The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Commits $10 Million to Improve Undergraduate Engineering Education in the Western U.S.
Menlo Park, CA - Nine public colleges and universities in nine western states have received William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grants to fund programs to improve the quality of undergraduate education in engineering and to increase the number of engineering graduates.
These Engineering Schools of the West Initiative grants, ranging from $750,000 to $1.1 million, will support programs to increase retention and recruitment efforts, and to improve student learning through better undergraduate teaching.
Schools were chosen in part because their programs had the potential of providing a significant “multiplier effect” leading to a change in the institution that would also be instructive to other colleges and universities, said Initiative Director Richard Reis. “We really believe that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts,” Reis said. “By bringing representatives from the nine schools together on a regular basis the Foundation expects to have a much wider impact on engineering education than would be possible with just stand-alone programs.”
The three- to five-year grants will support programs ranging from summer projects that target high school students from traditionally underrepresented groups to the development of team-based collaborative learning courses that mirror how engineering is done in industry. Others will develop curricula to help engineering students understand the ethical issues and responsibilities of professional engineers.
These institutions, selected for a commitment to rigorous assessment and ability to sustain long-term outcomes, will collaborate to tackle such issues as new ways to assess student learning or how to provide students with a global orientation to engineering problems. The awards are being made in honor of William Hewlett, co-founder of the Hewlett Packard company.
The Hewlett Foundation, incorporated as a private foundation in California in 1966, was established by the late Palo Alto industrialist William R. Hewlett, his wife, Flora Lamson Hewlett, and their eldest son, Walter B. Hewlett. The Foundation's broad purpose is to promote the well-being of mankind by supporting selected activities of a charitable nature, as well as organizations or institutions engaged in such activities.
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