Enrollment in the sciences is up by a third in the last five years at Connecticut’s state universities, a fruitful sign that construction of new classrooms and facilities to promote math, engineering and technology is working, education officials say.
“It appears that the phrase ‘if you build it, they will come’ holds true for students and science,” Karl J. Krapek, chairman of the Connecticut State University System (CSUS) board of trustees, said in a statement Tuesday.Â
“We’ve said that Connecticut students deserve first-rate facilities,” Krapek said, “and this data tells us that when our students are provided with state-of-the-art equipment and facilities, along with top caliber faculty, they will stay in our state and major in science in increasing numbers.”
CSUS includes Central, Eastern, Southern and Western Connecticut State Universities. The universities have heightened their emphasis in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and plan to launch a new collaborative graduate program in nanotechnology.
Students majoring in biochemistry, biomolecular sciences, meteorology, chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, environmental science,physics and related fields increased from 1,373 in 2005 to 1,818 in 2009 across the four universities, officials said
More noticeable is that growth jumped by more than 50 percent at the two universities where new academic science buildings have opened to students in recent years, Krapek said.
At Eastern, which opened a new science classroom building in 2008, the number of science majors climbed from 222 in 2005 to 343 in 2009, a 54 percent increase.
At Western, where a new Science Building opened on the Midtown Campus in 2005, the number of science majors grew from 239 to 362, an increase of 51 percent. The increase was 34 percent at Central and 10 percent at Southern.Â
The CSUS board announced last week an effort to hold 2011 fall tuition unchanged by, among other things, freezing salaries for nonunion staff.
