For Second Straight Year, UTD Confers More Computer Science Degrees Than Any Other University in the U. S.

Dr. Bob Helms, dean of the Erik Jonsson
School, said: “We are not where
we want to be yet … but we are
moving in the right direction.”

UTD’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, which is only 19 years old, awarded 575 computer science degrees (179 to women) in the 2003-04 academic year, the latest year studied, according to the ASEE database, compared with 527 for the University of Southern California (USC), 401 for the State University of New York at Stony Brook, 364 for the for the Illinois Institute of Technology and 357 for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. USC finished a distant second in the total number of computer science degrees conferred to women with 102.

The Jonsson School also ranked first in the U.S. in both the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women in computer science (77) and the number of master’s degrees awarded to women in computer science (101). More than 31 percent of all of the computers science degrees conferred by UTD were to women, well above the national average.

Additionally, according to the Survey of ASEE data, the Jonsson School ranked second in the nation, behind only George Washington University, in the number of female tenured/tenure track computer science faculty members (seven) within an engineering school.

“I understand that the president of a very well-known university – we used to call it the Stanford of the East – got himself into hot water not too long ago when he questioned why women don’t do as well as men in the sciences and technical fields,” said Dr. Bob Helms, dean of the Jonsson School, who taught at Stanford for many years and earned his Ph.D. there. “He should come to UTD. As you can see by these numbers, we don’t have that problem here.”

According to the ASEE’s latest edition of Profiles of Engineering and Engineering Technology Colleges, U. T. Dallas moved up from fifth to fourth in the country in the total combined number of electrical engineering and computer science degrees with 854, behind engineering schools at USC, 1,126; North Carolina State, 999; and Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 899; but ahead of such prestigious schools as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 778; and Stanford, 647.

UTD also jumped from 38th to 19th in the nation in the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in electrical engineering (125 compared with 77 in the preceding year).

After leaving Stanford in 1997, Helms served as a vice president of Texas Instruments (TI) and then as president and chief executive officer of International SEMATECH (ISMT), the Austin, Texas-based consortium of semiconductor manufacturers whose member companies include AMD, Intel, IBM, Motorola and TI, representing 40 percent of the worldwide market share in computer chips. He joined UTD as Jonsson School dean in 2003 and almost immediately set a goal that the school would achieve tier–one status as one of the top 50 engineering schools in the country by 2008.

The Jonsson School is known for its innovative programs. It was the first school in the U. S. to have an accredited telecommunications engineering degree, and it is one of the few schools to have a software engineering program and to participate in an interdisciplinary arts and technology program.

The school also is home to the highly regarded CyberSecurity and Emergency Preparedness Institute.

The number of doctoral degrees conferred by the school has soared in recent years. According to the ASEE figures, the Jonsson School awarded 24 doctoral degrees in the 2003-2004 academic year, compared with 14 the year before and nine the year before that – an increase of 166 percent over two years.

Significantly, the Jonsson School has only two departments at present – electrical engineering and computer science – while other more “comprehensive” engineering schools include such areas as civil, structural and chemical engineering and have as many as six or seven departments. Despite that, however, the Jonsson School, according to the ASEE figures, ranked 75th in the nation in 2003-2004 in the total number of doctoral degrees conferred, 22nd in the number of master’s degrees and 46th in the number of bachelor’s degrees. Helms, meanwhile, has made it clear that he hopes to add several departments to the school.

“We are not where we want to be yet,” Helms said. “But I think it’s clear that we are moving in the right direction – and at an accelerated speed.”

The Jonsson School was named after the former Dallas mayor and co-founder of both TI and the research institute that in 1969 became UTD. As the result of an economic-development program announced in 2003 involving TI, the State of Texas and the University of Texas System, the school is scheduled to receive up to $300 million in public and private funds to improve and expand its programs and to build a state-of-the-art engineering and natural sciences research center. The research center is currently under construction on the northern end of campus.

UTD is expected to raise $100 million itself as part of the agreement, which is popularly known as “Project Emmitt.” For additional information on the school, please visit
http://www.ecs.utdallas.edu/.

About UTD

The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart of the complex of major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor, enrolls more than 14,000 students. The school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas state universities in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a broad assortment of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs. For additional information about UTD, please visit the university’s web site at
www.utdallas.edu.