DeKALB — The College of Engineering and Engineering Technology will hire seven new positions and add new certificate programs in the fall as a result of Program Prioritization.

Program Prioritization used task forces to create reports that reviewed 223 academic programs and 236 administrative programs to influence the allocation of university funds.

The positions — six faculty members and one instructor — are across all departments in the college.

“Our program was recognized as a program that had far too little faculty for the number of students,” said mechanical engineering professor Brian Coller.

Coller said enrollment in the college is growing very fast, yet the number of teachers hasn’t increased. These new hires will reduce stress on teachers and give more class opportunities to students.

Omar Ghrayeb, acting dean of the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, said the enrollment in the college has been growing for a while. Over the last six years, the enrollment has grown more than 60 percent, and there are now close to 2,000 students in the college.

This is why the degree programs in the college were identified as programs for either enhancement or transformation by the Program Prioritization Academic Task Force, Coller said. However, the programs in the college were identified as either in need of reduction or review by the task force.

The college has four undergraduate programs and four graduate programs in addition to the certificate programs. Ghrayeb said many of the certificates were added to the catalog 20 to 25 years ago. Some certificates had even been added in 1985.

“We realized some of the certificates that’d been added to the catalog so many years ago are obsolete, and they are not relevant, and they will not be helping our students,” Ghrayeb said. “We decided to delete those certificates. They are not really degree programs, and students will not even feel whether they exist or don’t exist because we have zero enrollments in these certificate programs.”

These programs, which were removed from the catalog in fall of 2016, included certificates in nanotechnology; homeland security; integrated manufacturing systems; TECH; quality control of manufacturing processes; applied mechanics; CAD/CAM development, simulation and fabrication; thermal, fluid and energy systems; and vibration, robots and control systems.

Ghrayeb said courses included in these certificate programs remain in the catalog because many of them are required for degree programs.

The only certificates that remain are certificates in lean six sigma and logistics, both in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Ghrayeb said the college is in the process of adding certificates that are more relevant to what employers are looking for.

College officials are also working on proposing a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering as a result of Program Prioritization. Electrical engineering majors currently have the option to emphasize in biomedical engineering, but the proposition would make it a separate degree program from electrical engineering.

Hannah Medernach, junior electrical engineering major with an emphasis on biomedical engineering, said it is difficult for her to complete the biomedical portion of her degree along with the electrical requirements because classes she has to take outside of the department often overlap in scheduling.

Medernach was not interested in any of the old certificates, so their deletion was not a huge concern of hers.

“I guess it would have been different if I needed a certain certificate or if I needed to do something else to enhance my degree,” Medernach said. “But I guess my degree kind of stands alone as it is.”

Medernach said she noticed since Program Prioritization, teachers focus more on the base knowledge topics instead of small, specialized topics that only some will go on to use in their careers, which she likes.

“Now they’re able to focus and strengthen the fundamental of what you’re supposed to be learning,” Medernach said.

Coller, who was on the Program Prioritization Academic Task Force, said working on the initiative, which the university plans to do every five years, was a “tremendous” amount of work.

“I think we all put in about between 15 and 30 hours a week on top of our normal teaching duties,” Coller said. “So it was an incredibly taxing process, and I don’t think doing this every five years, at least in the way we did it, is something that’s sustainable.”