University of Missouri College of Engineering

The University of Missouri College of Engineering is one of the 19 academic schools and colleges of the University of Missouri. The college traces its beginning to the first engineering courses taught west of the Mississippi River in 1849. The college awards bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. The college is ranked 88th nationally by the U.S. News and World Report. The college operates the University of Missouri Research Reactor Center, the largest university research reactor in the U.S.StatisticsAs of the end of the 2014-15 academic year, the MU College of Engineering has a total enrollment of 3,812 students — 3,220 undergraduates, 348 master's students and 244 doctoral students. The average freshman ACT score for College of Engineering students is 28.2.The total amount of faculty is 113, and the college has more than 22,000 living alumni. For the 2014-15 academic year, total scholarship money totaled more than $1 million. More than 50 student organizations and design teams are affiliated with the college.HistoryIn 1849, the University of Missouri offered the first collegiate engineering course west of the Mississippi River – a civil engineering course focusing on "Surveying, Levelling and Classical Topography," taught by the university's acting president, William Wilson Hudson. Hudson would go on to become the first chair of civil engineering in 1856, and the Board of Curators’ officially would create a School of Civil Engineering in 1859 before losing it in an organizational reshuffling in 1860.The Morrill Land-Grant Acts, the first of which passed in 1862 and accepted by the State of Missouri the following year, provided space for institutions with specialties in agriculture and engineering. By the end of the 1860s, the University of Missouri had departments of civil and military engineering, and in 1871, the School of Engineering was incorporated by the College of Agriculture as a special department before separating into its own institution in 1877 with Thomas J. Lowry as its first dean. The building that eventually would become the current Thomas and Nell Lafferre Hall was constructed in 1893, giving the college its own home.