An investment in the construction of the Signature Engineering Building at Virginia Tech will pay economic dividends to Virginia for decades to come. Investing in Virginia’s system of higher education, especially in the areas of technology and science, is critical to the economy of Virginia and the nation. Industry needs a large supply of bright, creative, hit-the-ground running graduate engineers.
Here are facts showing how Virginia Tech engineering graduates can do this:
- Of Virginia Tech’s 2011 graduating class, more than 90 percent of our undergraduates were U.S. citizens. This percentage is the norm at Virginia Tech. This statistic is of great importance to industries that support the U.S. Department of Defense, with many of its employees living in the northern Virginia region.
- Virginia Tech provides more than half of all the new engineers with undergraduate and graduate degrees educated in the commonwealth and it is one of the Top 5 producers of new bachelor’s degrees in engineering in the nation.
- Approximately 22,000 Virginia Tech engineering graduates currently reside in Virginia, representing just slightly less than half of Virginia Tech’s living engineering alumni. These graduates are likely to seek employment in Virginia.
- Virginia Tech's College of Engineering was ranked 24th in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Graduate Schools 2012 survey released in spring 2011. Six individual Virginia Tech engineering graduate programs rank in the top 15 of their field, according to the survey.
- In U.S. News and World Report’s America's Best Colleges 2012 ranking of undergraduate programs, the College of Engineering ranked 15th among the nation’s top 20 U.S. engineering schools. Two programs -- the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Charles E. Via Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering were ranked in the Top 10 of their respective categories, nationwide.
- The Wall Street Journal in fall 2010 released a survey ranking Virginia Tech as 13th in the nation for top colleges favored by employers looking for workers. The college as a whole and its computer science department each ranked fifth on the survey.
During its 40-year existence, Virginia Tech's self-funded, nonprofit Student Engineers’ Council has given more than $1 million to university student team projects, scholarships, and philanthropic organizations. Its annual Engineering Expo career fair brings in 220-plus major companies, and attracts thousands of eager, ready-to-work engineering students looking for jobs.
In the entering 2011-2012 freshman class, the average SAT score for the general engineering student was 1,297 and the average high school grade point average was 4.06 on a weighted 4.0 scale.
- Virginia Tech was ranked as the eighth Best Value public university for 2010, and in the Top 50 in 2011, according to The Princeton Review, who teamed with USA Today to create the national rankings.
For information about supporting the Signature Engineering Building contact Erin Edwards at (540) 231-4066 or eedwards@vt.edu.
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