Through innovation and collaboration, the College of Engineering and Information Technology will capitalize on our geographic location and unique blend of engineering and information technology to transform lives and meet societal challenges. COEIT’s strategic plan, adopted in Fall 2015, identifies concrete strategic directions, goals, and metrics to meet this vision.
Beginning in 2017, two primary themes have been used reach these two strategic directions and to also follow through on UMBC’s 2017 strategic plan, Our UMBC:
- Elevate the student experience.
- Build and sustain a strong college.
COEIT’s programs include a broad portfolio of engineering, computing, business, and management topics. In the past five years, COEIT’s total enrollment has grown from about 4800 to over 6000, which is about 42% of UMBC’s ~14,000 students, supported by over faculty (90 T/TT) and staff with total expenditures of about $50M. The majority of COEIT’s undergraduates are people of color having increased from 48% to over 60%.
COEIT has established a strong college identity, initiated projects elevating faculty and staff professional development, and deepened engagement with external stakeholders and student organizations. Support for UMBC’s growth in workforce development, healthcare engineering, computing education, and cybersecurity has resulted in significant direct support from economic development initiatives. Over one-third of COEIT’s full-time faculty were hired since 2017.
The Engineering & Computing Education Program (ECEP) is an incubator for undergrad and grad education and education research projects to advance the college’s collective impact on student success, social responsibility, and inclusive excellence. ECEP houses interdisciplinary graduate programs and the Maryland Center for Computing Education (MCCE), which supports K-12 computing education across the state. COEIT introduced college-based faculty and staff awards, a laboratory renewal program, college-wide undergraduate and graduate councils focused on enrollment planning and student success, faculty, and staff advisory groups, and new programs for onboarding faculty and students.
Efforts to promote higher proposal success already show considerable growth: research awards for grants and contracts processed in the college were nearly $23M in the 2021-2022 fiscal year, which is more than double any year before 2018. A significant factor in that growth has been the founding of two college-level centers, CARDS and iHARP.
COEIT’s computer science and mechanical engineering programs have been extended to the Shady Grove campus, and a new professional master’s in software engineering has been launched. This is in addition to intensified efforts to support transfer students, improve connectivity to UMBC’s Academic Success Center, and the co-launching of a Computing Success Center.