An Interdisciplinary Strategy for Improving Enrollments in ET Programs

The recent trend of declining enrollments in many Engineering Technology (ET) programs across the US has prompted universities offering BS degree programs in ET disciplines to seek strategies to maintain their identity, viability, and continued relevance in the face of competition from Engineering programs, and the prevailing poor economic conditions. Strategies adopted by some institutions have included the "if you can't beat them, join them" option of switching their programs entirely from ET to Engineering, renaming their programs to differentiate them from similarly named Engineering programs, seeking innovative ways to develop pipelines for students to enter their programs via articulation agreements with two-year institutions, or developing highly innovative and specialized new curricula that seek to differentiate the ET programs from Engineering programs. This latter strategy was considered to be the better option by the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology (ECET) department at Southern Polytechnic State University (SPSU). In 2006, the ECET department at SPSU sought to take advantage of the rapid growth in the biomedical Engineering area to develop an innovative option in Biomedical Engineering Technology (BMET) under its existing Electical Engineering Technology (EET) program [1-3] . While there has been a lot of interest in this BMET option, the anticipated growth in enrollment has been slow to materialize due to the fact that the option was not a separate degree program. Students have had difficulty in accepting the fact that the actual degree obtained will be the BSEET degree with an option in BMET. As a result the ECET faculty have revisited the option and is working in conjunction with their Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) colleagues to develop a novel full-blown BMET degree program that incorporates aspects of device design and manufacturing into the curriculum. This program is being developed in conjunction with another program in Renewable Energy Engineering Technology (REET) that is also a joint effort between ECET and MET faculty. These two new highly innovative "boutique" ET degree programs are expected to capture the growing interest in Biomedical Engineering and Renewable Energy Systems. This paper discusses the development of these two new curricula and the anticipated challenges in offering these programs and recruiting students into these new interdisciplinary majors.