Declining state resources have made Clemson’s drive for excellence more challenging. But there are promising signs:
The S.C. General Assembly adopted the Research Centers of Excellence initiative, which sets aside lottery funding for endowed chairs (an act that provided Clemson with $15 million for faculty in automotive engineering).
Clemson is attracting and retaining top faculty, many who recently received such prestigious honors as National Science Foundation Career Awards, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Progress continues in emphasis areas defined in the University’s academic plan, such as the Clemson automotive research park in Greenville and the advanced materials research cluster at the Clemson Research Park.
Clemson continues to attract an increasingly talented student body. A third of the state’s Palmetto Fellows enrolled at Clemson, and this year’s freshman class has an average SAT score above 1200. Last year, three Clemson students won Goldwater Scholarships. With three winners, Clemson beat Stanford, Vanderbilt, Cal Tech and UC-Berkeley and tied Yale and MIT. In fact, if Clemson were rated solely on student quality, it would already be a top-20 university.
Clemson’s vision for becoming a top-20 public university is not so much about a magazine rating. It’s about jobs, higher wages, access to top graduate programs, increased personal wealth of the state’s citizens and greater public service.
In other words, it’s about a better quality of life for all South Carolinians.