A few decades ago they (Pettit, Stelson, others) realized the school would struggle without strong graduate programs. Grad students (especially phds) are the work force driving the countless labs fueled by the external funding necessary to have a world class engineering school. GT was initially largely modeled after Worcester Poly. It would be kind of like WPI now if those changes had not happened. The other big milestone was when the regents approved the uga engineering school - Gary May’s comment “we now don’t have to worry about educating Georgia’s engineering students” was noteworthy.
I remember sitting in Stelson’s office about 30 years ago...he had every current PhD dissertation piled on his conference table. The change was a huge deal. We can debate the pros and cons of our engineering school business model, but not adopting it would have meant becoming more like WPI, Rose-Hulman etc.
