Inside Higher Ed: Mississippi State in the Silicon Valley
San Jose State University has a major engineering program, enrolling several thousand undergrads a year and about 2,000 master’s level students. Many of those students would like a Ph.D. in engineering, and have jobs in Silicon Valley, but consider the top ranked programs in the area (those at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley) to be a bit of out of reach economically or academically. At many universities such a circumstance would lead to a proposal to create a Ph.D. program. But San Jose — part of the California State University System — isn’t supposed to create Ph.D. programs under the much-heralded state “master plan,” which leaves virtually all doctoral education to the University of California.
What to do? This week San Jose State announced a program in which its master’s graduates will be able to take Ph.D. courses at San Jose State, use the labs and library, meet their dissertation committee members and probably even conduct their defenses for a Ph.D. When they display their doctorates though, the seal will be from Mississippi State University, even though the students may never have stepped foot in Mississippi.
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