The Penn State College of Engineering is the engineering school of the Pennsylvania State University, headquartered at the University Park campus in University Park, Pennsylvania. It was established in 1896, under the leadership of George W. Atherton. Today, with 13 academic departments and degree programs, over 11,000 enrolled undergraduate and graduate students (8,166 at the University Park campus, and 3,059 at other campuses), and research expenditures of $124 million for the 2016-2017 academic year, the Penn State College of Engineering is in the top 20 of engineering schools in the United States. It is estimated that at least one out of every fifty engineers in the United States got their bachelor's degree from Penn State. Dr. Justin Schwartz currently holds the position of Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Engineering.
History
The Early Years: 1855 – 1895
In 1854, the Pennsylvania legislature granted a charter to The Farmers’ High School. The purpose of the institution, according to the 1859 catalogue, was to “adopt a system of instruction which shall embrace […] those departments of all sciences which have a practical or theoretical bearing upon agriculture.” The Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society encountered little resistance to the proposal, and the revised charter – dated February 22, 1855 – became the official founding day of what would become Penn State. A legislative appropriation of $25,000 – along with an additional pledge of $25,000, plus funds raised through public subscription and private donation – was used for the construction of the Main Building on 200 acres of in Centre County, near the geographic center of the state. The first class of 69 students was admitted in February 1859.
Pugh’s Establishment of an Engineering Foundation
Evan Pugh was selected as the first head of the Farmer's High School, and his appointment began in 1860. Pugh had received his Ph.D. from the University of Goettingen in 1854, and his vision for the Farmers’ High School included an expansion beyond agriculture into fields that would be of benefit to the nation as a whole. Chief among these were engineering and “industrial arts” – subjects which required a high degree of both theoretical and practical knowledge, such as surveying and carpentry.
This notion was considered radical at the time since American universities of Pugh's era tended to focus on topics such as ancient languages, philosophy, and rhetoric, which Pugh felt were inadequate for a nation seeking to “tame a hostile natural environment” and maintain economic and political importance upon the global stage. At the time of Pugh's appointment, fewer than 12 universities offered baccalaureate programs in engineering and produced fewer than 200 graduates combined; in most of those curricula, engineering was included as one of several subjects of study, rather than as its own major. The overarching belief was that because engineering was utilitarian and benefitted the many, it was inferior to the classics, which focused on the mental and moral improvement of the student; the prevailing thought – especially at tradition-bound schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth – was that integrating engineering with classics would subvert the purpose of higher education. In Pugh's time, most engineering programs focused almost exclusively on developing skills within civil engineering – e.g. canals, railroads, bridges – for obvious reasons: the expansion of the nation required knowledge of developing infrastructure. Pugh realized that on-the-job training (the most common form of learning a profession), combined with the nation's economic and geographic growth, would not adequately meet the demand for educated professionals familiar with the “mechanic arts.”
The passing of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts in July 1862 presented Pugh with the opportunity to help secure the School's future. Under the terms of the Act, a land grant bequeathed upon an institution 30,000 acres for each senator and representative of the institution's state; this land was then to be sold, and the profits of the sale – which could take months or years to be fully realized – would be used to fund colleges with four-year curricula. Pugh was instrumental in securing the school as the sole recipient of all land-grant revenues in 1863, although his untimely death from typhoid in April 1864 resulted in his vision of industrial education being delayed by several decades.