Inc. All rights reserved. D. Alumni Development Directory Engage Engr. 2000 Dear Students, To help offset the effects of years of inadequate state funding, the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees has enacted a special fee for engineering courses, undergraduate and graduate. I am keenly aware of the impact this fee will have on engineering students, but I believe that implementing this fee is absolutely necessary to ensure the quality of our programs. The college is not able to maintain, much less improve, its programs with the available state funds.
Engineering education is expensive to deliver compared to some other disciplines.
Engineering students simply must be afforded an opportunity to work with contemporary equipment and technologies in the course of their educational experience. The College of Engineering's allocations from the student technology fee and other equipment funds have helped, but they simply do not cover all our needs. While the engineering fee will add modestly to the overall cost of your graduate degree program, I am fully convinced that the benefits to be derived from the fee will greatly outweigh the costs. Given the difference in anticipated salaries for engineers with advanced degrees compared with similar graduates from some other programs, you can reasonably expect to recover the additional investment resulting from the fee in the first several months of your professional career. I look forward to seeing all of you when you return to school in the fall.