Opinion
 

Tech college should stay the way it is

Curtis D. Johnson
Guest Columnist

One of the founding missions of the University was to provide an avenue of higher education for " ... all the citizens of Houston." The College of Technology has always been key to satisfying this original mandate.

The college, which started in the 1940s, provides excellent, practical higher education in technology for Houston citizens and beyond. It is also particularly proud of its role in serving the working student, older citizens and graduates of local community colleges. Its programs have kept pace with evolving technology for its more than 60 years of existence.

The college serves more than 2,000 students and enrollment is growing. Thousands of its graduates continue to work in the Houston area.

Uma Gupta, the dean hired three years ago, instituted new initiatives and programs that are being implemented. The dean recently accepted a position as president of Alfred College in New York.

In this period of change, the College of Technology may now be disbanded and its units distributed to other colleges at UH. The engineering technology units would be moved to the College of Engineering along with programs in computer information systems technology. This move will negatively impact on these programs.

The approach to higher education taken by the college is unique to UH and vastly different than engineering. Technology classes follow a fast track, emphasizing knowledge of the technology required for applications in business and industry; it is a "hands-on" approach to understanding and using modern technology.

Engineering programs are focused more on the theoretical basis of the technology and preparation for advanced studies in graduate programs and research. Consolidation will inevitably result in the imposition of engineering standards on these programs and lead to their dissolution. UH will have moved significantly away from serving the needs of the Houston community.

There is virtually no fiscal advantage to such a merger. Serving the student population will require the same faculty, staff, administration, laboratories and classrooms. There is also minimal overlap between engineering and technology classes and facilities because they serve fundamentally different missions with respect to higher education. Class titles may be similar but the approaches are fundamentally different.

As a separate college, the unique needs of its technology programs have been well represented in the campus' governing units. This representation has enabled the necessary and frequent changes to courses and programs to keep them current with technological evolution. Programs would suffer without the current college status and the necessary representation.

The college has growing enrollment, a new set of initiatives for education and research in developing technologies and it serves a broad segment of Houston citizens and businesses. The College of Technology should not be disbanded.

Johnson, an electronics professor in the College 
of Technology, can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu.