I don’t know for sure.
Here’s my guess:
In order to convince the board, media, influential alumni, etc. that it’s worth it to dump tens of millions of dollars into an engineering department that will go head-to-head with GTech, the university needs to prove it will succeed and then convince everyone involved (potential students, alumni, etc) to agree with their vision. If it doesn’t, heads will roll. And very few people are brave enough to risk putting their heads under the guillotine when they can keep creating cop-out programs that are kinda-but-not-really engineering like the whatever-they-have-right-now. @bernie12, do you remember the name? I forgot.
It’s easy to follow the norm - build nicer college dorms, revamp the pre-existing buildings, get a new food court, get more professors.
It’s tough to do something revolutionary - open up a brand new core department to compete with GTech.
Having worked in corporate America for a while now, I realize that this general concept is applicable to pretty much anything.
Of course, that’s just pure speculation… Maybe Emory has an agreement with GT where the two schools share resources on that one condition.
shrug
Barring the university getting a major donation for the purpose of starting an engineering school, I doubt it will happen anytime soon. The school itself doing it would be risking breaking political ties with GT (in addition to everything else I’ve said earlier). I have no doubt there are a lot of favors earned and given going on among university leaders (nothing illegal, but still… favors).