If you heard your major might not exist in a few years, it’s not hard to imagine you and many of your classmates would be very angry and disappointed.
This is what happened less than two weeks ago to students in the environmental engineering program at Rensselaer. After several years of continually shrinking class sizes for the students involved in the program and the recent loss of professors to teach the necessary courses, the School of Engineering is considering whether the major should continue to exist in its current state.
As the School of Engineering and administration continue their review of this issue, we hope that they will take a close look at the core problems behind the lack of interest in the field and how this can be improved. By first conducting a thorough search to find new instructors interested in teaching environmental engineering, we can improve the major as it stands now. However, ultimately, by promoting this program to the niche community of prospective students that could be interested in it we can increase the size of it in future years. Eliminating this program is wrong and reducing it to only a concentration within civil engineering would belittle a field that is becoming increasingly relevant in today’s world.
In recent years, our students and the Institute as a whole have become more aware of environmental concerns. We have seen the development of a student task force to explore ways to improve sustainability, such as composting and renewable energy. The administration has also been inspired to head a task force in cooperation with students to look at many of the same areas. Many of these areas are focuses purused by environmental engineering students.
It seems fitting that the university that was first to offer an environmental engineering degree would only look to expand and enhance the program. Even President Shirley Ann Jackson wrote this week to stress that we will always be “dedicated to responding to the call to create a sustainable environment.” Perhaps, we should be the leaders of this movement by reinvigorating our environmental engineering program rather than looking to push it to the curb.
