One year after Florida State University announced a possible separation from the joint engineering college shared with Florida A&M University, students are beginning to express mixed emotions over the looming decision that will be made in March.
Last April, the Florida Board of Governors agreed to conduct a study analyzing the pros and cons of maintaining the joint college program versus’ developing separate engineering programs at each individual university. The Florida BOG hired Collaborative Brain Trust
Consulting Firm to create the report, which was finalized January.
“We’re all waiting on the Board of governors to meet and make their decision, so we will just have to wait and see. They will decide sometime in March, but we don’t know the exact date yet,” said Duo Liu, Executive Assistant to the Dean. “The study was conducted and they made the finalized report. The report can be found online on our main page.”
While no decisions have been made, students are aware of the negative effects that the possible program separation will have on FAMU students. Some of which would include an issue with obtaining funding due to a larger university being in close proximity.
London Bostic-Hardy, a FAMU sophomore mechanical engineering student from Atlanta, is among the many FAMU students who are concerned about their future academic careers.
“Due to the lack of funding that FAMU has now, it would be almost impossible for any engineers to graduate from FAMU,” Bostic-Hardy said. “I personally feel like it is unnecessary. Most FAMU students feel the same way and some FSU students really don’t care because they still have the main school and funds.”
Although it appears that FSU students will benefit by from the separation by receiving a brand new engineering building, some FSU students do not support their university’s request for a separate program.
“At first, I was all for splitting up because I heard we would be able to get all new things, but now I’m honestly against it because I don’t think it’s fair to the FAMU students,” said Katherine Estrella, a junior mechanical engineering student at FSU. “If the split does happen, I think FAMU students will get the worse side of it because most of the school is FSU students, so most of their students would be leaving. In the long run, they wouldn’t be able to compete with FSU for funding and they would probably have to shut down their program which means FAMU wouldn’t be able to produce anymore engineers.”