just among our peers, but 10 percent fewer engineering students at Drexel. Fortunately for the US, the current declining trend in engineering enrollment seems to be over, with a steady population of students over the last two years and signs of growing interest in engineering majors. (All of these numbers are taken from the American Society for Engineering Education’s survey database.) Unfortunately for Drexel, despite steady and healthy application numbers over the past decade, we are getting progressively worse at enrolling engineering undergraduates.
What is even more concerning is this: from 2014 to 2024, the decline in total COE undergraduate enrollment and the increase in CCI undergraduate enrollment are so steady that, when plotted vs. year, they form almost perfectly straight lines! In the decade ending in 2024, no other US engineering school even came close to such sustained, regular decline in total undergraduate enrollment. Equally surprising: the trends show no trace at all of the COVID pandemic. What remarkable robustness! Unfortunately, if they continue, in 10 more years there will be no engineering at Drexel.
It strains credulity that the weirdness of these trends can be blamed on vagaries of “the market.” It appears instead that, in or around 2014, the administration decided to shift Drexel’s focus away from engineering by progressively reducing the share of institutional financial aid allocated for newly enrolling undergraduates in COE and BIOMED. The converse view that financial aid budget allocations were changed only in response to decreasing enrollment cannot be accepted precisely because of the decade-long, perfectly linear decline in total engineering enrollment.
This may stem from some well-intentioned aim to broaden Drexel beyond its core strength and reputation in engineering. Granted, a university can strategically grow enrollments in whatever programs it wants to by increasing that program’s acceptance rates. Drexel’s already high acceptance rates do not allow such a strategy. Instead, institutional financial aid that discounts tuition is the only real tool Drexel has to redistribute enrollment. It is a very effective tool: surveys consistently show that financial aid is the single most important factor families consider when weighing whether or not to enroll at Drexel. So financial administrators can redistribute enrollments simply by how they choose to allocate financial aid budget.
Many faculty, myself included, find this state of affairs unacceptable. Opaque financial decisions seem to dictate enrollments and unfairly favor some units while putting others at a disadvantage. Unfortunately for Drexel, an untold number of accepted applicants over the last 10 years have likely chosen not to enroll because of small financial aid offers — and it isstill happening today. If Drexel had managed its engineering enrollment to follow national trends, it would have easily brought in 10s of millions of tuition dollars without negatively impacting any other units. This is a steep price to pay to make Drexel seem less like an “engineering school.”
Drexel has undeniably suffered because of the resulting poor enrollment, painfully missing ample opportunities to leverage our strengths for sustained growth in both size and reputation that would move us out of the regime of high acceptance rates. Since 2014 our University has careened from one financial crisis to another, laid off valuable staff to the point that basic functions are jeopardized, deferred addressing many of our programs’ major infrastructure issues and been forced to incentivize the retirement of some of our best faculty and staff. A steep price indeed.
The administration is correct that Drexel is in need of transformation, if for no other reason than to heal the self-inflicted damage wrought by the failed financial strategies of the last 10 years or more. Let us commit to this transformation by adopting a collaborative, open process, involving Deans and even Department Heads, for determining unit-by-unit financial aid distribution and enrollment targets. We could then all commit to balancing enrollment growth opportunities with the need to preserve and enhance the core drivers of Drexel’s reputation without causing the kind of financial panic that finds its way into the media. This new process will also help ensure the success of the new unit. If the incoming leadership is looking to make a positive transformation, that would be an excellent place to start.
Statistics were obtained from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and Drexel’s own Office of Institutional Research, Assessment and Accreditation.Cameron F. Abrams is the Bartlett ’81–Barry ’81 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Head of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. He has been on the faculty at Drexel since 2002 and a department head since 2017. He can be reached at [email protected].