
Originally Posted by
Telionis
We're at 626.7 Million as of 12-31-12. Not a bad change in three years, but alumni must keep donating for it to increase.
VT's SAT and GPA scores are KILLED by the humanities and liberal arts programs we added in 1970. If VT had, as GT did, remained engineering, architecture, science and business only (plus ag) the average inbound GPA and SAT would be far higher (same with average professor pay). USNews would have favored that immensely (we'd probably be in the high 40s, low 50s) but the university would be quite a bit smaller and frankly, derelict in our duty. The primary mission of all land grant schools is not to kiss the ass of US News, but to bring a complete education to the masses. We make fun of WVU for having lax admissions standards, but they are doing their duty admirably. If we were to be anal about test scores, we'd be failing our core mission.
A real public land grant school should offer everything, from art history to zoology. We can be awesome at engineering (like Illinois at Urbana-Champagne), but not do that exclusively like GT.
I think we should aim at improving the quality of research and education, and let the test scores resolve themselves. The better we do, the more high caliber kids from VA will want to stay instead of going off to private schools.
They would because they are the most arrogant fans I have ever encountered, far worse than UVA fans, which says a lot. Make no mistake about it, GT is new money.
I am in my early 30s, and even I am old enough to remember when VT and GT were nearly identically ranked (annually jockeying with TAMU and RPI for the last top 15 spot). GT had two back to back awesome presidents, John Patrick Crecine and G. Wayne Clough, the latter of which they stole from us (our dean of engineering). Both men restructured GT (Crecine did so drastically that the faculty almost revolted), got a lot more cash in, and heavily emphasized STEM. GT went from 14th in 1990 to 9th by 1995 when Crecine left, then down to where they are today (around 5th) by the time Clough left in 2008. Conversely, VT's rank has remained almost entirely static in that time (around 15), though our graduate engineering rank has fallen slightly.
GT fans like to pretend that they share a common history with MIT and Cal Tech, a hundred and fifty years of being exceptional, they even call themselves the MIT of the south (LOL), but in truth they've only been at the top for 15 years. Before that they were just another good engineering school like VT, RPI and TAMU.
We of course, took the opposite road. In 1970, T. Marshall Hahn restructured VPI with the intention of becoming the flagship of a new Virginia State University system (the Virginia State Hokies sounds a bit odd). Instead of emphasizing engineering and science, we added humanities and liberal arts, which drastically dropped our overall ranking (though did not harm our engineering). If he had done the opposite, our position with GT may have been changed. But Hahn wanted to be a complete university, an Ohio State or Penn State, rather than a public MIT.
In short, don't let GT pretend they're historic royalty, they're "new money" through and through.