Non Traditional Bachelor Degree Programs And Options Offered By Engineering Schools: Their Impact On Traditional Engineering Programs

Our Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering (IT&E) at George Mason University established a new four-year Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (BS-IT) program that focuses on selected sub-disciplines or areas of concentration during the last two years. The BS-IT program aims to help fulfill The Volgenau School’s mission, which is to produce more graduates who understand information technology and who can use it effectively. The BS-IT degree was offered for the first time during the fall, 2002 semester. Enrollment in the BS-IT program at the beginning of the fall 2006 semester was over 900 students, making it the largest undergraduate program in The Volgenau School of IT&E. The Computer Science (CS) Department in The Volgenau School here at George Mason has developed a new Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Computer Science (BS-ACS) with concentrations associated with selected disciplines (e.g., Biology and Geography) beginning with the fall 2006 semester. The decision to offer the BS-ACS program was influenced partially by the success of the new BS-IT program and the declining enrollment in the traditional BS-CS program, as well as the perceived need in the computational sciences profession. The BS-ACS program proposes to retain stringent technical requirements in the CS major related courses as well as in the discipline associated with the selected concentration. It must be noted that much of the success of the BSIT program can be attributed to its significantly reduced mathematics and programming requirements, which is not the case for the BS-ACS program. In this paper, we take a closer look at the types of non-traditional programs that are available to undergraduate students in engineering schools and explore the extent to which these types of non-traditional programs are achieving their goals both in The Volgenau School and at other select universities across the country. Additionally, we explore the impact of these types of non-traditional bachelor degree programs offered by engineering schools on more traditional undergraduate program offerings in engineering and computer science. We also attempt to both identify and gain a better understanding of the full range of issues that must be addressed. Among the topics to be discussed are: issues associated with both the recruitment and persistent of students in the traditional engineering and computer science programs; need for new types of engineering and computing related programs; and the need for branding of the non-traditional programs so that they are easily distinguishable from similarly named traditional programs. The results should be of interest to engineering schools and other academic units that are contemplating and/or in the early stages of implementing non-traditional bachelor degree programs.