In an architectural sense, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s vision for the Illinois Institute of Technology meshed perfectly with the long parallel lines of State Street and the elevated train tracks that course through the heart of the South Side campus.
His modernist, rectangular buildings, with their high ceilings and large expanses of smoked glass, were a hit in the architectural world.
But on a human level–for the students who were to live and study there–the net effect was a 120-acre university campus perceived by many as gloomy and sterile.
Now, however, because of a recent $120 million challenge gift, the university has the chance to give the campus a face lift and make it, as an engineer might say, more user-friendly.
But underlying any cosmetic improvements for IIT’s ambience is a greater challenge that also has dogged the university for decades: how to bring it into the pantheon of the nation’s best engineering-professional schools, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Although IIT graduates have long been admired by the firms that hire them, and the school gets respectful nods from its peer institutions, it has never quite gained a top-flight national image–the sort, for example, that would put it on U.S. News & World Report’s prestigious ranking of the top 59 engineering schools.
“I heard we had children of IIT alumni applying to Cal Tech, but not IIT,” said Carole Snow, IIT’s dean of admissions, who was hired away from the top-rated Cal Tech two years ago. “My interpretation of that was, IIT has been this gem of a school, but an urban school that isn’t glamorous. The people educated here do very well, and they send their children to the grander schools because they can.”
So beyond the considerable plans for reconfiguring the campus with the generous grant from businessmen-industrialists Robert Galvin and Jay and Robert Pritzker, IIT officials also are intent on repositioning its national image.
Complicating that mission is a range of factors, from its meager endowment and relatively small enrollment (about 6,300 undergraduate and graduate students) to the general image of technical schools.
Also, there is the special nature of IIT itself: The school has such a startlingly wide array of affiliate institutions that, at the most basic level, many people don’t really understand what IIT is.
“Technical institutions start off with two strikes against them,” said John Strauss, former president of the Association of Independent Technological Universities. Those two strikes are a “nerd” image perpetuated by a society that is both dependent on technology and scornful of its creators, Strauss said, and the tendency of such schools to attract students from the lower middle-income strata of society, who view technology–properly–as a way to advance themselves economically.
Eighty-nine percent of IIT’s undergraduates, many the sons and daughters of Chicago workers and immigrants, receive scholarships. IIT’s tuition is relatively high–$15,840. Problem is, the aid money hasn’t been coming from interest on its embarrassingly small endowment fund, roughly $120 million, compared with, say, MIT’s nearly $2.5 billion. The aid was being discounted from the price of tuition, and that has cut into the school’s revenues by more than 40 percent a year.
As a result, IIT experienced a fiscal crisis last year, not a unique experience in the ’90s for higher education. Both as a result of a $3 million budget shortfall, and plans to refocus the curriculum, the 102-year-old school went through some wrenching staff and program cuts last year.
The component and affiliated institutions include the highly rated Kent College of Law; the College of Architecture, which Mies once directed and which the South Korean auto manufacturer Hyundai just asked to design the world’s tallest building in Seoul; the highly regarded Institute of Design; the Institute of Psychology; and more than 20 research and development centers.
Among the latter: the National Center for Food Safety and Technology; the pioneering Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions; and the IIT Research Institute, an independent research affiliate that draws more than $130 million a year in contracts from industry, government and the military.
Still, the majority of undergraduate degrees–64 percent–that IIT awards are in engineering.
“IIT is one of the best-kept secrets of engineering education,” said Stephanie Pace Miller, a member of a national commission formed in 1994 to map out a future for IIT.
One hundred million dollars, a big part of the $250 million the Pritzker-Galvin contribution is expected to generate, will go toward building the quality of IIT’s student body. The $100 million will nearly double the school’s endowment fund, with the interest going entirely for scholarships.
Lewis Collens, IIT’s president, an attorney and a former dean of Kent College of Law, said the hope is that this will draw “the best minds,” top students who now are attracted to engineering schools at public universities for their cheaper tuition.
Enrolling better students is one of the recommendations made two years ago by the national commission for IIT’s future.
“That’s the question. Can they attract the top students who have gone on to the more elite schools?” said Robert Morse, research director for U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” guide. Morse, who nonetheless included IIT in his list of America’s 229 best universities (IIT was No. 62), says that it has a long way to go to become a serious competitor with the major engineering schools for top students.
But it has made a start. To attract those students, Snow raised IIT’s freshman admissions requirements. As a result, the average SAT scores of freshmen this year have risen 90 points, from 1,190 last year to 1,279 this year.
Still, the rate for the school’s retention of freshmen until graduation is 54 percent, well below the national average of 75 percent.
Why so low? Collens explains that it is because, unlike Cal Tech, MIT and public universities with engineering schools, IIT offers no liberal arts degrees. Those who decide engineering is not for them, or who find the curriculum too rigorous, have little option but to transfer to another school.
Moreover, the students, nearly a third of whom are commuters, complain about the perceived lack of student activities, and the gloominess of the campus and its urban surroundings.
“I’m definitely missing the campus experience. I think if I had it to do over again, I would have gone away to college,” said Mike Nguyen, 22, a senior in civil engineering from Morgan Park, on the Southwest Side.
Collens hopes the new student center, which is a major part of the cosmetic improvements, will provide both more warmth and a venue for student activities.
But IIT’s national image problem may prove more recalcitrant. Partly to change that image, the school has struggled with its focus and curriculum. Not too long ago, IIT was trying to be a more comprehensive university, all things to all people–and failing at it.
Now, some of its programs have been pared down, leaving a 24-credit-hour graduation requirement in humanities and social science courses–slim by liberal arts standards, but still six hours more than that set by the national Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology.
“We’ve become much more focused, back to our original mission, putting all our resources in a smaller circle,” Snow said. “We have narrowed down to the skill set we know industry is looking for.”
The second major recommendation by the commission was for IIT to create a niche for itself by focusing on what Collens calls “interprofessional education.” It has students from different years and departments working together under the direction of a graduate student on a real project assigned by industry.
“If they have the wherewithal to bring it off, it has the potential of raising the future of the school rather dramatically,” said John McMasters, an aerospace engineer with the Boeing Co.
While there are many details yet to be worked out, and some faculty resistance to be overcome, Collens and Snow see interprofessional education, along with higher-caliber students, as the heart of IIT’s efforts to better define itself nationally and internationally.
“When I came here from Cal Tech, I came because this place is either going up or going down,” Snow said. “We’re betting it’s going up.”
