5/28/2014 Bill Bell
The number of women to accept admission has grown more than 27 percent since 2012. 359 women plan to enroll in the fall of 2014.
Written by Bill Bell
A record number of female engineers accepted their offer of admission to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Engineering. Currently, 359 women plan to enter Engineering at Illinois as new undergraduates in the fall of 2014.
The number of women to accept admission has grown by more than 27 percent in the last two years alone. The growth is expected to secure Illinois’ place as one of the 10 colleges educating the most female engineers in the nation.
The Department of Computer Science has seen the greatest rate of growth. In 2012, only 15 of 208 entering CS students were women. In 2014, 62 of the 234 CS students who accepted an admission offer were women.
“Clearly there’s more work to be done,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, head of the computer science department. “But it’s also clear that what we’re doing is working. Our foot is on the gas, and it’s going to stay there.”
Scholarship support has been key to the growth in the number of women accepting their admission to Illinois.
The number and size of scholarship offers were increased to male and female students from all backgrounds. In 2010, Engineering at Illinois was able to offer just 209 students scholarships. This year, 455 students were offered scholarships. Two hundred of them were women.
“Scholarships work,” Cangellaris said. “As a Top 5 program, we’re competing for the absolute best engineering students in the country, and the quality of the students applying has only increased.”
“We can only do that by offering them significant scholarship support, and we’re committed to growing that support not just this year but in the years to come.”