Formulating Strategies for Building Excellence in Engineering Education

Engineering schools frequently face intense competition for resources. The latter would include funding, student enrolments, reputable faculty, and space. Such resource constraints are further complicated by the increasing “shrinkage” of the world in terms of the ease with which information is spread and the mobility of the human resources (by way of the faculty and students) a school is keen to attract. To ensure continued and adequate flow of resources into a school so that it may prosper and pursue its aspirations, a school would need to periodically examine its present configuration and determine its need to evolve.

Appropriate evolution requires a school to define and understand its mission, articulate its ambition, and project its vision. What needs to be done and how this can be done depends very much on a school's present configuration and the ecosystem it finds itself in. A school therefore needs to lay out its strategies and determine the tactics necessary to support these so as to achieve its objectives. This paper discusses some of the issues which may affect the formulation of such strategies, what some of these strategies might be, and the difficulties one might face while attempting to implement these.