February 2007

Selective Excellence Investment Paying Dividends

By Jamie L. Freedman

As GW enters the fifth year of its Selective Excellence program—created in response to the University’s Strategic Plan for Academic Excellence—the University’s steady investment in the seven signature programs is paying substantial dividends. Launched in 2003, the effort pinpointed and funded seven areas of excellence at GW that had the potential to gain national prominence: biomedical engineering, history, human evolution, political science, public policy and public administration, the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and transportation safety and security.

“The funding has had a tremendous impact,” says Donald R. Lehman, executive vice president for academic affairs. “To date, the University has invested a total of $7,826,600 since 2003 in the signature programs, including $2,271,900 this year alone. The seven programs were nationally and internationally recognized from the start, but we wanted to bring them to a higher level. I’m pleased to state that we’ve succeeded.”

A case in point is GW’s acclaimed Sigur Center for Asian Studies, which raised more than $1 million in outside funding for graduate fellowships, Gelman Library resources, conferences, and programming in 2005-06. “That’s clear proof of the impact of selective excellence funding,” says Lehman. “By helping raise the profile of the center and facilitating faculty research, our programs have become more attractive in the eyes of outside donors.” Most recently, the Sigur Center won a $510,000 award for Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships through a rigorous peer review process, pitting GW against leading programs at Columbia, Yale, and Berkeley.

The Department of History has experienced similar success over the funding period, witnessing impressive hikes in applicants’ standardized test scores, grade-point averages, and overall credentials. “Academic challenge and engagement has also increased by more than fourfold over the period, as measured by exit surveys administered to history students at GW,” says Lehman.

The public policy and public administration programs have made great strides forward these past four years, with external funding more than doubling from $600,000 at the program’s outset to $1.4 million last year. “The quality of incoming Ph.D. students in the School of Public Policy and Public Administration has dramatically improved,” adds Lehman. “Selectivity has gone way up, with only 33 students offered admission from a pool of 170 Ph.D. applicants this year.”
At press time, GW’s Anthropology Department received the welcome news that it had ranked sixth among top anthropology departments in the country based on a rigorous Faculty Scholarly Productivity index. “Our dollars invested in the program certainly helped,” comments Lehman. At the doctoral level, student selectivity increased, the number of publications rose, and fellowships funded at a competitive level more than doubled.

The Institute for Biomedical Engineering has added quality faculty members and increased research funding from $200,000 to $920,000 per year, while laboratory space has grown from 1,100 to 2,400 square feet. The additional support also helped create an undergraduate biomedical engineering program, which currently enrolls 70 students.

The transportation safety and security program is enjoying improved graduate student selectivity. Additionally, an undergraduate transportation program based in the Department of Civil Engineering has been established.

Finally, applications to GW’s doctoral program in political science have skyrocketed from 152 in 2001 to 393 in 2006, with a simultaneous spike in selectivity. “Half of the doctoral applicants were admitted in 2001, while only one in five were admitted last year,” states Lehman. Twenty-four political science graduate students received research funding in 2006, compared to none in 2001.
“The selective excellence money has had a tremendous impact on all of these programs,” Lehman says, adding, “This is only a small sample of the many wonderful things that are occurring through our investment in the current signature programs. We’re only scratching the surface, and I look forward to many more successes as we continue to enrich the University’s academic enterprise.”

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