Undergraduate Scholarship Needs
Attracting top students is critical for the development of the Civil Engineering Department. Top students "raise the bar" and quality of each class they are in, become leaders in the engineering community, and become very visible spokesmen for Auburn University. Top undergraduates often become very productive graduate students and help build the graduate program.
Currently, Civil Engineering has 26 students on scholarships ranging from $1000 per year to full in-state tuition of approximately $4430 per year. Funds for these scholarships are provided by 19 endowments or yearly gifts. As a result of rapid growth in tuition, it is becoming impractical for the Department to offer tuition scholarships with the currently available endowments. Fortunately, Auburn University has plans to increase the number and size of the scholarships offered to incoming students. Civil Engineering is most likely to be successful in recruiting top freshmen by layering departmental scholarships on top of tuition scholarships offered by the University.
Civil Engineering's target is to offer a $2500/year scholarship to every pre-civil engineering freshman with an ACT Score of 30 or above. Coupled with a tuition scholarship from the University, this will make a competitive offer for these top students. Past records indicate that 15 students per year can be attracted with these offers. At steady state there will be 60 students and a total yearly expenditure of $150K. The current civil engineering scholarship program is approximately $80K per year. An additional $70K per year is needed to reach the goal. These additional monies can be annual gifts or earnings on endowments. New endowments to generate multiples of $2500 per year will be very helpful. Contributions to existing scholarship endowments to increase the yearly earnings to multiples of $2500 are also needed.
