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Compete to Win
A $10.1 million gift to the School of Engineering at SMU designed to spark K-12 students' interest in science and engineering presents the opportunity to inspire and shape our nation's innovators long before they submit their first college application -- and provides hope for the future of American competitiveness.
Applications to engineering schools by American students have been on the decline for the past two decades, a statistic that has dire implications for the nation's ability to compete in the global marketplace.
The W.W. Caruth Foundation at Communities Foundation of Texas announced their gift will fund the Caruth Institute for Engineering Education, putting bricks and mortar and the promise of valuable resources toward an ambitious program that will change the assumptions students in America make about what they want to be when they grow up.
SMU President R. Gerald Turner said the gift will allow the university to fulfill its long-standing goal of setting the pace in engineering education. Programs already in place at SMU provide innovative engineering curriculum and teacher training to reach high school students through the Infinity Project, help attract more women into engineering through the Gender Parity Project and allow middle school kids to be "engineers for a day" through the Visioneering Program.
The Caruth Institute will build on these early successes of SMU's existing Institute for Education, established through a federal grant in 2002. Thursday's gift will direct $5.1 million to endow the institute and $5 million toward the construction of a new building on the site of the original Caruth Hall, the historic home of SMU engineering since 1948.
"With the Caruth Institute at SMU, our future is limited only by our imagination," Turner said. "Our goal is to encourage more students to become engineers and then for them to lead in the development of the products and solutions that will make the word a better place by solving critical global problems."
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