Natural science
Just as much as Owen was concerned with the quantity of students at NGC, he was just as concerned with the quality of the student body. Elevating academic standards was a high priority of Owen. He saw a direct positive correlation between the caliber of the faculty and the quality of the students. In the first ten years of Owen's presidency professors' salaries doubled, from $16,866 to $33,200. He also managed to secure funding, from public and private sources, for the purpose of faculty research, which was nonexistent before Owen. Natural science departments were particularly large beneficiaries of this research initiative. In the late 1980s the Natural science departments received roughly $125,000 from the National Science Foundation for new laboratory equipment. The effects of this and other similar financial investment in the school's science programs was evident. At the end of Owen's term, NGC graduates saw a sixty percent acceptance rate to the Medical College of Georgia, compared to the average rate of thirteen percent among other colleges in Georgia. The augmentations made to the natural science departments during the 1980s spilled over into other related areas such as engineering and mathematics. It was in this decade the NGC acquired its first computer lab and a diagnostic and tutorial laboratory. The college gained twenty more computers in 1990s for its new $80,000 language lab in Dunlap Hall.